breakdownbrothers Reviews

Three Wishes for Cinderella (1973)

Don't worry, it's just a movie!

[10/10 · 30 May 2006]

BEWARE! This film could very much f..k up your life. You think I might be exaggerating - I don't! Listen and remember. There was a boy, let's say someone I knew. He lived in East Germany, where life in the eighties felt like the sixties had never ended, short skirts, long hair, everybody listened to forbidden music and watched consumer instructions and Hollywood serials coming from the dark territory behind the Western border. In this magic time, when bread was so cheap you could easily build a house with it, in a land, where cars where made out of plastic and pulp and people out of silence, for a young human being TV was the only connection to the real world, to the real people living elsewhere. When he was young, this boy watched everything he could, he loved the tube with all of his heart. But when he saw for the first time the fairy-tale of Cinderella, he was lost. He had fallen for Cinderella head over heels, he had never seen something so beautiful and honest in all of his life. Until the age of fourteen he had seen the film at least 20 times, which was very often because there were no videotapes or VCRs in East Germany. He had a crush on Libuse Safrankova and he was never to be cured. No woman in the whole world could come close to her. Nothing could come close to her, including him. For all of his life he was unable to fall in love or have a relationship. There simply was no one who could compete with her in his heart. And then, one day, he saw a picture of her. Libuse, laying in bed together with a man, in a movie, the title I can't remember. Let's say as much as this: I think you know what happened – his mother found him - and I have no intention to talk about the details. As for "Three Nuts for Cinderella": I have no idea how something so beautiful could have been made in East Germany. I just don't get it. Of course, there were other good fairy-tale movies, but nothing anywhere comparable with this. If I have to rank this, I'd rather give it a 0. Keep your hands off this film, watch Star Wars or Walt Disney, you will be happier in the end.

Das kalte Herz (1950)

One of the best East-German fairy-tale movies ever, worth watching

[9/10 · 27 May 2006]

Who has watched that film in his childhood will probably never forget it. It ranks with classics like Sinbad or ET in my memory. The story is taken from a German fairy-tale by Wilhelm Hauff. Like many German fairy-tales the setting is the Black Forest, which is nevertheless an interesting fact, keeping in mind that it was cold-war times and the Black Forest part of West-Germany. Apart from being a piece of very subtle socialist propaganda, it is an impressive work of art. The movie plays with German archetypes in a masterly way, the character of the Hollaender Michel is one thing that stays in mind, the state-of-the-art special effects are another one. East-German movie production came never again anywhere close to it. It is a very interesting experience to watch that movie again some 20 years later and notice the dream-like narration in complete accord with the allusions to class-struggle and the last breaths of a unified German conscience at that time. Very nice, and never really appreciated for its accomplishments... I give it 9 of 10, the last frame is too obvious...