Alexandra's Project

Starring:Gary Sweet, Helen Buday
Studio: Film Movement
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

A gripping escape plan provides the narrative spine to The Tunnel, an exciting Cold War story. This film fictionalizes the true story of the digging of a 430-foot tunnel running under the Berlin Wall in 1964, as tunnel rats on the west side labor to find a way out for friends and family in the Communist East. The principals are led by a famous German swimmer (the excellent Heino Ferch, sort of the German Bruce Willis), whose sister is trapped in East Berlin. Juicy characters abound, including some compromised East Berliners and unlikely heroes on the West side. Also incorporated into this story is an American TV news crew shooting the digging as it goes along. Director Roland Suso Richter shot The Tunnel for television and if it is somewhat artless, it still grabs the viewer in irresistible suspense--and sustains the tension for 167 minutes. Like its heroes, this film is dogged and emotionally committed. --Robert Horton

Description

Anti-communist East German swimming champion Harry Melchior (Heino Ferch) narrowly escapes the Communist regime just after the Berlin Wall is completed, and is determined to rescue his beloved sister, whom he was forced to leave behind.

Customer Reviews:

The Tunnel.......2007-01-21

i love this movie, i watched it a couple of times. i grew up in germany and i remember all this very well. Also Heino Frech is a great german actor.

Amazing, Truly Amazing.......2006-12-18

I read the reviews for this movie and decided to buy it.

On the cover there is a quote by Kevin Thomas of the L.A. Times stating "Flat-out the most exciting movie from Germany since DAS BOOT"; the man speaks the truth. Holding your breath suspense, intense drama, this movie has it all.

Though I was reading sub-titles (which at times isolates you from truly connecting with a film) the actors were so passionate in the movie and so moving; giving their characters such realism, depth and life, I became completely emotionally involved in the movie from start to finish. Well acted, well scripted, well done!!!

I am so glad I bought this movie, amazing, truly amazing....

Tense, well acted, 2 1/2 hour+ escape flick........2006-02-23

This made for German television epic story of several people attempting to help their friends, families, and loved ones escape from East Berlin to free West Berlin. It is based on a true story, and in the DVD extras, you actually get to meet the real man responsible for the story in this film, whose name was slightly changed for the movie.

Popular German actor Heino Ferch gives a superb performance as the leader of a group of tunnel diggers, determined to get their loved ones out of the Communist side of Berlin, just after the Berlin Wall was built. For Ferch's character, Harry, it's his beloved sister, for Harry's friend Matthis, it's his spouse, and for the young girl Fritzi, who the group are quite suspisious of, it's her fiance' who is currently building the wall, but desperately wants out. There are many others helping, who don't necessarily have loved ones to help escape, including the American, Vic, who despite his leg injury, is just as determined as the rest, and even takes some of the biggest risks in the film.

The performances throughout the entire cast are top notch, and while there isn't a ton of action until the end, the tense atmosphere of the film really keeps you glued to the set. The emotions in the film are high, and the bonds between Harry and his sister, Lotte, and Matthis and his wife Carola, are so realistically portrayed, that it's easy to see why they are going through months and months of digging to get these people out.

The 167 minutes seem like they flew on by, and I could have gone on watching more of these intriguing characters. It's better than any other spy or war thrillers released in any country over the last several years. Hard to believe it was made for German TV, as it blows away several big screen productions. The direction, cinematography, script, and choice of actors cannot be faulted, and the only fault would be if you miss this gripping film.

Der Tunnel.......2005-11-18

For all you fans of cold war movies and spy thrillers....look no further. This is the movie we've been waiting for. Set in Berlin in 1961-62 this film is intense and thrilling. The viewer doesn't know what's going to happen right up until the end. This ranks to me, as one of the top spy/espionage/thriller movies of all time, side by side with "Day of the Jackal". All Star performances all around by the cast....especially the three female leads. This is a MUST purchase.

