moabitnik Reviews

The Zone of Interest (2023)

The Evil of Banality

[2/10 · 25 February 2024]

Well, who'd have thunk? Outside the walls of Nazi death camps, even the most awful slaughterers of mankind were loving fathers and family men. With wives who enjoyed growing their azaleas just as much as wearing the jewelry and fur coats of murdered Jews. And kids who played happily beneath the skies filled with smoke from the crematoriums where hundreds of people were incinerated every day.

Unfortunately, this information is neither new nor particularly insightful. It was more than sixty years ago that Hannah Arendt called this "the banality of evil". And while I'm certain there's some drama that could be created from that, that's extactly what the film decides not to do. It simply depicts that banality. In all its dullness and stupidity. For almost two hours.

There's no real story here, no real conflict, not much happening. The camerawork is fine, the acting okay - though Ms. Hüllers rolling John-Wayne-like gait which is supposed to show us that she's a tough, strong-willed woman, seems a tad clownish - but in the end the film is just that: banal. As is the - rather poorly translated - dialog which is at times wildly and laughably anachronistic.

Just about as forgettable as the other Hüller vehicle - "Anatomie d'une chute" - which critics decided to embrace this year, for rather unfathomable reasons.

Waves (I) (2019)

Far from being an overlooked "masterpiece"

[5/10 · 17 July 2020]

After an ADHS beginning, "Waves" actually and thankfully manages to settle down some, but unfortunately, that doesn't make the whole thing any better. It's just an overlong artsy-fartsy soap opera that doesn't tell us anything about its strictly one-dimensional characters and can't seem to decide what it's supposed to be about (forgiveness, family, racism, classism, capitalism?). A good-looking but deeply unsatisfying and unsophisticated film.

Chiko (2008)

Laughable

[1/10 · 26 July 2011]

A desperate attempt to mimic American mafia/gangster movies, this cliché-ridden mess plays as if a Hamburg high-school drama club had decided to stage a re-enactment of Brian De Palma's "Scarface". The non-stop, completely over-the-top profanities are, for the most part, unintentionally funny, the acting is limited to the usual swanky sputtering of threats and cuss-words through heavily gritted teeth, and characterization is virtually non-existent. Boring and predictable, this totally hits rock bottom when a montage set to the dull beats of an excruciatingly crappy German rap song shows Chiko rising to the top of the dope-dealing business, complete with loads of coke sniffing, money counting, drinking from champagne coolers in his own newly-opened restaurant and buying expensive jewelry for his girlfriend (the, sigh, hooker with a heart of gold he "bought" from her pimp) who promptly and happily flings herself into his arms when he shows her the penthouse apartment he got them. What made Faith Akin attach his name to this abysmal turkey remains his secret.

Molly & Mops (2007 TV Movie)

Bottom of the barrel

[1/10 · 27 August 2008]

A dumb script (which culls its basic plot idea from Erich Kästners 1920s classic, "Emil and the Detectives"), bad acting, fake accents, execrable direction, terrible camera-work, ridiculous special effects and poor dubbing make this appalling would-be comedy - about a fat little country girl trying to make it big in the city where she befriends an ugly, talking pug - a painfully tough turkey to sit through, even for certified aficionados of bottom-of-the-barrel trash and/or demented four-year-olds. I sincerely hope there are countries where people responsible for green-lighting and spending a few cool millions of radio license fees, i.e. viewers' hard-earned cash, on such a relentless piece of crap will eventually wind up before a firing squad. Unfortunately, Germany's not one of them.

The Passion of the Christ (2004)

"Torture Porn" for the Fundamentalist Crowd

[1/10 · 23 March 2008]

As everybody knows the story, let's cut to the chase: Gibson, in all his blind naiveté, has stripped the "Passion of the Christ" of any context whatsoever, so the movie doesn't really make much sense. Why does the film tell us this story, and this part of the story only? To wallow in a regular sea of blood, which Gibson happily - and, for the most part, in glorious slow motion - does? Or what? I don't have the slightest idea. Maybe he wanted to cater to splatter fans and Jesus freaks alike. Which seems to have worked, judging from the myriads of dumb sheep that literally flocked the theaters.

"PoC" is little more than a bundle of clichés, and the Jewish part of this world's population needn't worry - they're not the only ones being portrayed in a derogatory manner. Virtually everybody's a caricature here: the Romans are shown as slobbering, bloodthirsty brutes; the fringed and bearded Jews wag their staffs at every opportunity; all of the women are docile, silent and tearful most of the time; and even Jesus himself is so good and benign and endlessly heroic in his quiet suffering it makes you want to throw up. And not because of the pretty (and, courtesy of Caleb Deschanel, very prettily photographed) graphic violence, mind you. Which manages to shock for about two minutes; after that, watching Jim Caviezel in his latex bodysuit (which is clearly visible a couple of times), while he stumbles, falls and is bludgeoned to a pulp, becomes exceedingly and mind-numbingly boring.

