HGW haunts.

Apart from one of the best closing scenes ever for a movie, The Lives of Others had Ulrich Mühe's very memorable performance as Captain Gerd Wiesler. Wikipedia (of course!) told this much too:

Mühe was already seriously ill at the prize-giving ceremony in Los Angeles in April 2007 when Das Leben der Anderen was awarded its Oscar, and flew back to Germany hours later for an urgent stomach operation. In an article in Die Welt dated 21 July 2007, Mühe discussed his diagnosis of stomach cancer which had put his acting career on hold; he died the following day. On 25 July 2007 he was buried in his mother's village of Walbeck in the Landkreis (rural district) of Börde, Saxony-Anhalt.

Sad. Extremely so because he was only 54, and the rest of the world had just started to know of him. I wish to watch more.

Another real oddity here is that even the most celebrated Oscar material can barely hold a candle against some of the cinema made in Europe and Asia, and yet it takes Oscar news for these movies to appear in the most avid movie lover's radar. (It doesn't help that Kim Ki-Duk isn't exactly popular in South Korea, so is Wong Kar-Wai in Hong Kong, so was early Kurosawa in Japan. Familiar situation here too.) I can't believe that Mühe was little known outside Germany before his Lives days, despite his quite prolific portfolio and apparent popularity within his country. It is an odd world. Perhaps not.

And I would love to see how that wunder kind filmmaker von Donnersmarck would live up to expectations of a whole world of movie lovers. Can hardly wait!