Average customer rating:

big time revenge
Disturbing
Shocking Yes, Intelligent No...
Surprising
Subtlety with a hammer: "kill bill" of the mind rather than the body

Alexandra's Project
Starring: Helen Buday , Gary Sweet , and Bogdan Koca
Director: Rolf de Heer
Manufacturer: Film Movement
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0007LI10S
Release Date: 2005-01-01

Product Description

Alexandra's Project is the January selection in The Film Movement Series. Steve (Gary Sweet) is a middle-management office worker happily going through the motions of family life as husband to wife Alexandra (Helen Buday) and father to their two children. Today is Steves birthday, and things cant seem to get better. After receiving a much awaited promotion, Steve leaves work upbeat and heads home to his suburban townhouse in anticipation of a surprise party he suspects Alexandra has organized. A video tape marked "Play Me" will change his life. Official Selection at the Berlin, Toronto, Telluride, Edinburgh Film Festivals, Alexandra's Projected was directed by Rolfe de Heer (Bad Boy Bubby, Dance Me to My Song). The film is darkly wonderful - a movie that will leave few men unrattled and many women vicariously satisfied, according to the Toronto Star.

Customer Reviews:

big time revenge.......2007-03-31

Steve's birthday started well enough. While still in bed his kids gave him hugs and high fives. At work his colleagues had a cake with candles and his boss gave him a promotion. And his wife Alexandra promised him a surprise in the evening. Some surprise. The film opens with a camera panning through the winding road of a sterile suburb, and soft, discordant music. The very first sentence of the film belongs to Alexandra as she is alone in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror: "I'm so sorry, Steve. . . NO! I'm not sorry! No one should ever be sorry to stand up for their own self!"The rest of the film then takes place in the living room as Steve watches the "surprise" birthday tape that Alexandra made before she left him. Her powerfully manipulative monologue to Steve takes him on a roller coaster of emotions straight to hell: humor, disbelief, regret, sadness, pity, anger, rage, and finally despair. "You didn't marry me, Steve," she tells him, "you married my body." And so she makes it clear just how a marriage devoid of affection, intimacy, and mutual respect had made her feel. This film is hard to watch because it is without nuance. Alexandra is one deeply angry and cruel woman, but if what she says about Steve is true you empathize with her anyway.

Disturbing.......2007-03-20

Many others have already reviewed the plot, so I will stay away from that. I just saw it at our the Cleveland International Film Festival. The director / writer was in attendance for a Q&A after the film.

De Heer claimed that he strived for balance in the two characters when making the film. He also admitted that most people who see the film do not see much balance. He also said that feminist groups were the main advocates for the film.

After watching I came to two conclusions on his intentions.
1. The only balance that I saw is that in the beginning she is miserable and at the end he is miserable.
2. I cant see how any feminst group would get behind this movie. DeHeer portrays this woman as a crazy b#$%#. She is vengeful, she is a whore (literaly), she abuses drugs, and probably worst of all she kidnaps their children.

I would hate to meet the kind of people that support this lunatic. Any feminst that supports a person like this needs a check up from the neck up. This women is evil and in real life she would lose both of those kids to the father. Dont mistake me here, the father is no choir boy himself. He certainly has his vices and the writer makes sure you know that. But by the end their is only one victim.

As a movie it is very well written and clever. It is a plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat for what will happen next. It ends on a down note with a little humor built in to soften some of the blow.

In whole it is a film that is worth seeing. It will keep your interest and leave you thinking....

Shocking Yes, Intelligent No..........2007-01-03

The general plot has been covered by other reviewers so I'll skip to the chase. While the film does deliver the promised shock values, there are just too many contrivances, which make this film totally unbelievable, beyond the scope of say a `willing suspension of disbelief'. And intelligent it certainly is not. The first plot blunder, and this is a deal-breaker: is that when he gets home from work and realizes he is locked in, he just sits down and watches the video. Now I don't know about you folks, but the minute I found myself locked into my own house, light bulbs removed, furniture stacked in the corners, wife and kids missing, locks on doors changed, and especially finding my cell phone battery replaced by a bullet(!), I'd be busting down the windows and the walls if need be to get out of there. I'd be taking that video tape straight to the police to finish it there and figure out what happened to my family. At that point any reasonable person has enough information to know that his family was either killed or kidnapped, that the video tape was possibly made at gunpoint. Whatever the case there is absolutely no question, five minutes in that something is horribly horribly wrong. The bullet is the icing on the cake and anyone with half a brain cell would be running for the hills.

So after seeing all this, his sitting down, smoking a cigarette, having a beer, and watching this video which takes up the rest of the film, all feels very much contrived. It's completely against all human instinct and creates a strong tension that the film definitely feeds off of, but unfortunately its a *false* tension which the movie does not deserve and left me through the rest of the film going "please, this is just dumb, take the tape, get out of there!"

