ridiculous rating

Brilliant and touching

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

In 1987, in Berlin, six young idealistic anarchic activists leave a handcrafted bomb in a mansion. Only thirteen years later the bomb explodes, wounding two persons. The police force, under the command of the experienced inspector Manowsky (Klaus Löwitsch), investigate the terrorist act and go to the old apartment, where Tim (Til Schweiger) and the crippled Hotte (Martin Feifel) live, collecting all possible evidences, including many films. One of these films show the group making the bomb, and Hotte and Tim decide to find the former four members of their group to tell them that they may go to jail, if the investigation watch the film. Maik (Sebastian Blomberg) is a successful man working in an advertisement agency; Terror (Matthias Matschke) is a lawyer; Nele (Nadja Uhl) is a mother of two children; and Flo (Doris Schretzmayer) is a mysterious wealthy woman. The group joins force and plots a plan to retrieve the film.I am really impressed with the quality of the German movies released on DVD in Brazil in the last years. All of them are excellent films, including "Was Tun, Wenn's Brennt"? The dramatic story has action and humor and an unusual situation, with a good discussion between values, such as friendship, idealism and surrender to the system. The story has no clichés, and it is interesting to revisit the idealism that most of us have when we are young and try to embrace the world, and our "final destination" being part of the system. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "O Que Fazer Em Caso de Incêndio?" ("What to Do In Case of Fire?")

During the early 80s, squatters in Berlin have been mostly students on an adventure holiday, some years later they were mostly full time bums on a permanent "Do you have a Mark to spare"-quest. They had their fair amount of street fighting activities, their weapon of choice was the cobble, and sometimes they threw it through the glass of a bank building. But they were no terrorists. Maybe wannabe revolutionaries, in their dreams. Nobody took them really serious.Now some of them seem to have made this movie. Just let me tell you what happens during the first 15 minutes.A group of Berlin squatters decides to blow up an empty old villa. Must be a very evil villa, because basically squatting was about saving empty buildings from neglect.They do an amateur movie about this heroic deed, maybe they think there is a market for Building-Snuff-Videos.Their bomb doesn't explode. They don't care, they just forget about the whole thing. Even though the entrance they took was very obvious and easy to detect, the next 13 years nobody enters the villa.Not even the real estate agent who in 2000 wants to show it to a client. Why should she make sure that there are no unpleasant surprises waiting inside, like squatters, homeless, garbage, animals, broken mains, collapsing floors ... ? The main door will not open, so the client uses some force to open it, and the old bomb, that had been waiting patiently behind it, finally explodes. He and the real estate newbie get slightly hurt.The client has been a government big shot. Hell breaks loose, police raids start.Of course, amongst their prime suspects are two veteran squatters, who still stay at a formerly occupied tenement-house. The police confiscates .... all of their super-8-films. Believe me, they really do, I'm not making this up, it's even the main part of the plot: The Berlin police in the year 2000, looking for some bomb-building terrorists confiscates the 80s super-8-films of some broken down bums. Please don't ask why. But imagine how the authors and producers had to get people interested in such a story. And they succeeded, which is even more unlikely.The two die-hard squatters will try to get the band together again and rescue what contained once proud memories of their glory days and now fatal evidence of their stupidity from the well guarded chambers of the police.By now you will know that you are not watching a movie, but are instead trapped inside the dream of some pathetic drunken 80s squatters, "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes". Frightening? No, just a strange and boring childish mind-scape.I realize that there really IS a market for stuff like this, the infamous lovers of dilettantish and inane films. Here they'll find a lot for their liking. This is a very, VERY bad movie, and by all means, they should check it out.

My sister and I rented this movie becuase she was searching for someother movie to watch in German class besides "Europa, Europa". I didn't come into the movie with any expectations, and was really pleasantly surprised by how fun and compeling it was. I know nothing about German anarchists, maybe they were terrorits and shouldn't be sympathized with, but I was definatly rooting for them to get away. There were some less than perfect stuff (the rekindling of a romance is not well handled, nor is the love-interest interesting at all), but there were so many good things, they are easily overlooked by less nit-picking movie watchers.The German punk soundtrack is a definate plus.Jean

I finally found a German film, with English subtitles at the DVD rental store. Having seen Til Schweiger in Driven recently I was excited to see him in an authentic German production. And the film starts out well as we see the 6 radical friends going from being anarchists to most of them living pretty normal live, even to the point of betraying their original believes. In some ways I think people that lived through this might have a depth of understanding which I'm lacking having been brought up in very protective environment in Iceland. Therefore for an outsider, I felt that the film should have spent a little bit more time on defining what they were objecting to, what drove them, if you like. And the film had a strange balance of reality and humor, which did work, though unusual. When the film neared to its closure I felt it lost height a bit, becoming a little bit too Americanized. Unusual and well worth seeing. 7/10