Good concept, poorly executed.

Better Late Then Never

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Tom Schilling gives a solid performance here, starring as Niko Fischer, a young man, living in Berlin, who's lost his way in life and is currently broke, unemployed, has no serious relationships, and is still taking tuition money from his father without telling him he dropped out of law school some 2 years before.The satirical film will capture one day in Niko's life, as he encounters all kinds of bizarre situations, I imagine trying to be in the vein of Scorsese's "After Hours". He'll also meet all kinds of mostly mean-spirited and malevolent people, but one thing he'll have a heck of a time finding is a cup of coffee.Although I was intrigued enough to want to know how it would all turn out, the biggest problem for me was that I felt the filmmaker Jan Ole Gerster (making his feature film debut) went over-the-top with the mean-spiritedness and thus I couldn't find much entertainment here. I imagine we all meet these obnoxious jerks at times in our lives, so I would have much preferred more of a mixture of oddness and quirkiness rather than constant malevolence, but that's me.

Whilst the nouvelle vague phenomenon continues in NY, it's seems Berlin, and Jan Ole Gerster actually has something to say. At times comedic, at times serious, the writing is wonderfully wry and reminiscent of Woody Allen's darker moments. The tension between the black comedy and the underlying backdrop of Berlin's inescapable history is a knife edge Jan treads with the delicacy of a master. Berlin looks fantastic in black and white, and the effortlessly understated cinematography and precise editing mean this film deserves all the hype that Frances Ha is getting and more.Refreshing, and fresh this is an incredibly accomplished thesis film. And trust me, you can live without the trailer.

Oh Boy is somewhat reminiscent of Prozac Nation. The protagonist is an unlikable, spoilt child, leeching off others while breezing through life. It is an anti-"Coming of Age" film, showing how people refuse to "grow up" - even supposed adults. Niko's father is childish, his friend an underachieving actor and the former classmate he runs into is in a way still the little girl with a crush on him. It doesn't end there, even Germany itself refuses to "grow up", clinging to its Nazi past and sticking to absurd bureaucracy.On top of having an amusing story, Oh Boy has lovely cinematography. Berlin looks great in black & white, and with the lazy jazzy soundtrack it sometimes seems like a 50s film. Quite a promising start from Gerster, who won just about every German film award around.

"Oh Boy" features the same "plot" as countless art-house and student movies: A young man drifts through a big city, meets strange people, the end. There is probably a fancy name for this, but most people just call it pointless, boring, a waste of time. Regarding "Oh Boy" there is really no point in arguing with them.The "boy" (Tom Schilling) meets about 12 stale caricatures: a presumptuous bureaucrat, a snide coffee shop waitress, a wacky lonely neighbor, a fat girl who was bullied by him at school and is now thin and very blatantly mentally unstable, his rich & heartless daddy, stupid ticket inspectors ... These characters are neither funny nor interesting, they are just incredibly annoying versions of stereotypes recycled by a clueless author. He actually manages to dedicate two of the movie's scenes to the times of Hitler - in a movie about a young man's journey through the Berlin of today! That's world-class, in its own inane way. You are afraid to deal with current topics; you don't have a single original idea? Well, you can't go wrong with Hitler! He's still got a gigantic fan base that can't get enough of this guy."Oh Boy" is author/director Gerster's thesis project for a film academy. Therefore critics shouldn't be too harsh; they should concentrate on the promising aspects of this exercise. But there was a preposterous hype about this movie. It won the highest German movie award, the "German Film Award", for best feature film. This "best German movie of 2012" will be shown in art-house cinemas and Goethe Institutes around the globe. There is no reason to hold back punches anymore. Gerster's professors might be proud, but viewers expecting a good movie are bound to be seriously disappointed.While I'd give zero points for the author, the work of the cinematographer is quite good. "Oh Boy" is not only filmed in black-and-white, sometimes it really does look like an actual movie from the Fifties. And it has got an appropriate jazzy soundtrack to go with that. All in all there are several minutes of lovely Berlin photography. If B&W-movies do have a future, the name of the cameraman Philipp Kirsamer is definitely one to remember.In one of the two remarkably pointless Hitler scenes, the weather-worn old man Michael Gwisdek (born in 1942) gives a theatrical monologue about how he as a young boy witnessed the "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938, dreading that all the glass would hurt his bicycle tires the next day. This 5 minutes long, static monologue got him the "German Film Award" for best male actor in a supporting role. Awkward! Is the German cinema really that dead? ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 12)