The next layer of false tension, and this is really the broken backbone of the movie, does not come from any intelligent plot or crafty camerawork, but rather just from the pure shock value of everything the wife says and does on film. Its definitely shocking and I give the film two stars just for the shock value, but its all just so unbelievable. It's just not plausible in any way that somebody could be so very smart and so very well spoken and feel so very much abused *every day* and yet so completely fail for all those years to convey these feelings to their partner. In real life, 13 years earlier in the marriage she would have slapped his hand one night and said `I don't appreciate your touching me like that'. End of story.

Another layer I just can't buy, the film goes on and on about how he married her for her body, well what did she marry him for?! There is no allusion at all to his having changed over time, so what gives?

Bottom line, this is another shallow female revenge flick where the woman's horrific acts are justified by the man's density and inability to understand, fueled by false tensions, and ending in his lying down and giving up (once again, oh please).

There is nothing more intelligent to the shock value here than what you'd see in Reservoir Dogs. Shocking yes, intelligent no. But where Reservoir Dogs had no pretenses of being intelligent or thoughtful and was therefore a solid film in its own right, this one falls flat. If you are just looking for cheap shock factor, check it out, but if you're looking for an intelligent, believable suspense-drama look elsewhere.

Surprising .......2006-11-04

After watching thisI realizd how much I actually enjoyed it. Not for everyone but if it is for you I am sure you will totally enjoy.

Subtlety with a hammer: "kill bill" of the mind rather than the body.......2006-06-16

This is not the kind of film about which one says "I loved it!!" "I can't wait to see it again!" This is not even the kind of film you "recommend": as in "you have to see this film" -- it is a difficult film to watch (and I assume this would be true whether you are male or female). It is, nonetheless a powerful film, that can be easily misunderstood (as if it were merely a kind of "female revenge" picture: kill bill where Alexandra destroys the psyche rather than the body; even to compare this film to the Japanese film "Audition" would be a serious misunderstanding). One of the latest films by Australian auteur Rolf de Heer, Alexandra's project is a nuanced and subtle attack on the ways in which men (backed up by cultural myths of what it means to be a "successful man") objectify the women in their lives. To any one who has seen the film, this might seem like sarcasm: there is nothing subtle about Alexandra's "project," and she is extraordinarily blunt. What is subtle about the film is the way in which Rolf de Heer shows how easily Steve (the "protagonist" and "victim" of the film) completely misses the point of her message, how fully he misunderstands her (and how easy it is to share in that misunderstanding as an audience member). The despair and devastation he feels does not amount to a realization that for so long he has deliberately misunderstood and denied her needs (believing that to "provide for her" is enough) -- rather, he begins to feel that what she is showing is her own "masculine lust" and it turns him on even as it devastates him (what destroys him, "unmans" him, effectively, is his belief that what this was about was her feeling lust analogous to the lust he had never seen to be problematic in himself). He can't see that what she is doing in a confused effort to get him to listen to her is at least as painful to her as it is to himself, that while he gets simultaneously aroused and disgusted she feels only disgust for herself and at him. It is really this misunderstanding that, once perceived, serves best as a mirror for the "masculine image" that has been so harmful to both Steve and Alexandra. The misunderstanding is, for us, what is being shown in an effort to reach understanding.

Alexandra's Project [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.4 Import - Australia ]

Average customer rating:

Nice try, but not quite there...

Alexandra's Project [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.4 Import - Australia ]
Director: Rolf de Heer
Manufacturer: Palace Films
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B000DN7JJ4

Product Description

Australia released, PAL/Region 4 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. Languages: English Dolby Digital 5.1 Synopsis: Rolf de Heer's psychological thriller Alexandra's Project captures a turning point in a very unhappy marriage. Steve (Gary Sweet) and Alexandra (Helen Buday) have two children and numerous grievances against each other. After a birthday in which Steve received a birthday cake and a raise at his job, Steve arrives home to find his family is gone and a videotape awaiting his viewing. On the tape, Alexandra lists all of her frustrations and begins to strip for the camera. She then reveals that she suffers from breast cancer. Before the now emotionally reeling Steve can recover, he learns that Alexandra has paid to have the neighbor he hates change the locks in the house. Steve is trapped inside with little to do but think about what he has done to his wife, and his only company is the video that continues to provide disturbing information. Extras: Interactive Menu Special Edition Biographies Behind the scenes Documentary Cast/Crew Interview(s) Photo Gallery Scene Access Trailer(s) Uncut

Customer Reviews:

