The Tin Drum - Criterion Collection (1980)

 STRANGE, DISTURBING & THOUGHT PROVOKING
I am not a big fan of watching movies that have subtitles, but this movie is so interesting I had no problem with it. I think because what is happening on screen is so clear I sort of knew what the actors were saying. The star of this movie is the little boy, played by David Bennet and he does an incredible job. You may have seen him as "The Gump" in Ridley Scott's Legend! My brother turned me on to this film when it was first released. It is like no other film I have ever seen. Nightmarish,strange,disturbing and very interesting,not for everyone's taste for sure. July 17, 2007

 The Tin Drum
This Oscar-winning adaptation of Gunter Grass's allegorical novel is an absurdist parable in which a willfully stunted manchild becomes the moral conscience of an entire nation. Schlondorff carefully walks the line between fascist critique and the merely freakish, packing his movie with a mesmerizing onslaught of Fellini-esque set pieces. Dark, discomfiting, and sometimes disturbing to watch, "The Tin Drum" is a bitter look at German history and the death of reason, featuring a tragic, haunting performance by bug-eyed, 12-year-old wunderkind Bennent. July 10, 2007

 Nightmarish.
I will not pretend that I understood this on a symbolic level. I did not. I cannot say that the movie was a pleasure to watch. It was not. But it was a series of absolutely unforgettable images. Akin to a nightmare. It was all that stuff that SNL skits mock about German film. You may need to be something of a stoic to sit it through; my boyfriend insists it was the worst torture he's ever endured on screen. April 10, 2007

 An Adult Locked Inside a Child's Body with a Tin Drum
What a disturbing, unpleasant and often disgusting this Palm D' Or and Oscar Winner for the Best Foreign Language Film is. Perhaps it is appropriate given a bizarre look at the history of Germany from the World War 1 through the rise of the Nazis as seen by a strange child who refused to grow at his third Birthday. Little Oscar symbolized a conscience of the citizens of Danzig when the Nazis are in power and the war rages. I am expected to sympathize with Oscar because he supposedly understands better than any adult around him what the chaos of 1920s would bring to life to Germany and to the world in 1930s but I simply can't. For me, Oscar is the scariest and creepiest little creature with the empty and cold eyes of young Alex de Large whose expressing his outrage by constant pounding on his toy tin drum and screaming with window-shattering voice only annoyed me. As the years pass, Oscar turned into a teenager who became naturally interested in girls but was trapped in a little boy's body, which contributed to some of most disturbing and repulsing scenes in films that I've ever seen and I am a quite open-minded and tolerant moviegoer. The movie's imagery is powerful and I guess the filmmaker drove his point across but for me, "The Tin Drum" is too cold to genially touch me and too unpleasant to like it.

March 12, 2007

 Exquisite but degrading
At times exquisitely filmed, at times hideous to watch; there were several moments when I attempted to look away from the film, as the material on the screen was too repulsive to watch. To know that such acts of despair and horror actually might exist is enough to throw one into a fright of existential depression. In particular, the one scene when one of the husbands grips the decapitated head of a boar, and pulls still-alive wriggling eels out from its slimy mouth, and then subsequentely serves the eels for breakfast the next morning. Probably not a film I will watch again, yet glad to have been through the experience. I do hope they do not make more films like this though. May 18, 2006

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