Change Your Image
kallen99
Reviews
Teddy Bears' Picnic (2001)
I like Harry Shearer, but...
This is a bad movie, an embarrassingly bad movie. It is disjointed, poorly photographed, and, worst of all, not funny. One big problem is that the film includes a number of loosely connected subplots that don't go anywhere. They just get in the way of the main story.
You have the impression that Shearer went into this with a rough idea of what he wanted, then let the actors improvise, intending to pull it together during editing. Maybe he didn't get the material he wanted; maybe he didn't have time to do the editing properly. Whatever happened, the end result is a mess.
I hate to say it, but not even major Shearer fans should bother with this one.
Das Goebbels-Experiment (2005)
Interesting but uneven in what it depicts
This is a very interesting and surprisingly engaging film. Branagh reads excerpts from Goebbels' diary or translations of speeches while the film shows newsreel footage, scenes from propaganda films, and bits from theatrical movies. Sometimes the visual footage illustrates Goebbels's words; sometimes it provides an ironic juxtaposition. I have one important reservation. There is no real attempt to include even coverage of events during the period. Quite a few subjects are simply not mentioned. For example, there is no discussion of the German's defeat at Stalingrad, which must have been a gigantic problem for Goebbels as Propaganda Minister. Even more striking, there is very little discussion of Nazi treatment of the Jews. The film includes some early anti-Semitic quotations and a little footage of Kristallnacht, but nothing that I can recall about the Holocaust itself. Perhaps Goebbels' diaries don't include entries about these subjects, but the omission is striking.