Unfortunately, the film offers little in the way of redeeming qualities. Except maybe for die-hard fans of schlock, as this must be the most absurd and overblown piece of big-bucks cinetrash ever since "Showgirls" hit the silver screens.

In order to make this biblical fairy tale more "authentic", the film was shot in what its makers claim to be Aramaic and Latin - with heavy American, Russian and Italian accents. And if that weren't ridiculous enough, the tongue-twisting dialog gives the - mostly unknown - players such a hard time that most of them speak in a very unnatural, slow and clipped manner. To make sure his, er, "message" comes across, Gibson seems to have told his actors to go all the way, which is why virtually everybody (with the possible exception of Mr. Caviezel) is shamelessly hamming it up, so that a good part of the movie feels like it was made ca. 1917 - if in 1917 they'd had glorious Technicolor and CGI, that is. Unfortunately, the film is far from silent, though. Instead, a full-fledged orchestra plus choir gives a rousing performance of John Debney's permanently blaring and less-than-inspired score which sounds as if it was lifted straight from a cheesy 50s Bible epic. And when God quite literally shed a computer-generated tear in the end, I actually felt inclined to pray to the Good Heavens up above, because this piece of incredibly dull and reactionary religious propaganda was finally over.

I don't know what Mr. Gibson had in mind when he set out to write, direct, produce and finance this grotesquely inept specimen of cinematic garbage - the Jesus flick to end all Jesus flicks? Well, what he made is basically a religiously tinged - and even more lame-brained - version of "Hostel". In other words, "torture porn" for the fundamentalist crowd. Now ain't that sumpin' to be proud of?

Tatort: Der Kormorankrieg (2008) Season 1, Episode 686

Execrable

[1/10 · 10 January 2008]

A stupid screenplay (built around two plot points which have no foundation whatsoever in reality, i.e. the names of the victims of a car accident being spelled out in a newspaper and a politician personally pouring phosphorus - from huge cans bearing not only the formula but also the skull pictogram for "poison", as in a Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon - into Lake Constance; and since, in German "Krimis", it all tends to boil down to some jealousy and/or adultery thing and a so-called crime of passion, the killer's identity becomes pretty obvious about 5 minutes into the film) + the dumbest dialog imaginable (screenwriters, take note: simple past has no place in German dialog, and phrases like, "Erwähnte er nicht, etwas gegen ihn in der Hand zu haben?" may look like proper German, but most certainly aren't, not to mention the fact that nobody in their right mind would ever spout such a dreadful line - and the script was virtually brimming with them) + bad acting (e.g. Eva Mattes constantly casting glances literally loaded with meaning and pausing for effect at every turn, Benjamin Morik's stupid grinning; and isn't there any better use for a brilliant actor such as Bernd Tauber than this boring piece of unadulterated crap?) + poor direction, ugly cinematography, laughable action scenes, ridiculous hairstyles (Daniela Holtz's Marianne Rosenberg Memorial Hairdo has to be seen to be believed) etc. etc. = a dizzying new low in a series which has long outstayed its rather lukewarm welcome. Please deliver us from evil and, after 37 endless years, finally cancel the damn thing.

Loving Annabelle (2006)

Feel-good movie for lesbian teens

[2/10 · 4 January 2008]

To faint-hearted US citizens - who tend to pass out or cry havoc at the mere sight of a female nipple - this decidedly tepid tale of a 17-year-old lesbian girl falling in love with her 40-ish teacher and dragging her into bed might have SCANDAL written all over it; to more enlightened people, it's simply shallow and, even at its b-movie running time of 76 minutes, immensely boring. The muddled, underwritten script works strictly on the level of a high-school play, driving home its well-worn messages (true love will find a way to overcome even the greatest obstacles, heterosexual men are selfish bastards and bad in bed to boot) with all the subtlety of a poorly greased jackhammer. And while the acting is okay, some scenes - such as the kissing-in-the-swimming-pool bit - look as cheesy as if they were lifted straight from "The L Word" or a soft-core lesbian sex flick; how director Katherine Brooks managed to hire people like Elizabeth Shue, Will Patton and the ever-magnificent Frances Conroy for her latest effort ("Waking Madison") is beyond me. Finally, the climactic (no pun intended) sex scene is actually very tame and never goes beyond European prime-time TV standards, so, dear kids and guardians of public morals, there's really nothing to worry about.