Nice try, but not quite there..........2006-05-22

There's no denying that Alexandra's Project is a disappointment coming from Rolf de Heer, who made the superb The Tracker, one of the best Australian films of the decade. It's extremely well crafted and hides its low budget quite ingeniously, but unfortunately the birthday surprise that Gary Sweet gets from wife Helen Buday doesn't really hold together if you shake the package too much. Partially it's because the punishment seems far in excess of the crime, partially because you get the feeling that Rolf de Heer has been reading feminist literature just to compile a shopping list of grievances (most of them valid), but mainly because the holes in logic get bigger as the revenge grows out of proportion to the offence until the somewhat ridiculous climax: it's simply not credible even within the framework of the film. But the real problem is that you end up feeling sympathy for the husband for having the misfortune to marry so such wacko, which clearly is not the idea.

There's still much to admire. De Heer sustains the suspense as to what exactly will happen while creating a plausible air of impending dread, the distortion from the anamorphic lenses on doorways and corridors adding to the sense that something's definitely off here, while Sweet is outstandingly good in a role that requires mainly reaction shots from an armchair. Buday is impressive too, but it's more an impressive "performance" with odd moments of truth rather than an entirely convincing human being in the way that Sweet's character is - more a fault of the agenda-led writing of her scenes than her own commendably brave efforts.

The Australian special edition boasts a good selection of extras - 61-minute Q&A session with De Heer, half-hour documentary, trailer and stills gallery.

Average customer rating:

Intense and Provocative

Alexandra's Project
Starring: Gary Sweet , Helen Buday , Bogdan Koca , Samantha Knigge , and Eileen Darley
Director: Rolf de Heer
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Thrillers | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

( A ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
ASIN: B00005JN0J

Customer Reviews:

Intense and Provocative.......2005-08-03

This film will definitely not appeal to everyone. It is emotionally and sexually brutal, and the weak of heart or stomach should stick to Hillary Duff flicks, or perhaps a good clean slasher film. When I saw a 'sneak preview' a few days ago, not one walked out during the film but there was a stunned and silent exodus after. The closest I can come to its raw impact are Peter Greenaway films such as "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", though "Alexandra's Project" is simpler and more personal. It compels you to watch even as it makes it uncomfortable to do so.

The film starts out easily, though with some forebodings of camera angle and incident. Steve (Gary Sweet) wakes up in an Australian suburb on his birthday; his charming children give him some presents, and his wife Alexandra (Helen Buday) tells him that a surprise will be waiting him when he comes home. It seems an idyllic scene, but .... When Alexandra wants to pay a bill, Steve forcefully reminds her the accounts are his ... their row house has been fitted with deadbolt locks and automated security shutters (doubly jarring in free and open Australia) ... Steve curses a sinister neighbor out watering the communal lawn. At work, Steve is called into the boardroom ... sweatingly unsure if he is to be fired or promoted (perhaps, we think, his controlling nature at home stems from lack of control at work?). But it is good news, and he goes home ready to celebrate ...

... only to find an empty, dark and shuttered house, the light bulbs removed and a video tape on the TV saying "watch me". Pretty creepy, but when he puts it in it's a birthday present -- Alexandra informing him the children are staying with a relative and then doing an amateurish striptease for the camera as Steve has a beer (at the tape's suggestion) and enthusiastically watches. Then she stops, not quite naked, and sits down to vent her anger and frustration at her life and him. When he tries to escape, he finds he is cleverly locked in by all those security devices, and he is forced to continue, gradually becoming drunker, distress playing on his face.

It would be too much of a spoiler to describe what happens next, but there are several surprises as the tension builds and a sad and enigmatic ending. It becomes over the top at times, but in a way that is the point. We don't know if Alexandra is being logical and rational, reacting to a desperate situation, or overreacting out of dementia or paranoia.

Buday's is a bravura performance, as she chews up the scenery and convincingly plays a woman who is (justifiably or not) not about to take it any more. Sweet's performance is less overtly dramatic, but excellent in the play of emotion on his face as he gradually dissolves in pity and horror. Both actors take great risks. It is remarkable that each is alone, Buday/Alexandra speaking to camera while Sweet/Steve must act passively and receptively.

Women in the audience will undoubtedly sympathize with Alexandra's grievances and frustrations, while men will likely see her taped monologue as a metaphor for women's desire to have the men in their lives as mute objects, receiving an angry harangue without rebuttal. Many will be disgusted or horrified, but few will be left unaffected.

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