A previous commentator wrote that there are 'upside down' trains in Pina.There are not..it's a Schwebebahn - a hover train, a train system suspended from high girders, which can be found in the German town of Wuppertal - where Pina was based.I'd love to watch this film in 3D - anyone who knows where I can do so in the UK - please drop me a line.The trailer is gorgeous. All that fluidity. I'm glad Wenders did this tribute - other than him only Lynch would have qualified to do so.

Reading some the interviews that Wim Wenders gave about Pina I learned that this film ended to be something quite different from what the director originally intended. While fascinated a long time by Pina Bausch's creation and especially Cafe Muller, Wenders could not find for a long time the appropriate means of expression to make a film about it. And then something happened - technology developed and 3D came back with a revenge. The revelation was that 3D and filmed dancing are a perfect fit. The result is a film which is unique in its way, hard to enter in any category, a good example actually of how relative and futile categories are.What we get on screen is a portrait and a homage to Pina Bausch. While Wim Wenders authored many documentaries about music or history of cinema, this film is not the usual documentary, neither is it a biography (no chronology, no theoretical analysis of her work), but a portrait of an artist who was among the few who revolutionized her discipline, a portrait assembled from testimonies from the dancers who worked with her (although some say no words) and most of all by her art as it was filmed and brought to screen. Maybe the best description I found is the one in the German sub-title of the movie - a Tanzfilm, a Dance Movie.There are indeed a great deal of beautifully filmed ballet scenes, in different environments, and here we see the hand of a master director, as almost all required innovation in building the sets and making them look like belonging to a cinema event, not to a filmed performance. As I am a fervent spectator of filmed performances of contemporary dance on Mezzo TV especially, I am pretty familiar with the genre. Wenders succeeds here to work the synthesis, and Pina is both a ballet performance of first class and a cinema event combining the best of the two arts and amplifying it by the power of 3D. The usage of the technology results not only in viewers seeing better and more clearly the performance and the sets (these too), but also making them part of the creative process. In several scenes in the film we see Pina Bausch during repetitions mixing with the dancers, watching and talking with them, working together as a team. With the 3D effect the spectators become part of the work process, part of the show, part of the homage Wenders brings to the great choreographer.

I went to see this last night, and though I barely retained my sanity to the end, there were many times I wanted to go screaming from the movie theater.Most of the film is filled with weirdly interpretive dance sequences that were crazy enough to make you want to bang your head against a wall (some of the dancers actually did that during dances), but maybe it wouldn't have been so horrible if we were told what they were supposed to be interpreting. I discussed it with one other person (there were only four of us in the entire theater) and I said to her that "Okay, she wasn't crazy because these people swore loyalty to her for so many years, but from these dances...no, she was crazy." Let me give you a few examples...A dancer comes out with two pieces of meat, and yells, "This is veal!" And then she dances for several minutes with the veal in her ballet slippers.One male dancer is walking along and another places a branch on his right shoulder, then another on a left shoulder, crux of the elbow, and so on, until he has several balanced on different parts of his body.A female carries a pillow on a real subway, making monstrous noises with every step, while a make dancer sits at the back of the subway car wearing some kind of weird animal-type ears.One female dancer carries a potted tree on her back around a lake. No dancing, just carries a potted tree around on her back.One woman throws shovels of dirt at a crouching female dancer.This is just a small group of examples. The film had two hours of similar W-T-F routines!!!It is no wonder the dancers in the film all looked so miserable when interviewed! I am hoping to flood myself with other images from TV or wherever now in order to wipe out those memories caused by this film.

This wasn't art. This looked like someone took too many mushrooms and told the dancers to do ridiculous things.How can Pina be considered anything but a fool after seeing this? Such boring choreography, goofy eulogies by the dancers, and dull visual effects.Took my wife and daughters, who are all dancers. They laughed all the way home at how horridly bad the movie was and were shocked at what some call art.We knew little about Pina going in, but when we left we were convinced of one thing, anyone who considers the person who created those dances as anything other than a goofball is an idiot.Do yourself a favor, DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE!