The Lives of Others
|
List Price: Our Price: $14.99 You Save: $4.95 (25%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $5.73 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Lives of Others
Movie Review: Totally excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie, with excellent and easy English subtitles, is elaborate and subtle but totally clear. It is about a Totalitarian government (The GDR or "East Germany" before Reagan forced the USSR to tear down the Berlin Wall) which wants to KNOW EVERYTHING about you, ostensibly to protect the Socialist State against its enemies. The "Stasi" or state police, like all puffed up self serving bureaucracies, love to develop and maintain "files" on everyone and they see in this activity great potential for career advancement. The Stasi are the vilest of bureaucrats using any method to turn people against each other and to develop "informants" who in turn betray their friends, leading to personal and professional ruination or imprisonment. The heroes battle this system and the plot turns on the inner transformation of one of the Stasi officials. Great Movie.Movie Review: Beautiful film!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm having a hard time summing up all the good feelings and reasons why I love "The Lives of Others". I can only say this and thats that it is a magnificent film that tells an excellent story about what life was like for Germany back in 1984 when the Stasi secret police would listen to it's citizens very conversations. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is truly a gifted German director as well as story teller, not to mention the three trio of actors Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck, and Ulrich Muhe all giving such beyond stellar performances as the main characters. I often found my heart strings being tugged at when watching their characters struggle with a certain conflict. It's a film that shows how unfair people with power can be to people who don't have it and what the end result can be if taken far enough. A beautiful film that no one should miss.Movie Review: Pacing problems derail otherwise excellent thriller.
Summary: 3 Stars
The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
Been mulling this one over for quite a while, trying to figure out how to review it. Much of my problem stems from the fact that I don't seem to have been nearly as impressed with this movie as everyone else was; the pacing is awful, the screenplay, despite moments of brilliance, is often wooden, and the camerawork is, for the most part, uninspired. I've seen a good number of movies of this sort, most recently Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, and this one just doesn't hold up in comparison. (And really, winning the Best Foreign Film Oscar over El Laberinto del Fauno? There's really no comparison.)
Ulrich Muhe, the movie's highlight, plays Gerd Wiesner, a Stasi agent in East Germany in the 1980s, who spies on other people for a living. His old school friend, Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), now a Stasi higher-up, contracts Wiesner to do surveillance on a playwright named Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his leading-lady girlfriend Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). Wiesner is initially confused, as Dreyman seems to be the perfect Socialist; his plays are beloved of the State, none of his writing has ever been banned, etc. But Wiesner knew from the start that Grubitz had an ulterior motive for having Dreyman watched. Resentful that his services are being used in such a way, when Wiesner finds out that Dreyman is not the upstanding citizen everyone believes, he risks it all to cover for Dreyman.
The Lives of Others would probably have been a great film had von Donnersmarck (who, as everyone says, really is that good; it's impossible to tell this is the work of a first-time director, though he might have been served by hiring a better cinematographer) known whether he wanted to make a spy thriller, an existential drama, or a love story. Now, we all know it's possible to combine the three and come up with a winner (the Bourne movies, and about a quarter of Hitchcock's output, would qualify), but-- and I realize I'm very much in the minority on this-- I don't think they work here. Von Donnersmarck and editor Patricia Rommel failed to give the movie the pace required for a spy thriller. The characters are certainly deep enough for an existential drama, but in achieving that depth, the love story often gets shunted out of the way. Then suddenly someone realizes what's going on and some other portion of the plot thread gets picked up, and all the work of pushing the existential drama to the fore gets dumped. Von Donnersmarck, obviously, is not a juggler.
Now, despite all that I'm saying, I did enjoy the film somewhat. I just couldn't get past its flaws the way everyone else seemed to. ** ?
Movie Review: Just kidding!
Summary: 1 Stars
The other reviews do not lie, this is one of the best films to be released anywhere in the world in the past 5 years. Great script, Deutschland's finest actors, inventive camera work. A bit on the Romantic side (in the German sense), so if that's not your aesthetic cup of tea, this will be a taxing viewing; otherwise its hard to imagine being disappointed!Movie Review: Easily one of the 10 best movies I've ever seen.
Summary: 5 Stars
When I finished watching this movie, I felt like it was one of the best movies I had ever seen. I was not surprised to find out later that a number of reviewers said the same thing. I happen to have had the experience of having met and corresponded with a couple of East Germans after a college trip there in 1988. I later found out that they had visted the Statsi headquarters and found out that there was a big file on us which included copies of all the letters we ever wrote. Who knows? A guy like the one portrayed in the film was probably opening my letters. In any case, this is one of those movies that just seems to get everything right. Now, almost 20 years after the wall fell, I'm glad to see a movie like this to help people remember what life in the eastern block was like in some respects.