This movie wants to be a funny satire, but it's just a piece of embarrassing garbage.
Camera, music and set design are very good, yet each of the actors seems to have another definition of comedy and the director was unable to communicate them HIS sense of it. Topsy-Turvy in the ensemble, although some good German actors do their best (esp. Ulrich Mühe).
The absolute disaster is the screenplay. Neither comedy nor drama, it keeps searching for an identity. That's why the whole movie fails - Neither fish nor meat - just another silly joke-ridden but unfunny, pseudo-operatic flop by Dany Levy as so many before.
Chaplin (The Great Dictator) and Mel Brooks (The Producers - Frühling für Hitler) have achieved with ease, what this movie tries hard but doesn't convey at all.
Dany Levy still has to learn a very important film school lesson - screen writing (and in part directing) is just not his cup of tea.
He's much better in fund raising money for (his) movies than making them.
As most Levy movies, they are a waste of the German taxpayers money, funded by costly German TV-stations and funds of various state-departments.
Camera, music and set design are very good, yet each of the actors seems to have another definition of comedy and the director was unable to communicate them HIS sense of it. Topsy-Turvy in the ensemble, although some good German actors do their best (esp. Ulrich Mühe).
The absolute disaster is the screenplay. Neither comedy nor drama, it keeps searching for an identity. That's why the whole movie fails - Neither fish nor meat - just another silly joke-ridden but unfunny, pseudo-operatic flop by Dany Levy as so many before.
Chaplin (The Great Dictator) and Mel Brooks (The Producers - Frühling für Hitler) have achieved with ease, what this movie tries hard but doesn't convey at all.
Dany Levy still has to learn a very important film school lesson - screen writing (and in part directing) is just not his cup of tea.
He's much better in fund raising money for (his) movies than making them.
As most Levy movies, they are a waste of the German taxpayers money, funded by costly German TV-stations and funds of various state-departments.