Thanks for the memories!

Beautiful, moving film.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The thrust of the movie, as I saw it, was the propensity of a society, any society, to conveniently 'forget' the details of its involvement with nefarious deeds carried out in its name. Much as the vast majority of American westerns tend to gloss over the true level of barbarism we so-called civilized members of society visited upon the 'heathen' Indians, the German town in question conveniently 'forgot' its level of involvement with the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Mädchen's true 'sin' was of revisiting the Nazi era and detailing the involvement of many of the town's leading lights with that regime and its atrocities.In toto, this film asks disturbing questions about society (any society) and its willingness to justify or simply forget 'inconvenient' truths and realities.

The Nasty Girl is a movie unlike any other that's for sure. I found it interesting that they choose to start the movie with her mother being asked to leave her job as a teacher for being pregnant. She was married, and I don't feel like the children she taught were of an age where that wasn't acceptable. I think Michael Verhoeven was trying to foreshadow that she was going to be a trouble maker, but I still didn't think it was necessary for her mother to loose her job. I did like the scene where she throws the fish they were having for lunch back into the water. There is nothing nasty about Sonja's character. Due to the misleading translation of the title, the film is often put in the adult section of the video store when there is nothing pornographic about the film's content. The film really should be put in the drama or history sections of a video store.Overall I thought the film was good. I didn't agree with some of the transitions (like how all of a sudden Wegmus goes from her teacher to her boyfriend over the course of a car ride to school) there should have been more there especially because she is barely a teenager when they first kiss and he is about to graduate from college. But I did like the photography and the overall theme of the movie. I think Sonja's character showed that you can do anything you put your mind to. She was determined to find answers, and she didn't let anything stop her. She wants to make things better for her children so they don't grow up learning all of the corrupt things the her town has been covering up. Overall the production, direction and acting were very well done. I would definitely recommend the film, but please realize you are watching German cinema, which is usually a little strange when you are used to American style movies.

I am not accustomed to German film. I know my fair share about Germany through my research of their history and their automobiles, however I have never actually watched a German movie outside of Run Lola Run. German films have always been portrayed by the American society as 'art house' style films. As such, I would classify The Nasty Girl as an art house style film. The film starts off as a narrative and almost comical in presentation. Bringing you through the Sonja's childhood as a black and white flash back, narrated in-person by Sonja as an adult. The presentation and photography is comical as it puts the narrator Sonja in many hard to reach places as she looks over her younger self. Then we see her as a teenager, played by the same actress, Lena Stolze, that plays her as an adult. Again we see the adult narrator looking over her younger self. The movie never really comes to present time to my understanding as it is always narrated by Sonja.The other art house styling I see in the film come from the use of a projection screen to show certain interiors (the archives, the library, the archive administrators office) the stage like apperance of the courthouse scenes and the use of the living room that moves through a part of the town that Sonja and her family are constantly seen on later in the movie. The whole movie comes off as a big budget play rather than a traditional film. The film's timeline comes in at a confusing part of German history, though. To those not familiar with Germany at the time, this can be incredibly confusing. They make constant reference to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, German Democratic Republic or GDR. To most Americans who watch this movie, that might be confusing. The word Democratic would lead you to believe this would be Free West Germany, but in fact it was Soviet East Germany. The movie, released in 1990 and shot in 1989, was directly created in the middle of the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the unification of Germany (1990). This confusion of the time leads me to believe that is why the end of the movie is so open ended. Because it was based on a true story, I believe the story had just reached present day and there was no more to tell as it had not actually been completed. The biggest part of the movie that you don't quite get a hold of is just how secretive Germany is to this day. After World War II, the Germans went so far to hide the atrocities by adding a letter in their alphabet: ß which is the letters 'SS' adjoined into one letter. There are still millions of classified documents in Germany. Some believe this to be protecting the unified Germany's image now. It is also my belief that this open ending is the director's way of saying that the cover-up has never stopped, and I can surely agree.

Me and my homies watched this movie together, since we are all in Deutsch class. The only reason this scheisse was funny was because of how 'schrecklich' it was. The jokes were never funny, especially how the money looked like a vagina if folded correctly, that was just wrong. Also at some points when they were in their living room, it showed a street background that was moving, so it looked like they were sitting on a couch that was on the back of a flatbed! That was easily the funniest part of this horrible movie. 3/10