**Contains Minor Spoilers**
A movie that has its German premiere one year after it got some festival price surely sounds fishy. And so it was. If you want every prejudice about Germany certified, you should go and see this movie. The boredom of existence virtually soaks the silver screen as you enter the life of three retired coal miners, all of which seem to be depressed to a point short of suicide. Good thing for the hero Schultze is that he does not even have to kill himself as cancer is doing it for him. In his own unemotional mechanical fashion he enters a quest to nowhere. Trailing the path of some new and unaccustomed happy music he gets lost in Texas the very same way he got lost in his German life. It very much compares to the loneliness in "About Schmidt" but without any outbursts of fun.
From a technical perspective the movie is excellent. You have good scene compositions, nice angles and even some panning. The sound design is also well done. The movie itself however is as boring as it gets. You simply don't connect to the main characters except you're in a gloomy mood yourself, which I am not. Overall it's a movie that shows that the director has learned the trade but is in dire need of a good script.
I rated it 4 for it looked good and was consistent in its speed of narration. The content itself was horribly boring (read: the intent to depress me failed) apart from a little twist at the end.
A movie that has its German premiere one year after it got some festival price surely sounds fishy. And so it was. If you want every prejudice about Germany certified, you should go and see this movie. The boredom of existence virtually soaks the silver screen as you enter the life of three retired coal miners, all of which seem to be depressed to a point short of suicide. Good thing for the hero Schultze is that he does not even have to kill himself as cancer is doing it for him. In his own unemotional mechanical fashion he enters a quest to nowhere. Trailing the path of some new and unaccustomed happy music he gets lost in Texas the very same way he got lost in his German life. It very much compares to the loneliness in "About Schmidt" but without any outbursts of fun.
From a technical perspective the movie is excellent. You have good scene compositions, nice angles and even some panning. The sound design is also well done. The movie itself however is as boring as it gets. You simply don't connect to the main characters except you're in a gloomy mood yourself, which I am not. Overall it's a movie that shows that the director has learned the trade but is in dire need of a good script.
I rated it 4 for it looked good and was consistent in its speed of narration. The content itself was horribly boring (read: the intent to depress me failed) apart from a little twist at the end.