The Lives of Others
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Movie Reviews of The Lives of Others
Movie Review: Wow! A sophisticated thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
When the movie began, I was worried that it would be too explicitly brutal for my wife and me to watch. After all, this movie revolves around the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. But this film becomes a fascinating character study of a lost soul, an inauthentic man, discovering his humanity (as well as a history lesson on East Germany culture before the Wall fell).
The film is almost 2 1/2 hours long but we could not stop watching it as midnight approached, and had no idea where it was going. The story is engaging; the performances are excellent; the ending is perfect.
It certainly deserved the oscar it won. When watching the oscars, I was rooting for Pan's Labyrinth to win for best foreign movie, but now I understand why they gave it to this movie.
Movie Review: Strong story, solid acting, good directing, contemporary relevance ... so why am I not all that impressed?
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a good film, that tells its story quite well. It looks good. The actors are just right for their parts. It even resonates with recent revelations of a phone surveillance program. I like its theme of the banality and even stupidity of evil. The interrogations depicted in the film are not brutal, but are insistent and persistent and inevitably reach their aims. The film doesn't try to make the East German government into a sinister force (even while it does suggest that power corrupts) -- what makes their surveillance program evil is that it both forces people to curtail their activities and speech out of fear, and that it has so much potential for corruption: there is no need for a person to represent a real threat in order to be targeted, only for someone to claim a suspicion and there can be all kinds of motives for such suspicion. To be good, to resist such a system, is fraught with danger and I liked that the main character was a true believer who discovered the potential for exploitation within the system and exploited that same potential in the hopes of saving the lives of a few he had come to care about.
Still, for a film that won such strong acclaim -- an Academy Award for best foreign film, critical praise proclaiming it a revelation -- it was something of a let down. It's the kind of film that is hard not to like and hard not to praise, but I find it difficult to be enthusiastic about. Maybe this is because of the hype and the oversell, or maybe it is because the film felt pretty conventional to me, didn't break any new boundaries cinematically, didn't have much that I found very interesting or novel in the actual approach to telling the story. That may be a hard standard to hold a film to, but in a year (2006) that had so many other interesting stories coming out around the world that did push such boundaries (Volver, Inland Empire, Pan's Labyrinth, The Proposition, Army of Shadows, Perfume, Ten Canoes, etc.) this one didn't really stand out so much. That said, this is good, competent storytelling, better than most of what would ordinarily show in the cineplex. Four stars isn't bad, it's just not breathtaking.
Movie Review: wonderful
Summary: 5 Stars
If you can handle subtitles, this was a fascinating movie. Well worth the time and effort. The characters were real and sucked you into their lives. Better than just about anything I've watched recently.Movie Review: Absolute must see!
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm 60 years old and have seen more films than I can count. This film is one of the top 10 I have ever seen. The tension, the love story, the social commentary are all gripping. "Lives of Others" grabs you by the throat and simply will not let go until the last frame. Along the way it shakes you very hard from time to time. The ending is perfect. There is not a single gun shot, car chase, or explosion. This is definitely not a kid movie. I'll say it again: This is one of the best, finest filme I've ever seen. SEE IT!!!Movie Review: Subtitles lost on Widescreen TVs!!!
Summary: 3 Stars
First of all, this is not only one of the best foriegn films I have ever seen, but one of the best films I have seen period! I have nothing to add to the other five star reviews here that hasn't already been covered.
That said, it pains me to report that this DVD release has a serious flaw and that is the subtitling! Some other reviewers have commented on the poor quality of the translation in the subtitles, which may in fact be true. But even more of a detriment is the fact that if you watch this film on a widescreen TV you will not see ANY subtitles at all! This is because the disk was encoded to display the subtitles in the black dead space area, outside of the letterboxed region where film frames appear. Widescreen TVs don't display this dead space, they actually fill up the screen with the letterbox frame which means that the subtitles are completely lost! The disk offers no option to display the subtitles properly on a widscreen format television set, i.e. inside the letterbox frame. This is particularly ironic considering that SONY, the distributer of the DVD, is the same company that manufactured widescreen TV on which I discovered the problem! You'd think that they would have had a clue about how to format the subtitles on the DVD to work on all of their television models! If you have a conventional TV set, then you won't have this problem since it will display the letterbox with the black boundaries intact.
So if you are a widescreen television owner and are fluent in German, then I can heartily recommend this wonderful movie. If not, then make sure you have a conventional set on which to watch this DVD or wait for SONY to fix this embarassing mistake before you make the purchase!