I'm easily pleased in the cinema, I promise you, but after an hour of Die Fetten Jahre Sind Vorbei, known over here in Limeyland as The Edukators, I was ready to leave. Respect for social niceties bade me stay (my wife wouldn't have been pleased to have been left in Derby without the car, and no means of getting home), in addition to the fact that I have never left a movie prematurely anyway, but I could easily have broken my duck here.
This is almost a bad movie, its single redeeming feature being the excellent acting throughout, of Bruhl, Jensch, Erceg and Burghart Klaussner, particularly, in his role as the kidnapped Hardenburg. There are three deficiencies and they are all considerable. First and least, the first hour is slow and turgid. In short, we learn of a futile pseudo-revolutionary, young double-act, the self-styled Edukators. We learn what they do and we watch while Peter, essentially a good looking, shallow dope, lose his girl to the sullen Jan. Talking of shallow, were I not myself sufficiently weak as to be a willing target for the considerable visual charms of Julia Jensch as Jule, I'd have caught up on some sleep, I'm sure.
Problem two involves the plotting. It's asinine throughout the movie. The narrative development depends upon the retrieval of a left-behind phone oh, crikey and at the end, an implausible move by Hardenburg. The three-second shot of his supposed agonising next to a packet of cigarettes was laughable. Whilst it's fair to say that human beings are nothing if not strange, illogical and outright daft, if writers Held (and director) Weingartner had held their nerve, the film could have ended as a pleasant, if lightweight and flawed (see problem 3) piece. However, they chose to go for an endgame clever-clever flourish that had me frothing at the mouth and scowling as the credits rolled (a difficult trick to pull off simultaneously).
Character and plot are like Siamese twins. Held and Weingartner's plot is badly wrong because they allow their characters to behave in ways that stretch credulity. The hard-nosed renegade Jan allows his attraction to Jule to break activist vows. Jan and Peter fall out, then resurrect their friendship for the sake of politics. Hardenburg decides to change his attitude to his kidnappers (as already referred to above). Here for this author, were three rank bad writing moves where the writers failed to let their characters very well created, to be fair to be true to themselves. If they want to make the point that humans do act irrationally, they didn't set it up conscientiously.
Worst of all we have the appallingly unbelievable spectacle of the bourgeois Hardenburg revealing himself to have once been the associate of the Beider Meinhof terrorists. Unless Held/Weingartner have him lying through his teeth, then this was like Mickey Mouse trying to convince us that really, he was Tsar Nicholas II. If he was lying, then it wasn't remotely hinted at in any way in the script or body language of the actors. This was rank bad stuff.
Thirdly: if characterisation was poor in the movie (leading to disastrous plot moves), then the thematic content here in terms of modern young attitudes to 21st century materialism, was nothing better than GCSE level stuff. We see Edukators shake their political thing, breaking and entering, and whatnot; this is merely dull; to hear them expound their philosophy to Hardenburg was excruciating. The outlaws would have been better deployed so as to make a study in socio-political immaturity. The writers came over as being sympathetic to their counter-cultural philosophies through atrociously amateurish dialogue. I wouldn't have followed the trio down to the corner to buy a bar of chocolate, let alone man the barricades. It was all I could do to stop myself shouting, "Go out and get a bloody job!" at the screen. Admittedly, my view is skewed by my own bourgeois materialist attitudes, but really, after a hundred years of cinema, anyone making a movie, expecting anyone with a shred of intellect and a movie-going back story has to be and do better than this.
One final point: anyone making a movie these days also has to do better than dump Buckley singing 'Hallelujah' onto the soundtrack, hoping that we're not noticing what a miserable cliché that is. CWT
This is almost a bad movie, its single redeeming feature being the excellent acting throughout, of Bruhl, Jensch, Erceg and Burghart Klaussner, particularly, in his role as the kidnapped Hardenburg. There are three deficiencies and they are all considerable. First and least, the first hour is slow and turgid. In short, we learn of a futile pseudo-revolutionary, young double-act, the self-styled Edukators. We learn what they do and we watch while Peter, essentially a good looking, shallow dope, lose his girl to the sullen Jan. Talking of shallow, were I not myself sufficiently weak as to be a willing target for the considerable visual charms of Julia Jensch as Jule, I'd have caught up on some sleep, I'm sure.
Problem two involves the plotting. It's asinine throughout the movie. The narrative development depends upon the retrieval of a left-behind phone oh, crikey and at the end, an implausible move by Hardenburg. The three-second shot of his supposed agonising next to a packet of cigarettes was laughable. Whilst it's fair to say that human beings are nothing if not strange, illogical and outright daft, if writers Held (and director) Weingartner had held their nerve, the film could have ended as a pleasant, if lightweight and flawed (see problem 3) piece. However, they chose to go for an endgame clever-clever flourish that had me frothing at the mouth and scowling as the credits rolled (a difficult trick to pull off simultaneously).
Character and plot are like Siamese twins. Held and Weingartner's plot is badly wrong because they allow their characters to behave in ways that stretch credulity. The hard-nosed renegade Jan allows his attraction to Jule to break activist vows. Jan and Peter fall out, then resurrect their friendship for the sake of politics. Hardenburg decides to change his attitude to his kidnappers (as already referred to above). Here for this author, were three rank bad writing moves where the writers failed to let their characters very well created, to be fair to be true to themselves. If they want to make the point that humans do act irrationally, they didn't set it up conscientiously.
Worst of all we have the appallingly unbelievable spectacle of the bourgeois Hardenburg revealing himself to have once been the associate of the Beider Meinhof terrorists. Unless Held/Weingartner have him lying through his teeth, then this was like Mickey Mouse trying to convince us that really, he was Tsar Nicholas II. If he was lying, then it wasn't remotely hinted at in any way in the script or body language of the actors. This was rank bad stuff.
Thirdly: if characterisation was poor in the movie (leading to disastrous plot moves), then the thematic content here in terms of modern young attitudes to 21st century materialism, was nothing better than GCSE level stuff. We see Edukators shake their political thing, breaking and entering, and whatnot; this is merely dull; to hear them expound their philosophy to Hardenburg was excruciating. The outlaws would have been better deployed so as to make a study in socio-political immaturity. The writers came over as being sympathetic to their counter-cultural philosophies through atrociously amateurish dialogue. I wouldn't have followed the trio down to the corner to buy a bar of chocolate, let alone man the barricades. It was all I could do to stop myself shouting, "Go out and get a bloody job!" at the screen. Admittedly, my view is skewed by my own bourgeois materialist attitudes, but really, after a hundred years of cinema, anyone making a movie, expecting anyone with a shred of intellect and a movie-going back story has to be and do better than this.
One final point: anyone making a movie these days also has to do better than dump Buckley singing 'Hallelujah' onto the soundtrack, hoping that we're not noticing what a miserable cliché that is. CWT