Reviews

This has everything you expect from German films from the 1950s, with lavish song routines, chocolate-box German scenery, and a setting in a 1920s/1930s Germany as it might have been with no Great Depression and no Adolf Hitler. But, though I can't give more details because of the risk of spoiling the plot, it stands out because of its unusual take on divorce. The ending is definitely not what I thought it was going to be, and must have shocked many in the original audience.

The film is also notable for the acting of two characters. The actress Romy Schneider, here in an important supporting role, would later come to be one of Germany's best-loved actresses, for example when she played the title role in Sissi. But most interesting was the actress who played Willy's manager, who I think must be Ellen (Hertha Feiler), who adopts a deliberately "modern" style, and is largely responsible for frustrating the ending one might have expected.

I saw this a year ago and I still lie awake thinking of it. This is how the Nazis would like you to think of concentration camps. We see the inmates engaged in ordinary work, or at a football match or concert. It looks just like a normal happy society, until you notice that here absolutely everyone is thin to the point of being skeletal. I can still remember the facial expressions of some of the inmates, though those are indescribable. I felt guilty for watching this piece of exploitation. I wonder what reward the inmates were promised for trying not to look too unhappy, a bowl of soup?

Covers the last month of the election campaign of a young enthusiastic conservative politician to the German parliament ("Bundestag"). The trouble with films about politics is that it's tempting for them to drag out the usual stereotypes ("conservative" = corrupt, "left-wing" = idealistic and naive), but this film avoids that. Instead it concentrates on the daily grind of the election campaign, with the candidate trying to hand out his campaign leaflets and free biro to passers-by who aren't interested, having to fill the base of a stand in a public toilet to stop it blowing over in the wind, and so on. It would be unfair to comment on Herr Wichmann himself, since he is a real person, but overall I found the film surprisingly optimistic about German politics. True, there are no great ideals floating around, but on the other hand the sort of sleaze and corruption we normally associate with politicians is absent. Perhaps the best scene is when Herr Wichmann and three of his rivals are challenged to design a common campaign poster, and they look like four quite normal and nice people.

It's amazing how many people seem to be complaining about the unrealism of this film. Given that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that the film is not trying to be realistic from scene 1 onwards, the question is not whether the film tried to be realistic and failed, but whether a film about the Holocaust must try to be realistic to be any good.

The trouble is that unless as part of the performance the entire audience is deported in cattle-trucks, slowly starved, and then gassed, it is rather difficult to see how any film can be realistic about the Holocaust. So, if there are to be movies about the Holocaust at all, or if they are to do much beyond telling us that the Holocaust was ghastly (we knew that, didn't we?)

they have to give up on trying to be realistic, and try to look at the Holocaust in an indirect way. This is where I think "Train de Vie" succeeds, for example by the deliberate parallels between the society inside the train, and the society that helped caused the Holocaust. I could list them at length, but if you've seen the movie and didn't notice them, you won't be convinced by anything I say, and if you haven't seen the movie, I'd rather leave you the pleasure of discovering them for yourself.

I never actually thought of the film's relation to "Life is Beautiful" until reading the IMDB comments, after I'd seen both films. Well it's very hard to compare the two films, but I don't think "Train de Vie" needs to be ashamed of the comparison. True, Roberto Benigni does not star in it, and that is a heavy handicap for any film. On the other hand I think I like the exuberant un-reality of "Train de Vie" better. After all the portrayal of the Holocaust in "Life is Beautiful" is just as unrealistic as that of "Train de Vie"; the only difference is that "Train de Vie" revels from the first scene

to the last in its unreality. If we must be unreal, let us at least enjoy it.

This film is a treat from start to finish. I've seen and read a lot of Shakespeare, but this is going to be one of the defining versions for me. The Oliver version just doesn't compare.

