Fox and His Friends

A surprisingly blah film, one that put me off Fassbinder movies for years. He had a lot of nerve to give himself money shots (IKYWIM,AITYD) :-)

one of his more conventional films in some ways, but there's so much shading here in the faces and gestures and postures and spatial relationships that it makes me feel like a cinevirgin... few ever did it better. "he's not the kind of man whom money makes rich".

As if someone is trying to get more clean with a soap, but the more he uses it, the dirtier he gets.

Fassbinder's sob story about an illbred homosexual sideshow performer, "Fox, the Talking Head", who lucks into a lottery jackpot and is bled dry by his deceitful, prissy, upper-middle-class lover. Fassbinder reproduces some right-sounding, catty, below-the-belt dialogue in the homosexual social circle, but this is merely a sidelight of the movie, a bonus. Essentially he uses homosexuality as a means of equalizing the characters, so as to move the focus away from the Sex War to the Class War.

Biting attack on ultra conformist bourgeois gays, darkly hilarious, moving and, as usual for Fassbinder in his Sirkian melodrama era, gorgeously filmed.

Not that great. Seems a little too...earnest. Some interesting points but they are smothered by the overwhelming pathos. A mediocre film from his middle period.

That it's an unprecedented exposure of gays, complete with abundant full male nudity, is not what's daring. What's daring is that it's unflattering, non-naturalistic and couldn't care less about politics. A wonderful film, though definitely flawed: Much of Eugen's patronizing of Franz could have been trimmed, they really flog a dead horse there for a while. Also the ending is possibly a bit excessive. Still it's a brilliant, ice-cold melodrama the kind only Fassbinder is capable of.

Interesting that the character here shares a name with Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz. This is a solid entry into Fassbinder's filmography, this time casting himself as the lead. It's interesting but in the end I wished there was a bit more to it.

Estreava há 45 anos no Festival de New York. Esse é um filme muito difícil de passar por, não só pela tragédia anunciada desde o início, mas porque efetivamente todos conhecemos casamentos erigidos dessa forma vendo o filme de forma literal ou conhecemos a exploração do proletariado pela burguesia vendo o filme de uma maneira alegórica. Em todos os sentidos é um dos mais bem acabados filmes de Fassbinder, principalmente pela crueza de sua honestidade. Box OP Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

This movie is great because Fassbinder was a great actor. His face manages to express 10 things at once almost all of the time, from an only-skin-deep toughness and a touching naïveté to a repressed pain and hunger to connect...he's wonderful to watch (and he looks good naked). Difficult to watch at times--for me, because I hate seeing good-hearted folk being ruthlessly exploited. Sadly, for my advanced stage of bachelorhood, it seems gay men are the same the world over.

Brilliant, but almost unbearably sad.

Class struggle romance stuff and easy political posturing stuff. An acquired taste if you like your melodramas dry, icy and abstractly intellectual.

I got it pretty early on. Most of the film felt like an endurance test--can you continue to walk along with this oblivious or desperate guy who is so obviously being taken advantage of. Exquisitely shot, to be sure, but the characterization of the lead lacked enough to make the long journey worthwhile.

I admire Fassbinder's honesty in how he saw human beings - with their ugly sides, complexities and imperfections - but because his motives are usually clear from the get-go, his films tend to overstay their welcome. Here's hoping that his oeuvre doesn't fall under the category: once you've seen one, you've seen them all.

In this hypermisanthrope's version of Sirkian melodrama, with trappings of Anger, a working class lead played by Fassbinder strikes it rich, falls in with a circle of older bourgeois queers, and gets positively eaten alive. Fucking awesome.

Which one's Steve Doocy?

and what friends indeed. the title is like the final icy footnote on a film that avoids cheap sentiment instead aiming for the cold and matter-of-fact (meanwhile the sirkian colours surrounding are warm and intoxicating). the last scene is gorgeously shot, harsh and rather striking.

"Make no mistake, this is the real Queer as Folk, but for all of Fassbinder's gripes with an elite gay culture's many sexual hang-ups, Fox and His Friends is first and foremost a riveting evocation of Social Darwinism in action." - Ed Gonzalez

A rather simple and obvious telling of a working-class fellow trying to fit in the upper class tier. I thought the ending might've been bad, but it turned out to be quite the striking image.

I knew Fassbinder was a very good director. This film shows that he's also a very good actor.

Once more, the forces of Sirk/Brecht/Döblin collide in Fassbinder's mind and create an absolutely fantastic creation.