Contrary to some of the comments here, the film doesn't encourage, let alone propagate "pedophilia" (which generally stands for the sexual abuse of a child, a category a sexually active and aggressive 17-year-old hardly qualifies for in my book) but mostly plays like a chin-up movie for young lesbians about to come out.

An Old Maid (2007 TV Movie)

A dreary, plot-less piece of rubbish . . .

[1/10 · 25 October 2007]

. . . about a mousy late-bloomer (hence the title) who, for inexplicable reasons, falls in love with a seemingly mute drifter whose helpless ears she fills with the most uninteresting drivel imaginable. Unfortunately, the audience has to bear her incessant spouting of boring nonsense about plum pies and music teachers, too. The photography is fashionably desaturated, the acting seriously sub par - much-praised Haberlandt recites most of her incredibly stilted lines like a third-grader auditioning for a part in the annual school play - and, apart from inexcusably abusing the Langley Schools Music Project's version of "The Long and Winding Road", the score features the usual piano tinkling, combined with the scratchy strains of your regulation string quartet. Abominable.

Time Out (2001)

Okay, but far from being a "masterpiece"

[5/10 · 7 October 2007]

Judging from the reviews on this site, there seems to be some kind of "cognitive dissonance" between Europeans and Americans when it comes to films such as this. Whereas American cinephiles tend to automatically regard anything that's not Hollywood as high art, Europeans see something very different at work here, namely the well-worn workings of your run-of-the-mill, artsy-fartsy European TV movie - which, having been co-produced by French-German TV station ARTE, is exactly what "L'Emploi du temps" is. And it comes with all the usual trimmings: the desaturated color photography (which has nothing to do with cinematographically exploring the characters' inner barrenness or whatever, it's just a fashion thing - these films all look that way, because the directors want to enhance the product by making it look more "artistic"), the annoying string quartet score, the heavy-handed symbolism, the ominous open ending. This is the stuff that will garner awards by the dozen and, let's be honest, it's not bad. Most unfortunately, it's not that good, either: a pretty obvious story that essentially goes nowhere, underwritten but overlong, with a rather unsympathetic lead. Nothing to write home about, really.

The Hours (2002)

Hours you'll never get back

[1/10 · 14 September 2007]

This is just about the worst piece of cinematic dreck that has disgraced the silver screens in - at the very least - ten years, an abhorrent accumulation of the most atrocious clichés regarding artists, artistry and everything to do with it, a preciously pretentious piece of whiny tripe, a sugar-coated soaper in disguise with a lemony would-be feminist twist or, if you prefer, an old, stale-tasting slice of non-life, smeared and buttered with one of the worst and most nausea-inducing scores these ears have ever had the displeasure to hear, in short, a waste of just about everything: talent, resources, manpower etc, but most of all, a waste of two hours of your life you'll never, ever be able to reclaim, or, less pompously put, a piece of utter, artsy-fartsy garbage that makes you want to kick everyone involved. Yech!

Schtonk (1992)

Schtink!

[1/10 · 16 June 2007]

A horribly heavy-handed attempt to turn the real-life case of the forged Hitler diaries into a German comedy (a contradiction in terms, if you ask me, and I am German), this schtinker is an unabashedly broad, strictly one-note stab at what director Dietl probably takes for satire. Based on a pedestrian script which provides no laughs at all (except if you're a die-hard fan of fart jokes, that is), it features sleazy, grotesquely over-the-top performances by basically everyone involved (although George and Ochsenknecht stand out as particularly hammy), ugly, overlit photography and an unnervingly blaring score. Dietl not only proves that he has no sense of timing whatsoever - each and every punchline can be seen coming round the bend a mile away and is milked to the last drop when it finally arrives - but also displays a disturbingly childish penchant for "dirty" words which, quite obviously, he thinks are funny by themselves. To top it all off, at nearly two hours running time, the whole affair is so interminably drawn out it'll bore you to near-death. Avoid at any cost - and please do yourself a favor and give Dietl's other films (especially "Late Show" and "Rossini") a very wide berth, too: they're even worse.

Frühstück mit einer Unbekannten (2007 TV Movie)

Remade in Germany

[1/10 · 31 May 2007]

Yes, indeed, it's a German cover version of the 2005 BBC/HBO production "The Girl in the Café", an immensely likable and brilliantly performed little film written by Richard Curtis and directed by David Yates, starring the always excellent Bill Nighy and the wonderful Kelly Macdonald. Unfortunately, most German cover versions suck. This one's no exception.

