Pretty Good

Just perfect...

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Steven Soderbergh attempts to recapture 1945 Hollywood with the use of black and white film, studio sets, dramatic music, and camera techniques used back then in "The Good German," a 2006 film starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Jeff Bridges.In 1945, a journalist, Jake Geismer, arrives to cover the Potsdam conference. He's assigned a driver, Corporal Tully (Toby Maguire) who deals in the black market and is trying to get his girlfriend Lena (Blanchett), now a prostitute, out of Berlin. When he finds out that interested parties want to find Lena's husband, Emil Brandt, he claims to be able to turn him over for a price. Meanwhile, Lena tells Tully that Emil is dead. It doesn't matter to Tully - by the time anyone realizes he really doesn't have him, they'll be in London with lots of money.It turns out that Jake, who lived in Berlin previously, knows Lena and in fact was going to try to find her. It doesn't take him long to figure out that he was assigned Tully on purpose, and the Americans want something from Lena. He gets different stories, but which is the truth? That he was secretary to Franz Bettmann (based on German scientist Arthur Rudolph), whom the Americans are taking under their protection in order to have him work for their rocket program, and Bettmann wants him along? Or is it that he has paperwork they want to get their hands on? Lena isn't being totally honest with Jake, and she wasn't honest with Tully. But she's very honest about what she wants: to get out of Berlin...without her husband.Actually not a bad film that didn't make any money. Soderbergh pays tribute to Casablanca, particularly at the end of the film, and the novel by Joseph Kanon contains elements of The Third Man and Casablanca.I liked the black and white and the moody lighting and camera-work, all of which were done the way they were in 1945. We're so used to seeing old films in black and white, that it's almost as if history is in black and white and easier to buy when it's filmed that way. Crazy but true.Cate Blanchett turns in another excellent performance as Lena, a complicated woman with plenty to hide, but who is a survivor in every sense of the word. George Clooney to me was Tyrone Power incarnate, and he does a good job as a confused man who can't tell the players without a scorecard and can't trust anyone.As for the title, "The Good German" - just who is the good German? Lena refers to her husband as "a good German" because he wants to tell what he knows and restore Germany to the way it was before Hitler. Or is Bettmann the good German because he's useful to the U.S.? And what about the fact that the U.S. harbored scientists and other useful people who were in fact war criminals? It seems like a lot of people have secrets.All in all, while not entirely successful, a very interesting step back, telling an old-fashioned story in an old-fashioned way.

Designed to resemble film noirs from the 1940s, "The Good German" is a somewhat interesting experiment by director Steven Soderbergh. Loosely divided into 3 sections, each with its own narrator, the film stars Cate Blanchett as a German Jew who's attempting to protect her husband from both American and Russian forces. Set in 1945, when the Soviet Union and the United States were busy carving up a recently surrendered Germany, the film watches as Blanchett uses her feminine wiles to strike up various deals with American and Russian officials. Why? As her husband is a renowned rocket scientist, both sides want him for their rocket programs, programs which will form the bedrock of Cold War posturing. And if they cant have him? Well, then he's better off dead. Blanchett does her best to prevent this.With her high cheekbones and porcelain skin, Blanchett's cast because of her resemblance to Hollywood sirens of old. Alongside her is actor George Clooney, who's rocking a Cary Grant face and a bottle full of smug. "Cassablanca", "The Third Man", "A Foreign Affair", "Germany Year Zero" and various old noirs (and neorealist films) are Soderbergh's chief influences. Much of his film's first act consists of heavy-handed stylistic attempts to evoke films of the era. These include lots of dutch angles, wipes, canted shots, noir lighting, old Hollywood aspect ratios, and "traditional" blocking/mise-en-scene. While this initially lends the film an overly busy, overly desperate tone, things eventually settle down somewhat to become something a bit more gentle and introspective. For fans of old noirs, the film ably evokes a certain nostalgia. But that's all it does. It's a rushed, slight film, which is frustrating considering the potentially heavy subject matter at hand.7.9/10 – Better to ditch the homages and take things a bit more seriously. Worth one viewing.

