long and boring waste of a statue.

Rating: 4/10 (15 April 2007)

A film that I was looking forward too, a film that beat both 'Pan's Labyrinth' and 'After the wedding' to best foreign film Oscar at this years ceremony and a film in which I must be missing something. What was this all about? Well I know what it was about, not much, nearly three hours of not much to be precise. Long, grey and boring the cast, especially the Stasi officer (who spend most of the film sat at a desk) must have loved that pay check, quite literally money for nothing. Now there was a nice little thing at the end and the odd bit here and there but that should have taken no more than say twenty minutes to do. Maybe if each showing came with a lecture first filling in the history of the piece it may have been a little different, after all if you didn't live in Germany in 1984 and didn't know all about how the Stasi monitored everyone including each other during that period frequently bugging flats, phones and conducting surveillances then like me you would have been quite lost as the film throws you into to the story. Basically a playwright is being watched by an officer, playwright decides to write some propaganda, officer covers for him because under that evil interrogating exterior beats a heart of grey. That took me less than a minute to write how the hell did they string it out for so long? Anyway this has to be one of the worst foreign films I have seen in a long time, the story is slight, the actors underused, the idea overused and it was just too long. But like I say I might be missing something here as I seem to be in a minority, most reviews have given full stars, one said it wasn't just the best foreign film of the year but the best film period. I'm not sure they see enough films to be honest and I would question if they are actually qualified to do reviews? So in my opinion this really is a case of don't believe the hype and a waste of a golden statue.