Jemima
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Radio Heimat" is a pretty new movie from last year (2016) and this runs for 85 minutes approximately. After a few short films, it is the first full feature film work by writer and director Matthias Kutschmann. The novel this is based on is by Frank Goosen, who is also known for "Liegen lernen" and has a couple more films coming out soon that are based on his work. But we will talk about these on another occasions. Today we take a look at this one here that also goes by the name "Damals war auch scheiße!" and this summarizes the level of quality here perfectly I guess, namely non-existent. The film tries to use successful approaches from "Sonnenallee" and "Goodbye Lenin" and combining them with what is considered quality comedy (but isn't most of the time) like Schweighöfer or Schweiger or M'Barek films, but feels like a bad copy at best and the moments when it somewhat tries to make an individually creative impact it also comes short. I have not read Goosen's book, so I am not sure if the problem lies there already or if it is the filmmaker's approach here. I just cannot imagine at all one would be happy that a film based on his books has an outcome like this one here.The cast includes many well-known names actually here in Germany, a bit surprising in my opinion, but I guess the subject GDR still attracts prolific and successful performers these days. They lose a bit of respect though for me it they accept to perform in a film like this. I am sure they must have read the script before. Anyway, the likes of Hoenig, Lohmeyer, Borgmann and others all play supporting characters anyway as the story is about a bunch of young men making first love experiences in the GDR. Sadly, the actors (apart from their haircuts perhaps) are entirely forgettable and pretty bad as well and basically all interchangeable. The line delivery was horrible at times and this especially applies to the voice-overs that were used that often that you felt at times that actually the voice-overs are just there to tell us stuff that they weren't able to get in the story. It was like listening to a cassette at times. As a consequence, not only the comedy was a failure, but the film as a whole including the not too frequent dramatic moments as well as the romance, especially towards the end. The actors' shortcomings made it impossible to cheer for any of them. With that many GDR-films and there sure are a lot from Germany, it is inevitable that occasionally you also find one that went completely wrong. Here it is. I suggest you stay far far away. You could even say that while including as many GDR references as possible, they completely forgot to include a story and character development. Here's hoping Kutschmann can step it up in the future. He will absolutely need to if he wants a career that spans over several decades.
Karl Self
Radio Heimat started out as a compilation of short stories about the -- mostly unspectacular -- childhood of author Frank Goosen in the Ruhrgebiet (Bochum, specifically) in the 1980ies, although this movie makes it look like the 1970ies -- and sound way cooler than the 1980ies really were, with only the hits and none of the shite which was as abundant as ever back then.By the way, although they often only have minuscule parts, this movie features a plethora of the famous actors from the West Germany's Wild West.The first third of the movie features a pastiche of absurd and funny scenes that are a surprisingly convincing cinematic rendition of the book. Then the movie wanders off into teenage trope territory and narrates the entirely predictable story of how young Frank first got his tops and fingers. He falls for the beautiful queen bee of the school, Carola, but when he finally gets close to her, in a scene that makes many porn movie look like cinéma vérité, he realizes that she's beautiful, but bland! Not that that would've stopped me or anyone else I know. Later, during a booze-filled field trip, an equally beautiful chick pops out of nowhere, but this time she has PERSONALITY (signified by her not wearing neon earrings nor jerry headbands) and the two proceed to have meaningful sex with the approval of all of his friends.It's an unoffensive movie that you can watch on TV with a beer at hand. But we've all been young, we should all know what it feels like to have been 16 and inadequate, why are most of the movies about this topic so generic? The charm of the book was rendered fairly successfully in the beginning of the movie, then the producers must have been like: Sod it, let's just make another teenage flick.
