The Polar Bear (1998)

That was an excellent one.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The story makes no sense at all. A hired gun has to get stopped from his contract to kill a snitch with a bag of money. He misses his call, gets his job done and for whatever reason he and his agent should be killed now. There is another "plot" involving wiring up a gangster boss car to bomb him, but the car gets stolen. It even has a tracking device installed, but instead of phoning home and asking for the location, the beautiful assassin decides to go into a nearby bar and get drunk where she meets the hit-man who instead of warning his partner that assassins will come for him soon, also decides to get heavily drunk in the same bar. That is it. In fact nothing of importance is happening all the time. The car jackers sub-plot involves driving to a diner to steal hamburgers and is interrupted by their infantile humor. You will see many famous faces of German television who will in the end meet up in a shoot-out including several minutes of angry shouting at each other. The hit-man gets wounded, but is still able to walk away with the girl he just met. Instead of getting to a doctor and survive, they get the money that is still next to the dead snitch and decide to bleed to death on a nameless state road.The obvious comparison is Pulp Fiction. While the original focuses on absurd humor and violent shoot-outs with great cinematography, this is like the version for 14 year olds joking about penis sizes on the school yard smoking their mild tasting cigarettes. Oops, I just spoilered half of the jokes the actors will narrate. The overacting and the slow pace of the movie make it really annoying to watch. You will see a bar that looks like everywhere else with a group of xenophobic regulars, the rapid transit system of cologne and a no-name diner. This is no way near Tarantino even though it re-enacts parts of other movies all the time. Not even the Mexican standoff in the end is in any way impressive.Instead of watching this garbage I should have played a mission of Grand Theft Auto. It's storyline would have made much more sense and be way more entertaining. Luckily the protagonists died so there won't be a sequel.

At first glance, one could think the movie just unashamedly copies the stereotypical Hollywood gangster movie. But nothing could be further from the truth. The film is a total persiflage on the genre, setting a typical and deliberately shallow plot into Germany's industrial heartland - the Ruhr area. There it is staged with loads of local colour and bizarre details not necessarily related to the actual plot, the latter obviously 'borrowed' from Takashi Miike movies.Der Eisbär not only holds its own when it comes to gangster flicks, it's a standout. Rarely has a movie taken on the genre and rendered it what it really is in all its ridiculousness. The love for details is extraordinary and the situational humour spot on, but not as overdone as it often is the case in American productions.Add to this supporting roles filled with the who is who of the German film and entertainment industry, most notable an -as usual- brilliant Juergen Tarrach as the bomb constructor, Ralph Herforth and Ralf Richter as undercover cops, comedian Tom Gerhardt as the manager of the fast food restaurant, and character actress and internationally acclaimed director Katharina Thalbach in a tiny appearance, sleeping off her intoxication in the "Pauls Eck" pub during the final stand-off.Der Eisbär is a masterpiece. Totally misunderstood by many, it has acquired a cult following among the ones in the know.

I've just "Der Eisbär" and do not quite understand why so many people dislike this movie. Due to that I did not have any high expectations it is true that this movie tries a little too hard to become a cult classic and that some jokes do not really work out (as the phone ringing a couple of times when the hit-man is just about to kill some fellow) but on the other hand there are some brilliant scenes. The burger robbery for an example is one of the moments in which the movie's concept really works out. Schwaiger's performance is not over the edge but he does a good Job. Ralf Richter is brilliant as always. The story has some weaknesses but somehow one does not really care as it is not the aim of the movie to tell the backgrounds of the story. I reckon it's quite a good movie and if you don't go to see this with the expectation of watching another "Bang Boom Bang" you won't be disappointed.

Quentin Tarantino is a talented director who occasionally acts, although it's clearly not his forte. Till Schweiger on the other hand is a, well, decent and very popular German actor who, for this movie, pretended to also be a director. Unfortunately, the whole shtick didn't work out as well as hoped, and "Der Eisbär" turns out to be a glossy but ultimately pointless, and occasionally annoying, flick. It comes laden with Schweiger's actor buddies and is well filmed and "easy on the eye" (nice camerawork, good locations, coherent costumes, etc.), but the story is paper thin and has been done a hundred times before, and better. What really turned me off was the fact that Schweiger seems to think that simply having him on the screen for extended periods would make great cinema, and that copying Tarantino's style with a large brush would make him a great director, as if Tarantino's work was unseen of in this country. The movie is practically Schweiger's cinematic ego trip, and I did not find it was worth watching.