- The main thing you keep hearing about this movie is noir, noir, noir, and it succeeds in that respect on a rather superficial level. It looks like it was made in the 1940s, unlike most modern black and white movies that are meant to take place in the same era. Everything sort of fuzzed out around the edges and people often looked soft and overlit. You could tell that everything was done on a set and when it wasn’t, it was obvious stock footage was being played behind the green-screened actors; this was actually highly effective, rather than how I find it really annoying in other movies. It looked like Casablanca, really, which became no more obvious than at the end of the film when Cate Blanchett leaves on a plane wearing an outfit nearly identical to the one Ingrid Bergman wears in Casablanca.
- Why is Cate Blanchett so awesome in in everything?
- George Clooney was pretty good, although slightly lame because he kept losing every fight he got into. They at least let him win one at the end to restore him to his proper place in our minds.
- Tobey Maguire was horrendously miscast for the role. I rarely come away from a movie thinking “Oh god, someone else really should have played that role” but that’s all I could think about. There are people who can be convincing in period pieces and people who can be convincing in period genre pieces, and Mr. Maguire is unfortunately not the latter, at least not in this film. If you’re going to bother doing a noir film, there’s a certain style of acting that goes with it and he couldn’t really pull it off (not that he attempted to, really). The character was meant to be young and fairly tough except all I was getting was a squeaky clean Peter Parker. At one point he punches Cate Blanchett in the stomach and rather than getting any sense that this guy is a lunatic and not to be fucked with, you sort of want to laugh at him instead. I don’t know, he really, really bothered me. I was pretty glad when his character washed up dead on the bank of a river, and not because he was all evil and duplicitous.
- I couldn’t stand the narration in this movie. I guess I expect narration to be consistent through the length of the film — like following the main character’s inner monologue or something — or I expect it to come at the start and the end of a film, sort of like in War of the Worlds (which is the only one I can think of off the top of my head). This had each of the three lead characters narrating a segment of the film, but even then the narration wasn’t consistent through each act, it was just sort of there and then forgotten about. I don’t know, I’d rather have been shown that information than have it done as a voice over.
- I’m still not really getting why it was necessary to do this film in this genre. There has to be a point to reviving the genre in this particular way and I don’t think this film actually says anything interesting about noir, not even on an aesthetic level since it was just mimicking the style to the letter. It’s noir for the sake of noir, and that’s all fine and good and pleasing to watch, but it leaves you with an incredibly jarring feeling of “Why are you doing it like this, again?” It was enough to take an otherwise decent movie and make it not so great. Because I liked the film well enough on a three-star level, but I just thought the noir was so utterly pointless as to really detract from all its other positive points.
- I always wonder what colour everything actually is in a black and white film. Red looks so utterly black in black and white, it kills me.
The Good German
The only “good” in this movie is in the title.
IMDB Plot Synopsis While in post-war Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference, an American military journalist is drawn into a murder investigation which involves his former mistress and his driver.