Pretty Good

As Good As It Gets

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

The acting in this movie is really good.

During the early 80s, squatters in Berlin have been mostly students on an adventure holiday, some years later they were mostly full time bums on a permanent "Do you have a Mark to spare"-quest. They had their fair amount of street fighting activities, their weapon of choice was the cobble, and sometimes they threw it through the glass of a bank building. But they were no terrorists. Maybe wannabe revolutionaries, in their dreams. Nobody took them really serious.Now some of them seem to have made this movie. Just let me tell you what happens during the first 15 minutes.A group of Berlin squatters decides to blow up an empty old villa. Must be a very evil villa, because basically squatting was about saving empty buildings from neglect.They do an amateur movie about this heroic deed, maybe they think there is a market for Building-Snuff-Videos.Their bomb doesn't explode. They don't care, they just forget about the whole thing. Even though the entrance they took was very obvious and easy to detect, the next 13 years nobody enters the villa.Not even the real estate agent who in 2000 wants to show it to a client. Why should she make sure that there are no unpleasant surprises waiting inside, like squatters, homeless, garbage, animals, broken mains, collapsing floors ... ? The main door will not open, so the client uses some force to open it, and the old bomb, that had been waiting patiently behind it, finally explodes. He and the real estate newbie get slightly hurt.The client has been a government big shot. Hell breaks loose, police raids start.Of course, amongst their prime suspects are two veteran squatters, who still stay at a formerly occupied tenement-house. The police confiscates .... all of their super-8-films. Believe me, they really do, I'm not making this up, it's even the main part of the plot: The Berlin police in the year 2000, looking for some bomb-building terrorists confiscates the 80s super-8-films of some broken down bums. Please don't ask why. But imagine how the authors and producers had to get people interested in such a story. And they succeeded, which is even more unlikely.The two die-hard squatters will try to get the band together again and rescue what contained once proud memories of their glory days and now fatal evidence of their stupidity from the well guarded chambers of the police.By now you will know that you are not watching a movie, but are instead trapped inside the dream of some pathetic drunken 80s squatters, "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes". Frightening? No, just a strange and boring childish mind-scape.I realize that there really IS a market for stuff like this, the infamous lovers of dilettantish and inane films. Here they'll find a lot for their liking. This is a very, VERY bad movie, and by all means, they should check it out.

Once upon a time, there were six friends with a vision of a future in complete freedom, without the restrictions of a government stifling those too young and too foolish to stay within the bounds of what is 'normal'. So these friends lovingly created a homemade bomb and documented the whole process for posterity. They planted the bomb... and forgot all about it. Until twenty years later, when it finally blew up.Twenty years later, only two of the six are still members of that "Scene" in Berlin, while the others have gone off to get married, have kids, drive Mercedes, make millions in their very own advertisement company or become district attorneys (!). Of course, their later careers will be of little interest, once the police have had a chance to look through the confiscated film material...This is a great movie, about visions, friendship, solidarity - and anarchy. The plot is solid (in a Bond kind of way), and there is a deliciously ironic final twist.So, what do you do, when there's a fire burning? Well, let it burn!Naturally.

Movies about the german history are very hard to find. "Was tun wenn's brennt?" shows in an excellent way that moments of the german history worth being filmed. Seeing this movie about friends and getting out of a capitalistic system is a great pleasure because of its great acting, directing and camera work.Director Georg Schnitzler gets cleverly around many stereotypes and shows in his deep characterization his figures as dreamers on their search for happiness. After 13 years they have to come together to reunite their former group and beware themselves of being arrested. That's the beginning of a wonderful written script. The story designs a complex world. Director Schnitzler brings this world perfectly in the reality we know.The great team of actors presents us after a long time real characters which you can easily identify yourself with and which you really like. On their search for happiness they finally find it here in a simple formula of friendship: "Real friends help each other consoling about the nastily of the capitalism." Was tun wenn's brennt? Brennen lassen! (What to do when it's burning? Let it burn!)10/10

Good German movies are hard to find. Especially if they rely too heavily on big names with limited acting capabilities like Til Schweiger. Fortunately, this movie is an exception to both. Excellent camera work, a well-designed script throwing in a punchline here and there but not overdoing it, and a cast which doesn't favour anyone over the other, all add up to one of the best German movies I have seen lately.The female characters are a little weak, with a former and a beginning love story left unexplored, and some of the others a bit entangled in cliché, but the emotions conveyed are genuine and the storyline has enough surprises left in stock to make for an entertaining experience.If you plan to see any German movie this year, this should be it.Rating: 10/12 (4 stars)