User Reviews

I had high hopes about this generation P (for punk) movie set in the early 1980ies in West Berlin, directed by the renowned auteur Oskar Roehler, brim-full with the finest acting talent currently on the market (I'm not talking about Wilson Ochsenknecht, though), and cheered on by all the five reviews I read in different quality newspapers. Those critics spoke to me, and now I have this to say to them: You kind of failed to mention the salient point of this movie, that it's boring, ambling, wooden, contrived and boring. What little there is of a plot meanders through pastiches of those days gone by. Some of those individual scenes are quite good, and authentic, by the way. But they are strung together as if by an amateur.

1982, the provinces: Robert and his fried Gries (played by Tom Schilling and Frederick Laue, two excellent actors who are unfortunately clearly well into their mid-thirties) are 19-year-olds living at a boarding school in Coburg. Gries is a pimply young reactionary with a large shepherd dog, who leads a secret double life as a homosexual submissive. Robert is just a young malcontent who wants to get out. After a highly successful prank against one of their beardy lefty teachers, where they drug him into unconsciousness and then cut his golden locks off, Robert takes off to West Berlin. When he leaves school we see an armed man in military garb storm the school and supposedly open fire -- one of the many surreal gags of this movie. His mother refuses to subsidise Robert's change of address but hints that his father my be sitting on a stash of terrorist money, and also suggests that Robert should help her to kill her estranged brother. In Berlin, the destitute Robert meets a previous acquaintance, Schwarz, who offers his old mate a job and lodgings. The problem here is that we have previously seen Schwarz and Robert in a single brief scene together, where Schwarz is a hotshot riding a fast motorcycle with an equally fast woman in the backseat. So it's established that they're not friends in any way, so I had to wonder why Robert is welcomed by Schwarz with open arms. Well, they steal Robert's father's hoard, Robert falls in love with a stripper, they hang out with Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, hook up with Gries, try to start a drug ring, and eventually Robert gets deported to West Germany because he had been dodging his military service, although that was never mentioned before. The movie ends up with yet another surreal scene in Morocco.

This movie had the feel as if it had been shot by a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs. It's hyperactive, there are lots of funny ideas and scenes strung together, but there is nothing to keep your interest for 105 minutes, except for more wackiness.

"Tod den Hippies!! Es lebe der Punk!" or "Punk Berlin 1982" or just "Punk" is a German movie that was released roughly two years ago (spring 2015) and this 100-minute film is the most recent work by prolific and successful German filmmaker Oskar Roehler. Even with the collaborations of several German television stations, this is still a big-screen release. As for the cast, if you know a bit about recent German movies, you will see many familiar faces. Schilling, Schüle and Lau are among the most lauded (no pun intended!) from the recent/new generation of German acting talent. Finzi, Scheer, Hoger and Ochsenknecht are also no unknowns of course, even if with the latter I am always baffled how he gets cast in relatively big projects like this one here as honestly he does not have an ounce of his father's acting talent really and his father is also merely a good, not great, actor.

Anyway, the story here is about the protagonist, a punk, being fed up with not only the right, but also hippies as the title describes nicely, the ones who are at a similar spot on the left/right scale of German politics, but hippies are of course the more lethargic ones and their taste in music is also entirely different compared to punks. We follow the character Robert how he moves to West Berlin before the Fall of the Berlin Wall and how it is a journey into a whole new world for him, a world that is mostly full of graphic sexuality and language. This is also one of my bigger criticisms. At times, the film felt like it delivered very little besides rebellious teenager language packed with obscenities. Sure, it also somehow describes the spirit of a generation, but it just isn't enough. This is a bit of a shame as the performances in here weren't bad at all, even if the costumes certainly helped in making Schüle and the rest more memorable. I felt in terms of writing and story-telling the movie occasions hit a dead end. One example would be when we find out about the central character working in what we call a "Wichskabine" here in Germany and how exactly he is supposed to clean the windows. Another would be when we see a masochistic character who enjoys being humiliated sexually in pretty obscene ways.

It is a bit of a pity. The film certainly tried to make important statements and really make a difference, but the way it took itself so seriously also went quite a bit about the general message behind the punk movement. And honestly, the way they got in the likes of Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave and eventually even Rainer Werner Fassbinder was definitely a bit on the cringeworthy side and it was almost painful to watch how Roehler wanted this film to be much more relevant and in the news than it had any right to looking at most of the other factors here. I have seen some stuff by the filmmaker and basically almost everything was better than this movie here. i hope he steps his game up for future projects again. These slightly over 1.5 hours get a thumbs-down from me. Not recommended.

This movie is pure punk. It is fast, wild, transitions seem to be missing. It is exactly what punk to me is: Exaggeration, hedonism, provocation, without any ideology. It doesn't need politics to be against or pro, it just needs the every day boredom and stagnation to break out from. The movie doesn't describe the punk scene in Berlin or Germany. It shows the intention of punk and how it might feel to be punk. It was a big wave back then (I suppose) just carrying every one with it, offering booze, sex, music and of course risks and damage. Sometimes some scenes can be seen as surreal but I think that those are just subjective observations of the main character like when he meets Fassbinder or Nick Cave. Those encounters might be a (blurry) memory of some one who really met those persons back then. The movie is very funny because on every corner something unexpected is happening. So while watching this I was in the suspension of what might happen next, what chaos would be revealed. There are no stereo types about punk or rebellion. May be those were just skipped because the story is not really important. There is nothing to learn from what the actors experience. Just that it's about punk and the present.