Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7976 in DVD
• Brand: Sony Pictures
• Released on: 2004-08-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: German
• Subtitled in: English
• Running time: 121 minutes

Amazon.com
Contemporary comedies rarely stretch themselves beyond a bickering romantic couple or a bickering couple and a bucket of bodily fluids, which makes the ambition and intelligence of Good bye, Lenin! not simply entertaining but downright refreshing. The movie starts in East Germany before the fall of communism; our hero, Alex (Daniel Bruhl), describes how his mother (Katrin Sass), a true believer in the communist cause, has a heart attack when she sees him being clubbed by police at a protest. She falls into a coma for eight months--during which the Berlin Wall comes down. When she awakens, her fragile health must avoid any shocks, so Alex creates an illusive reality around his bedridden mother to convince her that communism is still alive. Good bye, Lenin! delicately balances wry satire with its rich investment in the lives of Alex, his mother, and other characters around them. Funny, moving, and highly recommended. --Bret Fetzer

DVD features
Though the DVD extras for Good Bye, Lenin! include a detailed featurette on the digital effects used in the movie (particularly intriguing because they had to be completely invisible--many viewers won't realize there were digital effects until they see this featurette) and a convivial cast commentary with Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Sass, and Alexander Beyer, the star of the DVD is director Wolfgang Becker himself. Not only is his commentary rich with historical information and thoughtful notes about the making of the movie (like the cast commentary, it's in German with English subtitles), for the deleted scenes (including two lovely scenes that expand on the relationship between Alex and his girlfriend Lara) he and Tom Tykwer (director of Run Lola Run and part of the X Filme collective that produced Good Bye, Lenin!) have an insightful conversation about the editing process, storytelling, and the essence of watching a movie. Utterly fascinating, and invaluable to any aspiring filmmaker. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
Christiane (Katrin Sass), a saintly East German Communist believer, falls into a coma just before the Berlin Wall comes down, in 1989. When she awakens, her son, Alex (Daniel Brühl), a smart young man who's completely wised up about Communism but adores his mother, creates a kind of ersatz reality for her-a living museum of Communism-in which nothing has changed. He gets his cranky sister and a group of embarrassed neighbors to take part in the charade, going so far as to work with a filmmaker buddy on fake news broadcasts about the unending triumphs of a regime that no longer exists. This social satire, a huge hit in Germany, was written by Bernd Lichtenberg and Wolfgang Becker and directed by Becker, whose background is in German TV. The movie often plays like a series of TV-comedy skits, some of them funny and incisive, some larkish and insubstantial. Yet beneath the slapstick surface a sombre German heart beats in mournful rhythm: the point of the fable, we slowly realize, is that Communism in Germany was always an ersatz reality-that for forty years Party leaders were creating a large-scale version of the fiction that Alex creates in his mother's bedroom. In German. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker