Today's Review: The Experiment (Das Experiment)
Starring: Moritz Bleibtreu, Justus von Dohnanyi
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
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The Naked Critic
Let's face it, when God was handing out
the abilities for nations to contribute to Pop Culture, Germany was on the
bowl. That's not to say that they haven't made any at all, but they're not all
"Metropolis." For every Franka Potente they give us, we get an Udo
Kier* in return. Not to mention the Nenas, Falcos, and Kraftwerks we're forced
to endure. Of course, to be entirely fair, they've also given us "Das
Boot." In return we gave them Hasselhoff. Proof further which side won the
war.
Interestingly enough, they're also known for length. The classic
"Greed" by Erich von Stroheim (1925) originally ran for over 8 hours.
Wagner's "Ring Cycle" operas totals, when performed back to back,
approximately 12 years. And contrary to popular belief, at NO time during those
epic operas does a SINGLE CHARACTER sing "Kill the wabbit, kill the
wabbit!" I learned that the hard way, kids.
Fortunately, "The Experiment" only lasts a tidy 114 minutes. And it's
pretty good too. I'd even go so far as to say that it's the best German movie
I've seen since "Run Lola Run". Of course, heaping that kind of
praise on it is meaningless when I admit that I haven't SEEN a single German
film since "Run Lola Run", but I'm hoping my candour is appreciated.
"The Experiment" stars a bunch of people whose names I can't
pronounce, like Moritz Bleibtreu. If the name means nothing to you, he's the
liver-lipped boyfriend of Franka Potente that ups and gets her killed
twice.hardly worth it, if you ask me. Bleibtreu plays Tarek Fahd, a taxi driver
who answers an ad in the paper for volunteers for a prison-type experiment. It
sounds like a pretty good gig.he gets 4000 Marks for 14 days work. Proving
early on how trustworthy he is, he immediately goes to the journal he used to
write for and offers to sell the exclusive story of the experiment for an
additional 10,000 Marks. For those of you scrambling for currency converters,
don't. They use the Euro now, and 14,000 Marks at the time was roughly
equivalent to about a buck-ten. He still manages to have enough put away to
invest in a nifty video camera system though.the camera is hidden in the frames
of a pair of nerd-glasses, with the receiver cleverly disguised as a Walkman.
Of course, we never see the receiver again, and since he's volunteering to be a
"prisoner" he can't take it with him. This leads me to one of two
possible conclusions: 1) it has even more range than they tell us, not to
mention almost unlimited hard-drive space and battery power, or 2) This is all
just an excuse to show us grainy, black-and-white point-of-view shots. Oh,
wait, the third possibility is that the receiver is hidden in a very clever
spot. I'd prefer to think it's 2, because the third possibility makes me squirm
uncomfortably in my chair. (And if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm saying
he hid it in his ASS.)
Back to the story.20 people have volunteered for this "experiment".
12 of them "prisoners" and 8 of them "guards". Among
Liver-Lips' fellow prisoners are his cellmate, a mysterious fellow whose entire
reason for being seems to be to remind us of Jason Statham of "The
Transporter" fame. This is no mean feat, considering this movie was made
long before "The Transporter", so I'd have to say that under the
circumstances he does a pretty good job. There's also a sad-sack type who runs
a convenience kiosk but manages to have no friends at all. On one hand, this
rings false because the character is very likable the kind of guy you can
picture knocking back a few bottles of Becks with while discussing Gerhard
Schroeder's foreign policy or soccer scores. On the other hand, the character
works because he's in prison, and loners like that usually wind up there after
the cache of bodies is discovered crammed in their crawlspaces.
There are the guards too. One is a really bad Elvis impersonator. I'm going to
go out on a limb and say there's no such thing as a GOOD German Elvis
impersonator, but for all I know there's a guy in Dusseldorf named Elvich
Preissler who packs in the crowds. It's also easier to buy him as an Elvis
impersonator because he's too fat to be a Hasselhoff impersonator, too male to
be a Nena impersonator, and too alive to be a Falco impersonator**. There 's
also Berus, the self-appointed leader of the guards. He's blond, blue eyed, and
psychotic. I guess they didn't want to go with the "Col. Klink"
stereotype guard, so they went with the much less obvious "Typical Third
Reich" stereotype.
Well, believe it or not kids, Liver-Lips and Berus don't get along. To be fair,
ALL of the prisoners act like a bunch of tools at first, knowing that the
"guards" are forbidden to use violence to keep order. But Liver-Lips
persists in taunting Berus, and soon Berus snaps. What follows is a battle of
wills between the two, with disastrous consequences. For all my sarcasm, this
is actually a pretty effective psychological thriller. This may be in part
because it's based on actual events. The infamous "Stanford Prison
Experiment" in 1971 was an almost identical study, with equally harrowing
results. At first, I was a little offended that the Germans would exploit a
failed American experiment in order to create a hit movie, but then I realized
that Americans have produced dozens of hit movies based on the failed German
experiment called World War 2, so I didn't feel so bad. But back to the movie:
it's pretty good. The characters are all pretty well defined, and the
performances are solid all around, especially Liver-Lips. There's a romantic
subplot (with a woman, gang.this isn't "Oz") that never really seems
to live up to its potential, but to explain further would require some minor
spoilers.
The DVD presentation of this movie is decent, but by no means perfect. The
extras are skimpy there's no commentary at all, but to be fair, it would be in
German and I wouldn't understand a word of it anyways. Instead, there are some
mildly interesting production notes and a bunch of trailers. The trailers, by
the way, aren't even worth watching if you don't speak the language. The German
one is pretty slick, but with the lack of subtitles, it doesn't tell you much.
The 3 US trailers are all of such horrible quality that not only do you see the
film's time code in them, it ALSO looks like it was taken directly from
Quicktime.horrible quality.
My biggest beef is with the subtitles. Some of them are awkwardly translated,
some are out of sync, and a couple flash on the screen so quickly that you
don't have time to read them (I'm talking under a second here, gang.) It
doesn't happen a lot, just enough to notice. And it temporarily takes away from
what is ultimately a good movie.
Because it's European, there is a lot on screen that a North American
production would never allow to be shown in a million years. This means some
pretty intense scenes of humiliation involving body fluid and - at times - a
lot of sausage on display. The movie can be brutal, but "good" brutal
rather than Nena-concert brutal. It's a character struggle based on position
and power.so it's really good if you're into that sort of thing.
Damn.all these Falco jokes, and now I've got "Rock Me Amadeus" stuck
in my head. Now THAT'S a form of psychological torture these "guards"
didn't even think of.
*For all you Udo Kier fans, I offer this advice: Andy Warhol's movies may have
been fun, but there were FAR from good. And Kier hammed his way through them.
And he sucked in Ace Ventura, too.
** At this point you may be saying "But he's too alive for Elvis too!
Elvis died!" To this I would say "You poor deluded person,
you."
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