As Movie Season winds down and Baseball Season approaches (yay!), Zip is behaving badly and not sending me enough movies, especially not enough of the movies I most want to see. I'm done fighting with them, though. I've complained multiple times, I've tried to game their system every which way in an effort to make it work for me. And now I'm resigned: this is as good as it's going to get.
Last night we saw an excellent film: "The Lives Of Others", "Das Leben der Anderen" in the original German. Set in East Germany in the 1980s, it's a chilling glimpse into what it might be like to live in a police state - where a chance remark to a friend could lead to interrogation and imprisonment, where all public discourse is controlled by the government, where trust and cohesion is impossible, because anyone may be an informant. It's also a story of finding humanity in inhumane situations, of one person's quietly heroic act that gives another person freedom.
"The Lives Of Others" was some of the best writing and acting we've seen this Movie Season. The DVD has an interesting interview with the writer and director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, including some detailed insights into the film's production design and score. I am amazed to learn this was his feature debut. It hardly seems possible.
I highly recommend seeing this movie without knowing any plot spoilers. Although it's not a conventional spy thriller by any means, it is suspenseful, and I wasn't sure how it was going to play out.
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