A book, a movie and the good German, who is it, between Casablanca, The Man in Between and Germany anno zero. Berlin, July, 1945. Journalist Jake Geismer arrives to cover the Potsdam conference, issued a captain's uniform for easier passage. He also wants to find Lena, now a prostitute desperate to get out of Berlin. He discovers that the driver he's assigned, Corporal Tully, is Lena's keeper. As everyone, she too has something to sell. In exchange a 'Persilschein' to get out of Berlin. It is her (hidden) dead husband, the scientist Emil Brandt, a member in the Bettman/von Braun, who has the evidence of what happened at Dora. He the valuable, dangerous witness, valuable for the Russian and American but also dangerous. The story in the movie is told by Tully, Jake and by Lena, the desperate Jewish wife of a former SS officer. She killed Tully; he came too near the truth. Her plan is to leave Berlin without her SS-husband. At one point she remind Jake of her past: "I'm a Nzi myself. It's true Heil Hitler. No, not a Nazi. None of us. Just something to join, like a sport club. How could you love someone for all those years and not know them? Did you ever love a Nazi? How about a Jew. A Nazi and a Jew both, better yet. I survived." "What happened to the rest of the family?" Jake asks. "They got send to the camps. Everyone. My mother, uncles, cousins. Everyone dead. As the wife of a SS-man I was exempt. Jewess is not a Jew. That's the way they used to put it. And at the end no one was exempt." In the ending scene, à la Casablanca she tells him: "There where not so many. You are right. So when they caught me, I turned that to my advantage. I used the skills you taught me. When I worked for you, for the newspaper. Watch, observe. The stupid risks they would take. Lunch at Aschinger's. Just to remind themselves they where still human. I found 12. I turned over 12 people over to the Gestapo. That's how I survived. It was all to survive. Everything. Now you know the last piece in your puzzle." Everybody was, is still and will be involved of what Berlin happens.Greed reach for a part of the cake. The critics are not good. The reason? Perhaps that not only the scapegoat Germany for the ununderstandable wound Auschwitz forced everybody to be part of skandalon. The Judenrat, the lenabrandts as the 'greifers', the men behind Hitler (not to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz). After WW II, Germany at the edge of suicide the survivors survive by whatever they can reach at. Not to forget Emil in Germanny anno zero, helping his father, the waste-over, to die. Himself committing suicide. He, the German, had not as Erich in the book, a greiffers child, a Jake and Lena and a Dr Rosen. In the center of 'Me, myself & I' the heroine of temps noir, femme fatale Lena Brandt, surviving. Why this and not the books ending?

When I heard about a modern past-war movie that would settle in destroyed and desperate Germany that was turned in intense black and white images and would include actors like George Clooney, I was really looking forward to this movie. Well, I guess I expected a little bit too much.The story has surely some interesting points and is also quite realistic, but somehow very difficult to follow. The actors mostly play without any emotions, especially George Clooney is doing a horribly weak job and the cold-hearted and not very credible Cate Blanchett isn't much better. Only Tobey Maguire as a hectic, emotional and unexperienced military guy who falls in love with a mysterious German "femme fatale" does a convincing job.Another minor detail that personally annoyed me is the fact that most of the actors that are trying to speak German are doing a horrible job, especially Cate Blanchett is not very easy to understand. As a native speaker I know that German is a very difficult language, but this film wants desperately be as atmospheric, precise and realistic as possible, so the actors should have had the help of some good German teachers for the few dialogues they do in German. The Gemran dialogues seem because of this lack of professionalism almost inaudible and silly.From an aesthetic point of view, the movie has a great atmosphere because it is turned in black and white what fits to the desperate and dark situation after the war and some camera shootings are also well done and directed. But this is sadly not enough to make this slow-paced and emotionless movie entertaining enough, even for a German or someone who is interested in history like me.To keep it short, the images and the atmosphere of the movie are well done, but the story and the acting could have been way better.