Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

BoulderBlues While the quality of the film is uneven, the overall experiment makes the film worth watching. Director Andreas Dresen (trained in the former East Germany), who often works with these actors, decided to make a film without a script (needless to say, he had some difficulty gaining funding!) A dramaturg worked to ensure narrative consistency, and the small film team met to plan the scenes for the next day. The focus becomes a focus on the characters and their experience of a place we hear little about - the town of Frankfurt on the Oder, which is located deep in the former East Germany on the Polish border. By the way - the film often is compared to Dogme95, with good reason. However, Dresen, in interviews, rejects the restrictive nature of the Dogme95 guidelines.

buzz_the_bee0 I saw this movie in a very unique fashion. The director, Andreas Dresen, was visiting my college and screening the movie. My German Studies teacher (the focus of the class is contemporary German culture, and using film as a source) had us all meet there and see it. We got to meet the director, and ask him all kinds of questions.He revealed that this movie was created in a unique fashion: almost all of the acting was improvised, and only very few scenes were scripted, and that was only done for consistency. The crew was EXTREMELY small, consisting of mainly the 4 main actors, Dresen, a cameraman, and a audio person. Everything was on the spot and improvised, giving the movie an almost documentary-like quality, and many scenes were filmed on a whim. In fact, Dresen revealed that the interviews that are interspersed throughout the movie, he did not mean to originally include. They were only meant to see if the actors were in character, and to see how they, as their character, would respond to the given questions and situations. To give the movie an authentic and natural feel, each actor in fact spent some time, I believe Dresen said a few months, actually working the job that they had in the movie. Also, Uwe is only shown smoking constantly because the actor, Axel, is a chain smoker. The musicians playing out of the toilet was originally a fleeting suggestions the group (17 Hippies) had made, and Dresen never intended to keep. The scene where Katrin walks alone in the snow was filmed basically before the movie had a plot, with hopes that it could possibly be included somewhere along the way. The dentist scene was a fleeting suggestion that Axel had made; he told Dresen that he was going to the dentist, and if maybe he wanted to come along and film something that could be used in the movie in his role as Uwe. In fact, the real dentist's nurse refused to be on camera, and Dresen had to get someone (from his small crew) to stand in for the position in the shot, but the actual operation and tooth removal is all REAL, live footage. Also,the first time Uwe tells the musician outside the stand to go away, he was never supposed to go back out and yell at him to go down to the lamppost, and in fact the musician was not supposed to obey him and move down there. Apparently the 17 Hippes, the musicians, were so convincing as street musicians that when the crew was not filming, people would actually throw them change. I apologize for these revelations not being in any particular order, but I found them fascinating, and wanted to share them.

gier-1 I excuse in advance for my bad English! It's late and I'm German! :-) When I read the critic that has already been done I get the impression that he hasn't understood the film. This is so much symbolic! The orchestra that is growing more and more during the film is not only because of fun, it means something! Find out yourself what it could mean for you! It's not a comedy film. Not everything that you can laugh about means it is funny. Sometimes people laugh about things which are actually very sad, and a part of THEM too, but they CAN'T see it!! It's a drama, everything about this film is drama, like normal life. The normal life is often so depressing and sad... Well, we try to make the best of it, we laugh... And more and more we loose the gift to see clear. It's our life that is represented in this film. WE ARE that ridiculous. Have you realized the bird that escaped from his cage? In the end it comes back... What could it mean?

Sennin The movie works on a plain line, telling straightly the story about this couple of marriages and how they manage to resolve a given situation. At first thoughts, the movie seems to be careless in what techniques are concerned, no esthetics nor photography proposal; but by half the movie you start to notice how some minimal details are driven, happening to work out by the end of it. While the plot management could have been better, though it does entertain, one of the major problems you can find is the camera direction. As opposite as one may think, working with a hand camera (as Lars von Trier does in his Dogmas) isn't a piece of cake, but a matter of great care. If not, you may get some really bad shots that would be the equivalent of shutting down the video and record an audio only scene. This is what happens here: There is a couple of scenes, mostly the ones in the cars, where all you get to see is the face of the character speaking covering the 90% of your screen and then i switches to the face of the interlocutor. That and a couple of gratuitous scenes, like the one with the dentist, that may have been deleted are the big flaws you may find in the movie. As a conclusion I may say that I don't regret having seen this movie, but it didn't change my life either.