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Good Bye, LeninRating:
Release Date: 10 August, 2004 Retail Price: $29.95 OUR Price: $8.47 You SAVE: $21.48! Cast: |
Good Bye, Lenin Reviews
Spreewald Pickles!
Good Bye, Lenin! is a movie set in East Germany that starts in the late 70s. We watch a family, in the opening credits, in which the father has escaped to the West, leaving behind his wife, and two kids. Alex, the son, is the character who tells the story and we watch as the mother, broken and in pain from her husband dumping them, embraces socialism to the point where she is totally loyal to its ideals.
In 1989 she has a heart attack, falls into a coma, and misses the most important eight months in world history. The fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of communism, frankly everything she believes in dies a swift, total death. Then she comes out of the coma and her son is warned by the doctor that ANY shock might bring another heart attack. Any shock. So her son has to make her think that NOTHING has changed.
The film is one of the funniest Non-English flicks I have EVER seen. The son has to find food she likes (that no longer exists), has to set up the TV with a VCR so she only watches shows from before the collapse and even has to organize her birthday with people who know that they have to pretend that history hasn't passed her by. Yet it has a serious underlining message about the importance of family that is touching (and sad at the same time) and I think a slight poke at materialism. Coca-Cola must have paid millions to get its name in so many scenes!
But Alex is not the only one making up lies. The mother has woven some lies of her own which end up coming out. The truth about their father.
The extras are great and this is a movie you should get at all cost, used or new.
Good Bye, Lenin!
German with English subtitles. I'll summarize what's on the cover.
Alex and his family live in East Germany. His mother, a devoted Communist, goes into a coma. When she awakens, the Berlin Wall has fallen, but Alex hides this from her. She still has a weak heart, and the shock of Capitalism might be too much.
What a wonderful angle for approaching the reunification of Germany. A memorable blend of the dramatic and the comic. Not "laugh track" comic. Wit and a delicious sense of irony. Is that "East German humor" or just the filmmaker's sense of humor? Whatever it is, I love it. It's so unlike what I'm used to seeing.
Also, lest we forget, I live in a country that has opened to the West and is, for the most part, communist only in name now, so I'd like to laud the realism. When East met West in Germany in 1989, at times they seemed to be from two different planets. It's not like that in China, although it probably was when Nixon came to town. This is a remarkable film, well worth watching.
I've reviewed one other film about a pretense, by the way, but I didn't tell you about the pretense because I didn't want to spoil the surprise. It was LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, by an Italian director. In it, some Jews get sent to a concentration camp, but our hero convinces his son it's a voluntary trip to an exclusive holiday resort. Wow!
To continue digressing, to such a degree that Dr Z might be proud, I started writing a book where my hero had a specific type of amnesia. He lost 18 years, I think it was. When asked who the president was, he answered Bush, but he meant the first one. My little joke. I really wanted to do the time warp here, and how you'd do things differently if you suddenly became the person you were 20 years ago. Then 9/11 came along. I didn't want to write about it. Plus, the original project was getting boring, so I just scrapped it.
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