I just loved the way the film mixed the 1930s with the Elizabethan; for example the 30s-style version of a Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd" (an Elizabethan hit Shakespeare himself quoted), which had a tune I can still hum, or the Plantagenet urinals. And all that's just in the first scene!

The updating was in my view fully justified. Folks, we have to remember that the War of the Roses was, in Elizabethan times, seen almost in the same way we see the First World War today. It was thought to be that horrible. Maybe it wasn't really, but that's how it was perceived. Anyone who tries to perform Shakespeare's history plays in their original setting today has somehow to solve the problem of making a modern audience feel the same sort of horror, otherwise you just end up with a lot of people in funny clothes running around doing funny things. I'm not saying you should never do a

history play in the original setting; Branagh's film of "Henry IV" is a good example of how you can, and succeed. But you ask too much if you just put the play on as if you were in Elizabethan England, and expect the audience today to be able to react to the War of the Roses as an Elizabethan audience would.

The modern connection with fascism is also perfectly reasonable.

Shakespeare's Richard is fascist, and so was the real King Richard III, who

really did haul Hastings out of a meeting and have him executed immediately,

and really did have the Princes in the Tower murdered. This was shocking to

the Elizabethans; even Henry VIII could not have someone beheaded without at

least going through some sort of judicial or parliamentary process. However

many modern audiences do not know this, and think it's just the sort of thing they did in those days. Setting the play in a fascist England helps us

realise how truly shocking Richard III's murders were.

The film also gives us a chilling reminder of how narrowly England escaped from fascism (and I am English). Fascism is not something uniquely German; it happened in Italy and Spain. It could have happened in 20th century England. If it had it might have looked something very like that, though perhaps not with Plantagenet urinals.

And yes, it is a pity so much was cut. But that's reality; that's how

Shakespeare has been done from the time of Shakespeare on. I certainly would like the film to have been twice as long, but you can hardly hold that

against it.

This film flopped when it was shown in Nazi Germany, and it's not hard to see why. Audiences apparently complained that it was simply too much, too over-the-top. The film attempts to show the Jewish people as a parasite corrupting the whole of Western Society; in fact it only succeeds in showing how they underwrite much of Western culture. For example there is a sequence attacking the Old Testament and various characters in the Old

Testament; this must have been very hard for any Christian to swallow. We see a number of famous Jews, including for example Albert Einstein; they couldn't really leave the greatest physicist of the last century out, but how can you leave him in? There are numerous internal contradictions, for example the assertion that Jews even when rich prefer to live in fly-infested hovels, against the later pictures of Jewish mansions. Perhaps the only really effective scenes are the allegedly kosher slaughter, and Peter Lorre's soliliquy which was stolen from "M".

I think some people have been unduly unfair on this film.

There is quite a complex sequence of flashbacks. But as a matter of fact, I didn't find them at all difficult to follow. My brain only hurts when I try to work it out afterwards. Maybe it's another of those things which work better in a cinema than on TV.

There is a scene where Bogart's character commits a war crime. I think we have to remember that Bogart did not always play saintly characters. He was not exactly saintly in the "Maltese Falcon" or "Casablanca". He was even less saintly in "The Caine Mutiny". I am sure that the audience in 1944 would have been shocked by the war crime just as we are

now; even Nazi propaganda sometimes emphasised the importance of being gentlemanly to prisoners. The easy and boring option would have been for

Bogart to play the all-American (or all-French) hero throughout; I find it

more interesting that in this case he isn't. I think the circumstances to some extent explain what Bogart's character does. The fact is war crimes happen in war. They happened then, and they happen now, and the perpetrators are not as through-and-through evil (or different from us) as we would like to think.

I agree with those who say this film is not as good as "Casablanca" or the "Maltese Falcon". The plot is a lot more lumpy and uneven than those films. But I've seen those two films several times already, and I can't watch them every night. "Passage to Marseille" is worth at least one viewing. In fact I would like to see it again, if I get a chance.

