So much average

Highly Overrated But Still Good

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Character driven...the strength of this film is its lack of narrative drive......and the weakness of this film is its lack of narrative drive...I'm all for films that break away from the conventions...but this one is...The greasy haired Herr Lehmann does not engage me. Nor do his cronies. The film is like a stream of consciousness with no resolution. The 10p ending of the fall of the wall is? Like, Na...und? What does it have to do with anything??? Didn't enjoy it. Kinda interesting and kinda boring.I love Berlin. I love Kreuzberg. It was nice to spend an hour or two in that lokal...but it would have been better spent with interesting people. A nerd and his nerdy friends didn't do it for me. I'd rather have followed Soda Pop (Fanta) Rainer's story.

As a fan of Sven Regener's (Author of Novel and Screenplay) Band "Element of Crime" I read the book and was really looking forward to see this picture. In some way I was hoping for a better "Soloalbum", an other adaptation of a German so-called "Pop-Novel". After seeing Soloalbum I really had the desire to kill just anyone involved in this movie that was nothing but let's say an average Romantic Comedy, having deleted all the cynicism, the melancholy the humor and the truth which made the book so marvelous. But let's get back to Herr Lehmann: I got what I hoped for! Sven Regener carefully adapted his own story for the big screen, transforming some words into images, thoughts into dialogs, leaving out what had to be left out and keeping this special humor that was one of the characteristics of the book. The only thing I missed is the Chapter about the "Ku'damm-Bus", which I would have loved to see on screen, but who cares about this detail... The cast (consisting of some of the best German On-Screen-Actors of the "old school" and a bunch of great Newcomers) is nearly perfect. It would take to long to name all the actors who played their roles so authentic and sometimes getting into the field of warm-hearted satire. The one that takes it all is obviously Detlev Buck playing Herr Lehmann's best friend Karl in a way that will be remembered for long time, I suppose. The soundtrack is really cool and the photography by Frank Griebe (besides Michael Ballhaus probably the best German Cinematographer at present) finds the perfect images to illustrate the life of the Boheme in West-Berlin at the end of the 80s. Leander Haußmann after all succeeded in even topping his first movie "Sonnenallee" and is now responsible for two of the best German pictures of the past years.

Read the book, it's great. The movie is very disappointing. Bad adaption of the story, worst casting. Sorry, but Mr. Ulmen didn't perform very well as Herr Lehmann. Detlev Buck couldn't save the movie.If you have read the book, don't see this movie. If you haven't, read it.

1. a remarkable screenplay (based on a contemporary literary classic) with several truly hilarious lines2. fresh, charismatic characters and actors, all the more convincing for their random quirks and non-supermodel appearance3. unconventional direction4. one of the best soundtracks EVER!a recommendation with five exclamation marks!!!!!