tdrewes Reviews

Grave Decisions (2006)

Can't understand the hype

[3/10 · 28 February 2007]

Hi,

I rented this movie to have some light hearted, funny entertainment. But to be honest - we hadn't.

First of all: Coming from north German descent and thus not too familiar with the Bavarian dialect we enabled subtitles after the first 10 minutes. But I could have lived with that without problems if the movie would have been funny. But it wasn't. The first 50 minutes had two or three chuckles for me but the rest was merely boredom.

I don't know really why I couldn't connect to this movie but I wonder if the reception of this movie is a regional thing. I liked for example 'Karniggels (1991)', because I could connect to it not only from the regional point of view. But this one here for me is a mostly badly crafted, not really funny comedy.

Der Wixxer (2004)

Very mediocre parody movie.

[4/10 · 9 June 2004]

I entered the cinema with very mixed expectations. I'm an avid Oliver Kalkofe fan because of his satirical "Kalkofe's Mattscheibe" TV show but I feared that he and his partners would not be able to deliver a good movie nor live up to the expectations of the fans.

A shame that I was right.

The stylish intro of "Der Wixxer" was quite good, so I still kept my fingers crossed for the movie, but the movie degraded from minute to minute. Most of the jokes weren't hilarious at all - they were rather washed out, old and often simply not funny. The acting of most of the characters was mostly bad: Oliver Kalkofe's strong side obviously is NOT acting, Oliver Welke's (who I like as person) performance was terrible, Bastian Pastewka wasn't too funny nor convincing also. The best acting performance in my opinion was by Lars Rudolph who played Smeerlab and revived Klaus Kinski in his typical Edgar Wallace style. Adding to my negative expression were the references to Matrix and Silence of the Lambs - which I have seen in dozens of comedy movies before. Not helpful was in my opinion also to include "favorite characters" of the former TV shows of the cast like the roses selling pakistani. And yes - I could have done without the musical scene also.

*** spoiler warning ***

A nice touch though were the various German references (though the will probably be obsolete in a few years) and especially the inclusion of Kalkofe's long time opponent Achim Mentzel as the original "Der Wixxer".

My conclusion is that it's obviously not sufficient to team up with other funny guys and come up with a topic (here: German Edgar Wallace movies) which has not been covered before. Movie is apparently a more difficult business than that. Especially when watching a parody movie I expect a hilarious firework of jokes without any pauses and not some small firecrackers burning down once in a while.

For a 15 minutes TV sketch the idea and the jokes may have been sufficient but not for a silver screen movie - I have the feeling that they wasted quite a bit of potential here.