Liefers and Jentsch are badly miscast as the somewhat stuffy, uptight Treasury adviser and the girl he meets in a café, falls in love with and subsequently takes to the German G8 summit in Heiligendamm where she confronts the political hot shots with the naked truth about world hunger, poverty and injustice, thus changing the outcome of the meeting. Worse still, the undynamic duo can't hold a drippy candle to Nighy and Macdonald. Watching Liefers mimic Nighy's quirky body language will literally make you cringe with pain, whereas Jentsch's bland and utterly unbelievable performance once again proves that she couldn't act her way out of a pay toilet.

The script doesn't do them any favors, though. The setting was unwisely moved from icy Reykjavik with its shades of blue and gray to Heiligendamm with its palette of brown and golden, which makes for a dramatic change in tone and atmosphere. And while, in the original movie, Gina was a tough and heavily accented young Scotswoman fresh out of jail where she did time for "hurting a man" who "killed a (her?) child", here she is a joyful, clean-cut and blatantly naive midwife(!) who leads a Bohemian life in a fancy apartment shared with a wacky friend and speaks typical acting-class German without so much as the slightest trace of an accent - a small, but fateful shift of character that thoroughly ruins the structure of the story. Like in so many German films, virtually all of the dialog is clumsy and stilted and sounds like a poor translation of Richard Curtis's original lines even when it isn't. And where "The Girl in the Café" was funny and touching, "Frühstück mit einer Unbekannten" (Breakfast with an Unknown Woman) is merely witless, boring and shallow - the jokes fall flat, the romantic scenes are anemic, and the characters are dull. Worst of all, though, it not only features a - completely unnecessary - cameo by Catherine Deneuve (what the hell is that woman doing in this dud?) - but also a tacked-on happy ending which finally turns the film into a dreadful piece of slushy fluff.

Unfortunately, poorly written, poorly acted and poorly directed junk like this is fairly representative of German TV which, on the whole, is light-years removed from state-of-the-art international fare like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Carnivàle, Wonderfalls, State of Play, The Lakes, Cracker, Murder One, Life on Mars, Epitafios, Vientos de Agua or La Meglio gioventù (to name but a few; the list is endless). If you're looking for well-made, high-quality television - sophisticated both intellectually and aesthetically - you'll have to go elsewhere. Sad, but true.

Rings (2005 Video)

Far superior to the silly sequel

[8/10 · 31 October 2006]

Apart from being miles above the pedestrian, even ridiculous "Ring 2" (by much-hyped and overrated Japanese director Nakata) in terms of style, wit, and execution, this savvy, snappy little short introduces a whole new set of ideas to the Ring "myth" that could've given Nakata's clinker the shot of fresh blood it so desperately needed - mainly, the intriguing concept of the tape as a sort of "psycho virus" you have to pass on within 7 days in order to save your own life. This premise - which opens up all kinds of possibilities and suggests a whole bunch of analogies - could have been the basis for a terrific sequel. It's a shame and a pity the producers opted for the easy way out instead. What did they do to Ehren Kruger to make him drop this for the absurd piece of drivel that became "Ring 2"? Hollywood works in mysterious ways, indeed.

Der zweite Blick (2005 TV Movie)

The misery of German movie-making in a nutshell

[1/10 · 7 August 2006]

If you want to know what's wrong with contemporary German film-making, watch this: a totally predictable story (travel writer goes to a small North Sea island where a not-so-brief encounter with a boyhood sweetheart nearly breaks up his marriage), pedestrian pacing, excruciatingly pretentious, fashionably color-drained photography that seems to cry out, "Look! It's art!" at every turn, and dialog so wooden ("You want a map?" - "Well, it might be rather convenient for my purposes") it creaks on its rusty hinges. The overused players, chosen from the usual pool of about 50 mugs that can be seen on German TV virtually every night, don't go but sleepwalk through the motions as if the director deliberately spiked their lunch-break drinks with valium, except for Suzanne von Borsody who acts and talks as if prior to shooting she spent two weeks in a recording studio dubbing a rubber duck in a children's animation film. All the stock clichés generally associated with remote North Sea islands are there: the inbred village idiot, the fuzzy-bearded, pipe-smoking captain of a fishing trawler, the small and dusty second-hand bookstore, the picturesque little guest-house, you name it. To top it all off, the score consists almost exclusively of appallingly arty piano tinkling heavily indebted to Chopin and Satie (and very probably written with a certain beer commercial in mind) - only the incessant use of scratchily played cello sonatas could have been more unnerving. In a word: execrable.

