The Age of Commercialism

How sad is this?

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

"Männerhort" or "The Man Cave" is a German movie from 2014. It runs for slightly under 100 minutes (including credits) and it is the first big screen directorial effort by Franziska Meyer Price, after a long career of television work that sadly includes a lot of garbage too, such as "Doctor's Diary". She is not a writer though and the play by Kristof Magnusson was adapted by Ungureit and Ewerrien here, who are most known for the film "Systemfehler" other than that, but you can safely say that "Männerhort" is by far the most known work of the trio now. This also has a lot to do with the cast. Getting Herbst, M'Barek and Buck for the trio of main characters is something you can really only hope for because of their popularity. I myself quite like Herbst and Buck and their inclusion certainly made this a better watch. Never been a fan of M'Barek at all and he is equally disappointing here. As for the supporting characters, you may find more familiar names if you are a German film buff, especially if you look at the 3 (or 4) protagonists' love interests. Or Michael Gwisdek, who was cast for a little cameo just because he is Michael Gwisdek, at which I can only shake my head.So this is the story of three men who have enough of their partners and just want some time for themselves, so they have a secret hideout where they meet with their friends and just spend some male-only time doing exactly as they please. The comedy here basically relies entirely on their interactions and on flashback scenes where we see the protagonists and their wives/girlfriends. There were some okay moments in these scenes, but honestly nothing too funny either. This film is entirely comedy. There are dramatic moments on rare occasions, but even these are only handled from the fun perspective. And this is also one reason why I cannot take the film seriously. For example we find out one character slept with another character's woman. Then we find out the other character who was supposedly working slept with the other character's woman at the exact same time. Oh well.. talk about realism. Then we find out one character got another character's woman pregnant. But hey, this cannot be anything that destroys their friendship or so. It's all the woman's fault? If at all. Apparently, just one woman's fault. And then they just leave in the end and will never return to this place where we are supposed to believe it is some kind of sacred location for the guys.It's impossible for me to really appreciate this one. Buck (and Herbst to a lesser extent) managed to make this watchable at times, but if we are honest here, the screenplay and story in general are pretty garbage. Sadly, films like this one are apparently right now what many audiences want to see and this is also why they have 1000+ ratings on IMDb. I am not sure if this is a good thing as it becomes more and more difficult this way to find German comedy films that offer decent entertainment and depth. This is not one of these. i give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.

Or something like that. The movie is filled with clichés, but does not capitalize on them as good as it could have for comedy purposes. No one has to tell you that one guy outside our main male group who plays it tough, is actually anything but tough in his own home. So while the movie is predictable, the thing that really hurts is the fact that almost none of the jokes actually work.Best of the bunch is Christoph Maria Herbst, getting a few chuckles with his character. He is known as "Stromberg" in Germany, a German version of the Office. Elyas M'Barek plays a bit with his image here, which would be nice if they actually had good stuff to support it. He's the flavor of the month right now, with his movies making a lot of money. That's no excuse for a poorly written script though. Remarks to German soccer/football are not helping either, making the viewer feel uncomfortable rather than amused. Still there are flashes of good things, mostly because one of the actors is giving us something ... to laugh about. Who'd have thought?

The plot of this movie is this: Three men want to escape the loving arms of their significant others at least once in a while, so they set up a secret man-cave in an abandoned basement room of their apartment building. Unfortunately the new "facility manager" (janitor) discovers their little paradise and tells them to clear off. In order to rescue their eagle's nest, our band of bros offer the janitor to join their club, but he's not interested because he's the one wearing the pants in his house. But then it turns out that the hapless janitor has a very dark secret indeed ...This seems like the type of movie where you think: "Sweet premise, but I wonder how they'll make a 90-minute movie out of it?" As it turns out, the guys making this movie were apparently wondering about that, too. The movie struggles to kill time. At least the actors (Detlev Buck impressed me the most) do their darndest, but even Christoph Maria Herbst who is usually subscribed to misogynist dinosaur characters comes across as shallow here. In effect, a lot of the humor hinges on the premise that "women like to buy shoes while men like to drink beer and watch soccer".This started off as a theatre play, and it still has this static, stay-in-one-location feel to it in the movie. The battle of the sexes and the changing of gender roles offers a lot of funny potential, but this movie didn't pick it up.