Our Favorites
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Maren Ade
Art by Joey Elkins (@joeyelkins)
Forest For the Trees (2005): A first-year teacher moves to the big city and tries to make a friend. For anyone who’s ever lived the brutal combination of social weirdness and self awareness.
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(currently available for free for Amazon Prime members!)
Everyone Else (2009): Have you ever been in a relationship that had already expired and then you go on vacation and get lost? What about one where the day-to-day of the relationship depended on your partner’s confidence level at any given moment? Have you ever had dinner guests who stayed too long and you wanted to stick a knife in their face and tell them to GTFO? This is all of the above.
Toni Erdmann (2016): A businesswoman’s hippie prankster father shows up and won’t leave her alone. It’s about parents wanting their adult children to be happy and adult children not knowing how to connect and look, just call your parents okay? They love you and want to know more about your life. Watch this before the American remake just in case it’s a bummer.
Maren Ade
Dear Maren Ade,
MAR-in AH-day. MAR-in AH-day. I recently looked up how to pronounce your name correctly because I plan on saying it a lot for the rest of my life. Maren Ade, I love you. Your Oscar-nominated film Toni Erdmann may be remembered for naked brunch and the best rendition of “The Greatest Love of All” since Whitney, but I’ll remember it for doing what your films do best: making melancholy funny. Your films are about people trying to connect and failing (The Forest for the Trees), or trying and wondering if they should quit (Everyone Else), or trying and somehow, against all generational gaps, succeeding (Toni Erdmann). And they’re all infused with just the right amount of magic – not dopey CGI movie magic, but moments so surprising and beautiful they can only be defined by the beat my heart skipped when they happened: a hug in Toni Erdmann, a sudden leap in Everyone Else, and the goosebumps-worthy last scene of The Forest for the Trees that I swear to God, Maren, I have dreamed a hundred times. And then there’s jizz on petits fours which is maybe less magical, but unforgettable all the same. Maren, My love for you burns so hot that I literally co-founded a website so more people would know about your work. And so I swear this oath to you-- if every film nerd who has ever swooned over a single minute of Cassavetes doesn’t go see or pre-order Toni Erdmann right this minute, I’ll kill myself for the publicity and it’ll be worth it just so more people learn your name. Maren Ade (MAR-in AH-day), thank you for making movies.
Annabel