Police Call 110: Er sollte tot... (2006) Season 35, Episode 6

A Lumbering Mess

[1/10 · 7 August 2006]

Dominik Graf, generally regarded as being one of Germany's foremost directors, has so many friends and acquaintances among German TV and movie critics that he could probably film the Munich phone directory, and they would sink to their knees and sing his praise. Unfortunately, he has never really made a picture to justify his reputation, and this disastrous little outing no doubt is a case in point.

A pensioner has been brutally clubbed to death, a teenage whore who extorted substantial sums of money from the poor sod is the prime suspect, and the film follows the plodding interrogation process leading up to the hardly surprising denouement of the less-than-complicated story.

So much is wrong here that I don't know where to start: None of the characters - some of which, such as the lesbian girlfriend, seem totally out of place and devoid of any recognizable purpose to the plot - is even remotely interesting or worth caring about. The acting is significantly below par - even the usually reliable Edgar Selge seems clumsy and bland, and Rosalie Thomass' one-note performance won't prevent her from garnering some kind of acting award for her impressive ability to shake and tremble and faultlessly roll hundreds of cigarettes. The dialog is lame and wooden - the best lines are invariably spoken completely out of character; and that Thomass, who's supposed to be an undereducated lower-class kid coming from a foster home, none the less converses in a perfectly polished way throughout, should suddenly start breaking just about every existing rule of grammar in order to justify the film's stupid title ("He must dead"), is hardly believable. Worst of all, though, the pace is so incredibly leaden that the whole thing is literally sleep-inducing. Of course, Graf realizes this and thus tries to liven up the tedium by constantly diving into his grab-bag of cinematic tricks: as a result, there's a downright ridiculous amount of extreme close-ups, jump-cutting, zooming (is this 1972, or what?), dollying, fading etc. About a dozen times a train rushes across the screen for no good reason, probably trying to suggest that there's something really heavy going on. To no avail; when, at last, the credits rolled, I felt as if I'd just sat through Andy Warhol's "Empire". Twice.

Der Fall Rabanser (1950)

Noirish little would-be thriller

[4/10 · 16 July 2006]

Feeble (and rather ludicrous) attempt at German film noir. Söhnker's the hard-nosed news-hound who has written a story about an "easy" way to score a bank. When his article serves as a blueprint for a robbery involving a double murder, he becomes the prime suspect but manages to flee custody and hunt down the real killer on his own. What starts out interestingly, pretty soon turns into a routine little thriller complete with hard-drinking (almost every scene in which two male characters meet starts with their knocking back a shot of "schnaps"), hat-wearing men pounding dimly-lit streets in heavy rain, negligéed femmes fatales running smoky back-room gambling dens and scrubbed, squeaky-clean secretaries secretly in love with their boss.

While Kurt ("Ich denke oft an Piroschka") Hoffmann certainly is one of the more accomplished directors of German post-war cinema and Albert Benitz's moody camera-work and Werner Eisbrenner's brooding score are excellent, this never rises above mediocrity, due to a script which is, at best, formulaic and contains just about every cliché known from hundreds of 40s Hollywood thrillers. The actors (including the miscast lead) seem strangely uninvolved and struggle with the - mostly preposterous - dialog (hardly anybody ever utters a sentence someone might say in real life - an unfortunate tradition which has continued up to this very day: dialog in German films often sounds like a bad translation, simply because everybody in this country - including screenwriters - has been raised on poorly dubbed films) and scenes which, at times, simply don't play. Everything seems interminably drawn-out, and each and every little detail is spelled out so that even the most lame-brained viewer gets it. Which, all in all, makes for a rather tedious affair to sit through.

Something's Gotta Give (2003)

Neither naughty nor nice

[5/10 · 16 July 2006]

Yes, it's true, Jack Nicholson is, quite obviously, having a hell of a time poking fun at himself - or his image, that is. And yes, Diane Keaton (an actress I usually can't stand) has hardly ever been as lovely and likable as she is here. But: the whole story is about as predictable as lights on a Christmas tree and more than just a tad too pat; Frances McDormand and Amanda Peet are unforgivably wasted in grossly underwritten parts while Keanu Reeves, as the young doctor having the hots for Keaton, is his usual bland persona; and at over two hours (!) running time this is grotesquely overlong, as after about 90-100 minutes virtually every comedy, as "sophisticated" as it may be, must inevitably run out of steam. Given the fact that at least one complete sequence was cut from the film, it must've seemed even more interminable in its original version. On the whole, a moderately entertaining movie with a few nice one-liners and a few good laughs, the best thing about it being Jack Nicholson rendering Edith Piaf's classic "La vie en rose" over the credits, though.