Die Tageszeitung 18.05.2007

Cristina Nord is aghast at the lush beauty of Wong Kar Wai's new film "My Blueberry Nights," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. "The colours are magnificent, luminous. Light breaks and refracts in innumerable ways, seductively reflected in a whiskey glass or through the splintered window of an ambulance like a bed of diamonds. When the camera glides alongside another car, its bodywork looks like black, liquid gold. Even the blueberry cake that gives the film its name looks like the most erotic thing on earth."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 18.05.2007

Verene Lueken is also disconcerted by Wong Kar-wai's first American film, perhaps because of the setting - Route 66 - and the music by Ry Cooder. "Certainly, the visual strategy is highly artistic, with shots through the letters written on window panes and the light of the open countryside, as well as the shining red, green, blue and gold of the interiors and exteriors. Yet the ecstatic experience that was possible in Wong's other films fails to take hold, supplanted by a feeling of banality. For the first time, Wong Kar-wai lovers will be disappointed."


Die Welt, 18.05.2007

Peter Stein's "Wallenstein" performance, which will stage all three dramas of Schiller's trilogy, celebrates its Berlin premiere tomorrow. The drama has already played in Leipzig and in December it will be staged with Gert Voss in Vienna. Matthias Heine tries to explain the explosion in interest. "A Germany that is sending its soldiers into apparently endless, every worsening conflicts and thus must learn the terminology of warlords is recalling that it was itself once the Balkans or Afghanistan to the power of ten. Back then, cloaked in creed, bands of murderers destroyed entire swaths of the country – Kabul and Baghdad can't compete. And a little provincial nobleman from Bohemia could become so powerful with his private army that he considered himself an equal force to the the Swedish King Gustav Adolf or Emperor Ferdinand."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 18.05.2007

Samuel Herzog has been to the Schaulager in Basel to see a major show of works by American sculptor Robert Gober, who rose to fame with variations on the drainpipe. One assemblage "shows a life-sized Madonna with her arms spread and her body pierced by a huge pipe. The figure stands on an oversized manhole, through whose chinks you can see a magical underwater landscape with algae and anemones, mussels, prawns and a couple of large coins. Water splashes over a wooden staircase behind the Madonna, and to one side suitcases lie on the floor. Inside them we see once more manholes and watery scenes, but now bathers are hinted at as well. This mysterious installation has its prosaic pendant in the first room of the exhibition, where we glance through the crack of a bathroom door and see the lower body of a woman relaxing in the tub and pouring in hot water."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18.05.2007

Stefan Koldehoff speculates that the average hot dog stand is better managed than the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, following a report by the German Federal Court of Auditors. "In the open air concert category, the court attests dilettantism: audience numbers are vastly exaggerated, the costs are calculated too low and the risk of bad weather simply discounted... By 2006, the losses from concerts and the operation of an ice skating rink amounted to more than six million euros, there was no report on the board of trustees, despite repeated requests." On Wednesday, managing director Wilfried Gatzweiler had to go.