disgusting, overrated, pointless

Better Late Then Never

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Danzig in the 1920s/1930s. Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from his birth he decides at his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him at the eve of World War II.This is very much a fantasy film. IMDb says it is a war drama, which is true enough, being set in the place and time that it is. But this is less about the war and more about Oskar, which I think makes it a fantasy film. His imagination is incredible, or perhaps more incredible is the idea that none of this is his imagination at all. His ability to alter the world around him is quite interesting.The idea of a tin drum as a symbol of protest makes sense. It becomes even more interesting when put in the hands of a small child, protesting against life itself. Such an action is unheard of.

Of all the directors of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff is the one who interests me least. That's not to say that I'm not a fan — I can think of very few filmmakers with a gift for adapting written source material on par with Schlöndorff's — but it is that very facet of his art that diminishes my interest in his work. Because he is always working from material that is not his own, his films lack the personal, artistic touch of the New German filmmakers that interest me more, such as Fassbinder or Herzog. That being said, while I don't hold him in the same esteem as some of his contemporaries, there is no doubt that Schlöndorff is a highly talented, highly intelligent filmmaker, and he has had about as much to say about German society as any other member of his movement, even if he uses largely the words of others, instead of his own.This is a complex issue, of course. Alain Resnais worked from source material, and no one would doubt the artistic or personal qualities of his work. Sometimes the choice of material, combined with the cinematic execution of that material, can achieve a personal version close to that of the medium's greatest filmmakers who worked from their own, original ideas (i.e. Ingmar Bergman or Eric Rohmer). I'm not sure I believe Schlöndorff is comparable to Resnais in that regard, but there is no question that his piercing allegorical portraits of a German society still recovering from the trauma of World War II are as profound as virtually anyone's.The four films I've seen by Schlöndorff — "Young Torless", "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum", "Coup de grâce", and "The Tin Drum" — have alternated curiously in style. "Young Torless" and "Coup de grâce" utilized a formal realism (pardon the oxymoron, but I think it's appropriate) with a black-and-white aesthetic, while "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" and "The Tin Drum" were color films that operated within a predominantly classicist mode of filmmaking.To refer to "The Tin Drum" as classicism shouldn't be misconstrued to suggest that the cinematography is less impressive by technical standards. In fact, classicist films tend to be the most polished of all, but their formal and aesthetic qualities are impressive in a technical way, as opposed to an artistic one. In other words, the cinematography in a classicist film will very often be considerably well executed, but always toward the end of making the film go down as smoothly as possible for the viewer, not toward the end of being artistically expressive.It's a very important distinction, for the thing I found the most disappointing about my experience with "The Tin Drum" was how familiar it all felt. It reminded me too much of the kind of Hollywood classicism I grew up on in the '90s. Of course, "The Tin Drum" is immensely more complex, immensely more intelligent, and immensely better than virtually any of those films. Furthermore, this familiarity, in actuality, is probably to the film's credit, since it suggests that it served as inspiration for coming generations of classicist filmmakers, and likely influenced a great deal of future films (for instance, possibly, something as recent as "The Book Thief"). "The Tin Drum" also reminded me of an impressive and under-appreciated German film by Helma Sanders-Brahms, "Germany Pale Mother", which was released the next year, in 1980.Like all the films I've seen by Schlöndorff, "The Tin Drum" views very much like a novel (which is logical enough, since his films are based on novels). Both theme and symbolism are executed very much as they would be in literature, with form ultimately giving way to content. That being said, there was some vaguely surrealist imagery throughout "The Tin Drum" that definitely added a welcome element of visceral potency to the viewing experience. The film's protagonist is a young boy who, on his third birthday, just after the end of World War I, is given a toy drum by his mother. On that same day he makes a conscious decision (or what he recollects as a conscious decision) to stop growing. He is unimpressed by the adult world, and prefers to avoid it. His refusal to participate in this world is symbolized by the tin drum, which he keeps close by him, attached at the hip, for essentially the duration of the film, and when someone tries to take it away from him — when he feels threatened by the encroaching adult world around him — he beats his drum and yells in an ultra-high pitched voice that is capable of breaking any nearby glass. It is his unique defense mechanism, and his only means of protecting his tin drum (that is to say, his innocence) from the harsh world that envelops him. "The Tin Drum" is a film about social and cultural atrophy. The child with the drum is a metaphor for a German nation that had suffered petrification after the first war, and as a result, throughout the interbellum, the second world war, and, most importantly, the postwar period, it remained stuck in stasis, unable to grow or progress, like the child in the film. Naturally, as a means for dealing with life and its hardships, this is as ineffective for Germany as it is for the boy with the tin drum. One must eventually leave both the hopes and despairs of the past behind, and embrace the future, however uncertain and intimidating. This is Schlöndorff's criticism of German society. Schlöndorff (and the author of his source material, presumably) declares that it's time for Germany to wake up and move forward, at long last.I've heard so many mixed reviews about "The Tin Drum", and I think I weigh in somewhere in the middle. For me, it's a very good film, falling a bit short of a truly great one.RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

Made in 1979 this award winning German film is an adaptation of the book of the same name by Günter Grass. It is the story of Oskar who is born to a mother who loves two men and a grandmother with a past and very accommodating skirts. On his third birthday he sees how the adults around him are behaving and is less than pleased. So he makes up his mind that he will stop growing up.He is also inseparable from his tin drum – which he bangs at all occasions and needs to regularly replace. He also has a gift of having such a high powered scream that it will shatter glass – this he uses when ever he is displeased. His rejection of his family and their middle class attitudes is set against the rise of Nazism and Der Fuhrer. Even though his body will not grow his mind certainly does and that will bring its own problems.This is a truly memorable film, with acting, direction and camera work that is as close to flawless that I have seen. It is 136 minutes long but seems much shorter which is always the sign of a quality film. There are scenes that come close to bizarre but that too is used to show the absurdist nature of what was taking place at the time and beneath the pomp of the rallies, and the like, lay the very real dangers that Hitler and co would bring down on Germany. This is one of those films that all serious cinephiles need to see, I am glad I finally have.

As winner of the Foreign Language Oscar for 1979, The Tin Drum has been on my list of movies to look out for for a while. It's a lot stranger than I anticipated- possibly more unconventional than the winner of the same award for 1978, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Say the movie is a coming-of-age tale of a boy living before and during World War II in Poland, and yeah, you'd think it'd be fairly typical. Now say the protagonist never grows more than he was at age three, screams so high he can shatter glass whenever you try to take his drum away, and that his mom dies from an addiction to eating raw fish- and you'd say, what is this?The Tin Drum is a surreal dark comedy that is often more unusual than funny, but it is, generally, interesting and enjoyable to watch. You just have to be willing to accept a protagonist who isn't totally likable. Oskar's screaming actually hurt my ears, his drumming creates disruptions, he doesn't seem to mourn his parents' deaths, and despite some glimpses into the Nazis' cruelty, doesn't seem to have any problem with entertaining German troops. What this movie has to offer is a view of history, and life generally, quite possibly unlike any other. There is some colour, some laughs, some tragedy, and some eroticism, making for competent storytelling. Do I agree this is the best foreign language movie of 1979? I'd go with Tarkovsky's Stalker. But this is a movie worth seeing.