If you want an action movie, watch something else. Das Boot reflects what war must really be like, showing not just the 1% of terror and confusion, but also the 99% sitting around waiting for things to happen. It is also the best if not only explanation I know, of how honourable men could have fought for the Nazis.

I have now seen "Das Boot" 4 times. The first time was the "Director's Cut" with subtitles. Since then I have learnt German, so each time I watch the film I understand it better. It is still very difficult to follow, and a great deal passes me by; I think this film probably has the hardest German of any of the 50 or so German-language films I've seen. This is part of its authenticity; you don't expect people to speak Standard High German when they think they may die horribly in the next five minutes.

The original mini-series has about the same amount of action as the Director's Cut, but a great deal more explanation and character development. For example, the Captain gets to comment on his actions towards the English sailors from the sinking oil-tanker. I think the sound of the Director's Cut was redone for Dolby-7, so the noises seem to come from all around and at times make you want to hide under the seat. However in all other respects, I think the mini-series is very much better than the Director's Cut, brilliant though that is.

It's not surprising so many foreigners think Britain is a class-ridden society. A few years ago the typical British film showed Hugh Grant and various other apparently unemployed filthy rich living the high life, now the fashion is for grimy Northern pictures showing decent working folk being ground down by the forces of conservatism. Well I am British, and I don't recognise either of these stereotypes as being particularly typical of the Britain I know.

Of course the story of the miners' strike is an important one, and Billy Elliot does make a good attempt at telling it. But Billy Elliot is primarily supposed to be about a young boy who wants to dance, so what has that got to do with the miners' strike?

What I think it's got to do with it is that the script needs a father who is basically decent, but is anti-ballet-dancing. Now in fact I'll bet that if you walk into a pub anywhere from the West End to the Gorbals, and ask what the men there think of boys doing ballet, you will get some in favour, some against, and some don't knows. But instead the film patronises the mineworkers by assuming that northern mineworker == conservative (with a small c) =thinks ballet is for "poofs". This is a cliche in the worst sense, because it's a substitute for thinking; the film robs us of the chance to see what really makes Billy Elliot's father anti-ballet, which is never explained.

It's also manipulative. If Billy Elliot was the son of a millionaire and went to Eton, his parents might be just as anti-ballet, and his public-school comrades even more scornful. But the film puts him in a stereotyped Northern family, because the scriptwriters knew that by doing that they'd tug our heartstrings more.

The film is worth seeing because of the acting of Billy Elliot and his dancing teacher, who have a really special and interesting relationship. But I don't think it deserves to be in the IMDB top 250.

You see and hear lots of aeroplanes, and lots of Kowloon. No dialogue or plot. Amazing film, but don't know why; put it down to the general brilliance of everyone responsible.

I remember I used to like Philip Glass, until I noticed that you could listen to his music for hours on end, without the mind being engaged at all, making it a superior sort of muzak.

This film is more of the same. If you are not already aware that people sometimes look funny when shown speeded up, then you may learn something from this film, though I think this was already a cliche in the days of the Keystone Kops.

The photography is good, but in the style of minimalism, it cuts away as soon as there is any danger of the film getting interesting. I left the cinema with a new appreciation for the sights of the real world around me, like someone emerging after a long prison sentence.

I sometimes think there are too many period dramas, mostly British, in which immense sums of money are spent taking over streets and removing all the television aerials from them, just to prove that gorgeously-dressed men with stiff collars and moustaches are also prey to the finer emotions. This television series can't really be blamed for that, because it dates from 1978, when I think such adaptations were not so thick on the ground. All the same I can't help thinking of it as yet more of the same, and while the quality is very good, and it all looked very expensive, and I enjoyed watching the stiff collars and railway trains, I didn't notice any overarching theme or idea.

