Making Up! (1993) User Reviews

German romantic comedy - American style

[SkaVenger · 6/10 · 12 November 1999]

I haven't seen many german movies but 'Widows' came to my mind when I was watching this one, both have female characters for leads but is actually about men.

We all have seen this before many times, some like it and some don't. I gave it a 6.

Short but nice movie

[Mone-11 · 6 January 2001]

Katja Riemann plays the cool woman that doesn´t need a man and her friend (Nina Kronjäger) adores the beautiful Gedeon Burkhard. Katja has to show Gedeon´s American friend (who she doesn´t like at first) the town while Gedeon has a date with Nina. But sex with the selfish Gedeon ends in disaster and Katja falls in love with Max (who plays the perfect American guy as Germans think Americans are - with chewing gum in the mouth and always a cheeky word on the lip). I think this movie tries to explain what love really means: not only beauty is decisive, most important is to understand your partner and to have fun together. For a German movie it is really good.

Some different, some generic, overall not too convincing

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 19 April 2018]

"Abgeschminkt!"or "Making Up!" is a German romantic comedy movie from 1993, so this one has its 25th anniversary this year. It was the first full feature film effort by director Katja von Garnier and she is also one of the writers here, although full feature film is pretty debatable with this one staying comfortably under the 1-hour mark. You don't see films with this running time too often, also here in Germany. And you see it even rarer that they actually get a solid deal of awards recognition, especially from prestigious awards bodies like the German Film Awards here with both lead actresses receiving nimoninations and the movie also getting in for Best Picture. Actually, that is fairly inspiring and I would certainly support more films of this running time being made. But nonetheless I cannot agree with the perception of quality here really. Maybe it is because it is a movie that is really more for females as it is mostly about females, but the plot is a bit predictable and the writing not too creative most of the time and rarely funny admittedly and that is of course a negative deal breaker for any comedy. Plus, I am not a great fan of Riemann in general and did not care a lot for Kronjäger here either. As a consequence, I found it really difficult to find the characters they portray likable or even hope for them to find happiness and they clearly were supposed to be likable. And yeah like I said, the predictability, especially in the second half was not helping matters either at all to be fair, so I must say I am glad it was such a short movie to be honest, even if it is by no means bad on a level where I would call it a failure, even if von Garnier has some later projects in her body of work that kinda fit the description. By the way, on the script here she worked together with actor Hannes Jaenicke, which is a rare occurence to see him anywhere else as cast. Of course, you don't know how much he contributed to the script and if it was a good idea that he mostly stayed away from that department. but all production values taken together, this was neither a successful watch for me in terms of both romance and comedy. That's why I give it a thumbs-down and suggest you watch something else instead.