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Reviews
Erbsen auf halb 6 (2004)
Beautiful pictures spoiled by a horrible script
This film started out very promising with the story about a director who loses his sight and a blind woman who is bound to help him. However, somewhere in the middle it seemed like the script writers didn't know where to go from there.
One unbelievable event followed the next (Russia must be very small because they are all bumping into each other all the time), the motivation of the female lead character comprehensible (why does she still follow him after they got off the ship? Why doesn't she try to borrow a mobile phone on the ship to call somebody?), the side stories were completely ridiculous (was the story with the mother and the boyfriend supposed to be funny? And what was the story with the younger sister about?). Still with all this seeming arbitrariness of the plot, the movie managed to be completely predictable.
The saddest thing about it is that there was a lot of potential. As I said, the idea of the film was good, the visuals and the score were very beautiful and the actors of the main characters were good, too. So this could have been a really good film... but it wasn't.
City of Angels (1998)
When you take the art from an artistic film with a weak plot you get...
... right, a weak film with a weak plot. I love "Der Himmel über Berlin" (Wings of Desire) but I always felt that the plot was very weak compared to the emotions and the art in the film. I thought, City of Angels might have improved on the plot aspect so I was intrigued to see what they came up with. Well, they did improve on the plot but in the mean time they managed to get rid of everything that touched me in "Wings".
The nice little stories of the humans they are watching and also the dialogs between Cassiel and Seth were completely dumbed down. The former angel who tells Seth to become human is some kind of gluttonous hedonist and stuffs Ben&Jerry's inside of him instead of enjoying a simple cup of coffee. And I almost burst out laughing when Seth said "red... COLOR" after he became human even though the whole film was shot in color and nothing hinted that he couldn't see colors.
I'll stop lamenting now! Go, see the original and NOT for the plot!
Absolute Giganten (1999)
Maybe I just didn't get it
I really liked what I had heard of this movie and wanted to watch it for a long time. Now I finally got around to it and I was very disappointed. I still think this could have been a really nice movie and it had it's moments. But the dialog and some of the characters were just embarrassingly bad. The main character was very good and the two friends were OK, too (although I couldn't really stand Ricco) but most of the other characters were just completely unreal (or maybe I just don't know this world).
Don't think that I just don't like this movie because I'm used to Hollywood. My favorite movie is Lichter which is similar in mood and the way it is made but just a hundred times better.
Lichter (2003)
One of the best films I've ever seen...
I'm not exactly sure why but this film just hit me right at the heart and hasn't left me since I left the cinema (which has been more than a year now). I completely disagree with the review that's on the title page at the moment in almost every point. He says the film was too busy... I say it was authentic and seeing the making of it makes you realize how the "busy" camera was mainly due to the fact that the actors had a lot of room for improvisation which you can tell when you see the film.
He also said that he thought that the mattress episode was pointless. I found it really really moving. And Devid Striesow just acts incredibly well (He doesn't act like an actor but like a real person which is something you have to get used to at first but then it's so rewarding to watch!)
I also think that the parallel way of storytelling worked really well and it wasn't hard to follow the plots at all. I'm actually proud that films like this one are made in Germany and this is just so much better than the average big-budget Hollywood film. The mood it creates is so tense, depressing and yet hopeful. It is definitely one of my favourite movies.
Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken (2004)
Not at all what I expected
I mostly agree with the reviewer who said that this is a "bad German" film. I came to expect a lot more from Daniel Brühl and August Diehl; Good Bye Lenin, Lichter, Vaya Con Dios and Das Weiße Rauschen showed that these two can REALLY play! The film left me quite indifferent and that really should not have been the case considering the story. The characters where so flat that I didn't really bother what happened to them. I have to disagree with the above quoted review in one point though. I thought that this was wholly different from a TV production cause the cinematography was really beautiful and stylish at times.
Before the main film they showed the short film "True" by Tom Tykwer and strangely enough there was much more life in the 10 minutes of that film than in the 95 minutes of Liebe in Gedanken. You really shouldn't walk out of the theatre only capable of thinking about the pre-movie...