As I'm British, I just can't help comparing this with Brideshead Revisited (1982), which has to be the best television series ever. This is a monstrously unfair comparison, and it's not surprising that the acting in Buddenbrooks comes out badly when compared with that of Brideshead, given that Brideshead's cast included the likes of John Gielgud, Jeremy Irons and Laurence Olivier, all at the top of their form. But it just goes to show how impossibly good a straight period drama has got to be these days to stand out from all the others.

Nevertheless Buddenbrooks is certainly pretty good as period dramas go. Certainly it would save a heap of money, and be a good idea generally, if the next time a British television station planned yet another Jane Austen adaptation, they scrapped it and broadcast a subtitled version of Buddenbrooks instead.

I really enjoyed this film, and was shocked to see all the negative comments about it on IMDB. Yes it's long, yes it's a fantasy rather than true-to-life, yes it's spectacular rather than deep drama. But what the hell, it's also (like the book) a hilarious send-up of Englishness as seen by a Frenchman. The millions of cameo roles (actually I'm HOPELESS at recognising faces, so identified none of them) camp it all up splendidly. This film is one of those, like the Ealing comedies or the Carry-On films, that define the British Myth.

OK, so it won't work on TV, unless you have a widescreen TV and can shut yourself away from all distractions for several hours. But I just dare anyone to be bored by the film in a cinema. They don't make them like that any more, because these days films are "made for TV" . . .

As we can expect of a modern blockbuster, the special effects, cinematography, acting, and music are all brilliant. Unfortunately we also get a very implausible and predictable plot. There are lots of very showy fight scenes, but they were all so long that I rapidly found them boring.

This film is, if it's about anything, about murder. We are shown a sequence of murders. Unfortunately the motives for these murders all seem wholly unconvincing and inadequate. I do not think the majority of people are likely to murder for trifling reasons, even in Texas. I suppose the many admirers of this film like watching all the goo when people are murdered or trapped in gruesome ways. Personally I find it boring. I'm not even in the least horrified, since the plot is so contrived, and all I think is "Oh yeah, another special effect". I don't know why this film is called film noir; there is more noir in a typical episode of Tom and Jerry.

I wouldn't normally go to a film designated as for children, but I was encouraged by the previous IMDB reviews. Pünktchen and Anton are friends. Pünktchen has rich parents but not enough attention from her mother. Anton is poor but with a lovely mother. There are a number of bad films this could be, ranging from fluffy candyfloss with a contrived and implausible happy ending, to grim social realism. But the film avoids all these traps and has a satisfactory and convincing ending. There is also a huge amount of very well done action, including a a little slapstick of the sort I'm more used to seeing in black-and-white with piano accompaniment. In particular this film ought to be nominated for a Food Oscar if such existed, because the number of times food is used as a plot device is staggering. I enjoyed this film and so did the children in the cinema.

An East German uses an inheritance to buy himself a West German passport. However he can't keep away from his East German friends. As with all the best comedies, the action builds up to an eventual crisis.

So it's a light comedy, with nothing bad or very good about it. In particular, the acting is good, but not outstanding. However the film is very political, preferring capitalist glitz to communist squalor. The best moment comes when the hero is asked whether he is West German or East German and he replies "gesamtdeutsch", which I would guess translates as "all-German". I left feeling what a total obscenity that stupid Wall was.

I should say that I only wrote this review because nobody else seems to have bothered. My German is still pretty basic and I expect I missed quite a lot.

This film is what I expect from Merchant Ivory, a tourist guidebook of a movie with wonderful scenery and acting. I don't see much else beyond a very ordinary boy-meets-girl plot. I have only seen this film once, so there are probably nuances I've missed. But I think there are much better nostalgic movies about the English upper classes as they never were, such as "A Passage to India" or (if it counts as a movie) "Brideshead Revisited".

This film didn't make much sense to me. The story is told fairly straight, but its twists and turns are contrived and I couldn't discern any unifying dramatic structure. The climax is so overblown it's amusingly bad. The acting was excellent, but that is not enough to make the film worth watching.