Daniel Bruehl, Kathrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Simon
Directed by Wolfgang Becker

Normally this is not the kind of movie I watch because it has no violent action. But since it was a German film, which we don't get much of over on this side of the ocean, and everyone who saw it said it rocked, I had to check it out. I was surprised by the amount of people who were there to see it as well.

The film was funny, but it was funny in a way where it didn't look like it was trying to be funny. And that is what makes it so good, because all the funniness happens for a reason, not solely for the sake of being funny. It definately is not thigh-slapping hilarious, which is the way it was described by those gawky chicks in my German class, because the whole premise of the movie is not the humour.

Goodbye Lenin is the type of films we should be watching, and the Cold War, its end, and German reunification is the type of themes we should be studying in a German culture class. It is much more interesting and understudied. It's like come on now, I have had to read and write crap about the Holocaust at least three times in my academic career already, all in unrelated instances. Why must every German class be about the damn Holocaust? Not saying we should forget about it because of course we should not, but it is just an overstudied theme already. Let's get some damn variety in our lives, dammit!

In the "west" where we live, we don't always get a neutral view of Soviet Bloc countries. What we learn is that their leaders were insanely corrupt, which they probably were, and that all the people were poor beyond belief and suffered greatly, which again, is true to a certain point. Our textbooks, however, left out the part where people were able to just live their lives and didn't think their government was "evil", and the part about there being normal people who actually believed in the socialist system, like Alex's mother in the film. It's also interesting to take into account the slightly exaggerated fake news clips Alex and his video editor buddy makes and think about what the East Bloc could have been, as Alex mentions in the narration later on that he was creating the East Germany he wishes they had become.

But whatever. That is the International Relations major in me speaking. Normal people don't think like this when they watch movies.