"The Lives of Others" (Sony Pictures)
Shipped: The Lives of Others:In contrast to our other weekend film fare, Das Leben der Anderen was excellent. If you've never seen the film, pay attention to the use of color (red and blue, especially). Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck spent six years on this film after graduating from film school, and it shows. [redacted a bunch of film-school nerd speak, because I no longer want to write like that. Sorry.] Anyway, 1984 is appropriate a setting for a Big Brother movie as 2007, right? As Roger Ebert writes:
Shipped on 09/13/07.
Set in 1980s East Berlin, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature (which earned an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) provides an exquisitely nuanced portrait of life under the watchful eye of the state police as a high-profile couple is bugged. When a successful playwright and his actress companion become subjects of the Stasi's secret surveillance program, their friends, family and even those doing the watching find their lives changed too.
The Berlin Wall falls in 1989 (the event is seen here), and the story continues for few more years to an ironic and surprisingly satisfactory conclusion. But the movie is relevant today, as our government ignores habeas corpus, practices secret torture, and asks for the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on its citizens. Such tactics did not save East Germany; they destroyed it, by making it a country its most loyal citizens could no longer believe in. Driven by the specter of aggression from without, it countered it with aggression from within, as sort of an anti-toxin. Fearing that its citizens were disloyal, it inspired them to be. True, its enemies were real. But the West never dropped the bomb, and East Germany and the other Soviet republics imploded after essentially bombing themselves. [From :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews :: The Lives of Others (xhtml)]
