Although I am German and although I found out that a lot of Germans usually talk very fondly of German films (even the bad ones) I just have to resist this impulse. German films are, in comparison to American films, generally very bad. The Americans just know how to entertain whereas the German actors (even the so called good actors) always look clumsy and helpless when they act. I can't think of any German actor that could probably deliver the same performance like the top American actors. Please don't get me wrong: There are some good German films (Das Boot, Sophie Scholl) but usually they have to do with WW II and then it's very often not the actors that make the movie interesting but rather the plot (which is so good that even German actors can't mess it up). There are very many bad American films, too, but still even bad American movies have sometimes very fine actors in it. Anyway, regarding GLOOMY Sunday: Krol doesn't deliver a convincing performance, he just knows how to look sad and happy at the same time. The pathos and melodrama was overdone and the news reel about the people that committed suicide because of the song just made me laugh. Ben Becker displays no passion for his role, he just blurts out the lines of his script and intermittently he tries to look the mean Nazi which doesn't work either. The song of gloomy Sunday is played far too often throughout the movie, I almost had the impression that the director thought every time that he discovered a whole in the plot: Oh, no problem, we'll just play the theme song again. The ending was ridiculous too and had a very controversial message: It says that revenge is OK, and that Eichmann deserved to die (an eye for an eye) and all that BS. You should watch Dead Man walking instead. So, hopefully, we'll be getting some better German movies in the future, I still can't believe that people wasted their money on this one. Maybe I should become a director myself, then we wouldn't have to see bad German films ever again. Watta you think?
Review of Gloomy Sunday
