A Coffee in Berlin (2014)

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Learning life's lesson the hard way. Poor guy. Niko is having a really bad day. All he wants is a ##$$%% cup of coffee, and his day just keeps worse and worse. Looks like he's not getting his driver's license back, his father has shut off his bank account for being a slacker, and he gets busted for not having a ticket for the subway. Grainy, gritty black and white photography of Berlin. Tom Schilling does a great job of showing us a pretty rough day in one man's life. Really quite good at showing us all the issues that weigh on him, but he keeps on trucking. The rough day turns into a bad night, but then... when morning comes, we are given just a smidge of hope. Directed by Jan Ole Gerster. He had only done a couple things prior to this, but does a fine job. The music is eerie in the right places. Not too much talking. We see a lot just observing. One of the characters, an old man he bumps into at the coffee shop goes into a long tirade talking about Kristallnacht, and how it affected him as a small child. That went on for quite a long time, but this IS a film about Berlin, so clearly someone thought it was important to include here. Good stuff.

A movie describing the life of someone who can't find his place around people, how he feels that people became strangers to him, but actually, it's him becoming a stranger to himself.The movie isn't much of an entertainment, at least it wasn't for me. Frankly, I was disappointed by the jazzy beginning, which led me to think more about Berlin as a future Woody Allen New York. But there are some scenes in the movie that were so simple to understand, they got me thinking.The courage of one girl, which was once fat, which led her to stop ignoring what people say to her. Even if that means to put her in danger, she can't leave thoughts unsaid.But by far, the phrase that struck me deeply, was that "People can't bear the dark anymore". It led me to think about the insecurity people feel these days, and how they're afraid to be alone with themselves.

Whilst the nouvelle vague phenomenon continues in NY, it's seems Berlin, and Jan Ole Gerster actually has something to say. At times comedic, at times serious, the writing is wonderfully wry and reminiscent of Woody Allen's darker moments. The tension between the black comedy and the underlying backdrop of Berlin's inescapable history is a knife edge Jan treads with the delicacy of a master. Berlin looks fantastic in black and white, and the effortlessly understated cinematography and precise editing mean this film deserves all the hype that Frances Ha is getting and more.Refreshing, and fresh this is an incredibly accomplished thesis film. And trust me, you can live without the trailer.

"Oh Boy" features the same "plot" as countless art-house and student movies: A young man drifts through a big city, meets strange people, the end. There is probably a fancy name for this, but most people just call it pointless, boring, a waste of time. Regarding "Oh Boy" there is really no point in arguing with them.The "boy" (Tom Schilling) meets about 12 stale caricatures: a presumptuous bureaucrat, a snide coffee shop waitress, a wacky lonely neighbor, a fat girl who was bullied by him at school and is now thin and very blatantly mentally unstable, his rich & heartless daddy, stupid ticket inspectors ... These characters are neither funny nor interesting, they are just incredibly annoying versions of stereotypes recycled by a clueless author. He actually manages to dedicate two of the movie's scenes to the times of Hitler - in a movie about a young man's journey through the Berlin of today! That's world-class, in its own inane way. You are afraid to deal with current topics; you don't have a single original idea? Well, you can't go wrong with Hitler! He's still got a gigantic fan base that can't get enough of this guy."Oh Boy" is author/director Gerster's thesis project for a film academy. Therefore critics shouldn't be too harsh; they should concentrate on the promising aspects of this exercise. But there was a preposterous hype about this movie. It won the highest German movie award, the "German Film Award", for best feature film. This "best German movie of 2012" will be shown in art-house cinemas and Goethe Institutes around the globe. There is no reason to hold back punches anymore. Gerster's professors might be proud, but viewers expecting a good movie are bound to be seriously disappointed.While I'd give zero points for the author, the work of the cinematographer is quite good. "Oh Boy" is not only filmed in black-and-white, sometimes it really does look like an actual movie from the Fifties. And it has got an appropriate jazzy soundtrack to go with that. All in all there are several minutes of lovely Berlin photography. If B&W-movies do have a future, the name of the cameraman Philipp Kirsamer is definitely one to remember.In one of the two remarkably pointless Hitler scenes, the weather-worn old man Michael Gwisdek (born in 1942) gives a theatrical monologue about how he as a young boy witnessed the "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938, dreading that all the glass would hurt his bicycle tires the next day. This 5 minutes long, static monologue got him the "German Film Award" for best male actor in a supporting role. Awkward! Is the German cinema really that dead? ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 12)