A few movies to watch

After recommending some books I would like to draw your attention to some movies that I consider worth watching.

Let's start with a classic: Billy Wilder's One Two Three. Set in Berlin July 1961 (one month before the Berlin Wall was erected) it tells the story of a CocaCola representative being troubled by the daughter of his boss, who ...

***Spoiler*** (mark the text to read the spoiler)
runs off to East Berlin and marries an East German Communist.
*** End of Spoiler***

It is a very fast paced comedy. You 'll have to watch the movie like 10 times to get all jokes.
Back in the 60s it flopped, probably due to bad timing of the release. With the wall up noone seemed to like a comedy about East and West Berlin.

Another movie set in Berlin is Good Bye Lenin. I mentioned it at the bottom of an earlier post. It is a serious comedy that brings us back to the next most significant point of Berlin history: The fall of the wall in 1989.

***Spoiler***
a young man is at a forbidden rally in East Berlin when his socialist mother sees him being arrested. She falls into a coma and awakes miraculously months later. But everything had changed. The wall was gone. Western products in the shelves...
Doctors say that the sudden shock of this could kill her. So her son sets up a show for her pretending that the GDR (East Germany) still existed in order to save her life.
***End of Spoiler***

This movie is about a loving son-mother relationship, about hanging on to things that are bound to change, about loss of things you know and about new beginnings.
It won several international awards, really worth watching... Not many good movies come from Germany these days, but this is one of them.


For now this must be enough. I will continue some other time with movies not connected to Berlin.