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69 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most beautiful and poetic film of all times, 9 Dec 2004
I love this film and I love it because of so many things. I saw it for the first time when I was a teenager in mid 90s and I was so impressed... I was roaming the streets of Almaty (my home town in Kazakhstan) with my best friend and I asked her: "Do you think angels are walking together with us and collecting the spiritual signs of our existence?' Of course, it was a joke, by what a romantic joke... A longing for something magical that can happen to a mortal... When you first watch the film, you wonder why Wim Wenders has picked two aging men in long black coats to be angels. That's not how you imagined an angel, after all. However, the further you watch the film, the more you realise that their angelic nature is in the way they look at everything, in their increadible eyes. When I think about this film I think about all the good that can happen to an ordinary human being. This film highlights the best in all of us and makes us immortal for a short while... And I believe this feeling is worth it. Natalia
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Serene, truthful, funny, lyrical, beautiful, haunting, 26 Oct 2005
This film is just so lovely - it has haunted me all day (despite a stressful and distracting day at work) and is a film never to be forgotten. I had to order it to keep because I know it is a film I will want to watch at regular intervas for the rest of my like. The library scenes are particularly haunting and really do convey a strong impression of serenity. The notes in the bonus material are well worth watching too I watched them because I just wanted more I didn't want to leave this film. It is an average length film but I wish it was an hour longer - like one of those rare books that you really never want to finish Rent it!!! Buy it!!!
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43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the finest films of the 1980's., 3 Oct 2002
This is probably Wenders' masterpiece, though it followed the equally wondeful Paris, Texas. Wings of Desire was another collaboration with Austrian writer Peter Handke (The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty). Following the key works of the New German Cinema (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities), Wenders went to work in America at Coppola's Zoetrope studios- making the problematic Hammett and the reaction The State of Things. Here he returned to Berlin, still divided by the wall which would fall two years later. The film sits somewhere between It's a Wonderful Life, Rilke's Duino Elegies, The Cure's Just Like Heaven and The Seventh Seal: a metaphysical romance. The lead character is literally Berlin (the German title is 'The Sky Over Berlin); Wenders uses Damiel and Cassiel as two omniscient angels tracking life in 1980's Berlin: observing like a camera. Here we see them listening to people's thoughts in an unforgettable fashion (and this was an influence on REM's video for Everybody Hurts). Damiel sees Marion, a circus acrobat with a penchant for Nick Cave and decides to make the trip from eternity to her (Wenders reversal of Nick Cave's song From Her to Eternity- played here along with The Carny). Along the way he meets Peter Falk as "Peter Falk"- who just happens to be an ex-angel and the film moves back to pre-history and the spectre of the War and Nazism (Falk is making a WWII movie, with those conotations for West Germany- tying it in with such German films as The Marriage of Maria Braun and Mephisto which explore Germany's dark past). This is pure poetry, as great as the best of Jean Cocteau in terms of transcendental imagery- every scene has resonance: a truly perfect film now restored on DVD. These are the people who see you when you cry (but who can never impinge on this world); the angels are non-intervensionist. Much better than the sappy Hollywood remake City of Angels- though it is worth seeing the post-wall/reunification sequel Faraway, So Close! where Cassiel follows Damiel into the mortal realm. Hopefully Wenders will follow this with DVD issues of his best 1990's films, The Lisbon Story and Until the End of the World. This is one of the finest films of the 1980's , or any decade from the first century of cinema...
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