Suck Me Shakespeer (2013)

This movie is a lighthearted, unpretentious comedy to be enjoyed as such. I don't understand why people come on this site and write pretentious criticisms as if this movie were made with winning an Oscar in mind. I liked the movie for what it is. Also, it's recommended to have relatively good command of the German language, as some of the humor in this movie is pure speech humor which, some of it, can't be translated (for example the way Chantal speaks).

Fmovies: I am German but I usually don't watch German movies. However, I really love Fack ju Göthe. It's a clever and funny movie about how German teenagers of the lower social classes are often perceived by Germans. It plays with all the stereotypes we Germans have about teenagers whose parents are immigrants, on welfare, alcoholics etc. Not only the language used but also the names of the characters portray this very well - both are a reflection of German reality, not made-up for entertainment. I laughed tears throughout the whole movie but I also cried, and then I laughed and cried at the same time. Would watch it over and over again. 10/10

Handsome rascal Zeki Müller has just been released after serving 13 months on the inside, but now everything seems to be going his way: All he has to do is dig up his loot so that he and his stripper friend can elope on an endless holiday of snorting coke and getting breast implants (her, not him). Unfortunately, the squalid containers of Goethe Comprehensive School now stands where he once buried his stash. Yadda yadda, and the old reprobate ends up as a sub teacher in the dysfunctional school with square-but-cute (her nerd glasses barely conceal that she's a smouldering sexual vulcano) colleague Lisi Schnabelstedt, trying to come to grips with his dysfunctional pupils. In the end, bad boy gets girl, discovers his heart of gold, and becomes teacher with an edge. Never mind the plot, though, because it's just a vessel for a lot of zany teacher-student-scenes and the übercampy love story. And since many of the scenes and dialogues with the students are fast and witty, I can benignly pardon the fact that the love affair plot is far more reactionary and clearly less quirky than in the writer-director's previous smash hit "Türkisch für Anfäger" (at one point, Lisi's sassy girlfriend advises her to lose the glasses or she'll never get laid).

I ususally don't like Katja Riemann, but she really delivers an outstanding performance here (compared to the lukewarm efforts of M'Barek and Herfurth) as the cynical principal, and Uschi Glass reprises her "Lümmel von der ersten Bank" days as a worn-out teacher.

Suck Me Shakespeer fmovies. This is a brilliant written and act-out movie. Didn't expect that. I don't want to spoil and for that I wont do it. I can tell that this piece is sarcastic, funny and tragic, all at once. No stalling tactics and I'm very thankful for that. All of the chars were exaggerated pictures of somebody you actually know and that is what makes it so lovely. If you want a very well-conceived German comedy or missed something like that, this is for you movie! I'm aware that the ending isn't near the reality, but I appreciated it, because most of the German productions seem to try to be very accurate to the law etc. and miss the point of entertaining (sometimes). In this case, they found the balance between unrealistic and plausible.

This film has some of the most conflicting reviews I've ever read! Comedies will always polarise opinions but this one seems to have gone to the extreme, although in fairness, there are only around 11 reviews at the time of writing mine so perhaps if more people contributed their opinions, we would get a better indication of the overall success of the film.

First, I'll discuss the story and how engaging it is: I really liked the leads and the supporting characters were interesting. It's a fairly predictable plot so I knew what to expect but I always like it when character development and changes in people are done subtly and believably. No one suddenly makes any huge leaps to become a better person and in fact, people don't do a complete 180 and suddenly change every aspect of their personalities which adds to the realism.

This is a very fast-paced, slapstick-style film which injects enough sarcasm and biting one-liners that the 'silly humour' aspect of the direction is easily overlooked. It helps that the editing is superb; no joke is ever drawn out and the film moves frantically from one scene to the next. I would say that the style of the film is similar to that of Clueless (1995) in that people use over-the-top facial expressions and crazy 'goofball' things happen like setting booby traps but the script is extremely witty so it complements the action really well.

I imagine that Fack ju Göhte would have been entertaining enough as a straightforward film without any humour however, it is a comedy and in terms of 'how' funny the film is, it would have been useful to me if reviewers had provided some examples of comedies they found funny so that I could compare. Here are a few comedies or films I found funny:

Overt comedies:

American Pie, Horrible Bosses, Step Brothers (get past the first ten or fifteen minutes and this one is genius), The Other Guys, 21 Jump Street, Hot Tub Time Machine, Someone Marry Barry, Pineapple Express, Ted, Bad Words, everything Jim Carrey...

Films with humour I like:

Back to the Future(s), Groundhog Day, The Truman Show, Borat, Meet the Fockers, Juno, The Guard (2011) - The Guard is a must-watch!

So those are some examples of films I found funny. That's not to say I found every joke hilarious but these are films I'd recommend to someone who was looking for a funny film to watch.

At this point, I will highlight that I watched the original German film with German subtitles. I'm not sure how successful comedies are when translated into other languages so it's worth noting this.

In my opinion, the fact that Fack ju Göhte is one of the most successful German films in years, speaks for itself. I really enjoyed the story and it had me laughing out loud every five or ten minutes.

9/10

If there ever was a film that made me feel it was geared for being sold up for a Hollywood remake - this was it, what with pseudo-hip-hop slang and American pop-numbers in the soundtrack. It's okay enough in its own right (just like the main character is okay at being a teacher), but it does look like it's planning on scoring big-time (again, just like the main character).

Whether I'm right or wrong about that, we're looking at a German flick that wants to be as edgy as is demanded from European films, but ends up bogged down by cookie-cutter cop-outs, in true American style. It's at its edgiest in the title itself, then in some scenes that involve teacher-student relations and then in the very premise that the best suited person for being a teacher nowadays is - an ex-con.

The ex-con, the central character, gets out of prison and finds out that the money from the robbery he was jailed for ended up buried on the school ground. He applies for a vacated teacher's spot in a bid to extract the loot, but finds out that teaching rowdy teenagers is slightly more than he bargained for. Not a new formula for the plot, but it works very efficiently. The character of Mr. Miller is written as a rude, no-nonsense guy, and many successful jokes stem from that fact. Also, the dialog is sometimes witty, quite unexpected of them Germans.

Bad, unfortunately, outweighs the good just enough to give the effort a mere middle mark. The actor in the main role, while being very handsome and having a striking on-screen appeal, gives an unbalanced performance. Many times he acts out instead of just acting and other times he merely recites the lines. The rest of the cast is also as mediocre, but in their case that isn't such a problem since their characters are written as predictable clichés anyway and don't have to carry the film.

The story itself doesn't squeeze enough out of the premise and goes for clichéd resolutions way too often. Subplots are underwritten (such as ex-con's relation to his former mates), forced (the love story) or thrown in out of the blue (the theatre play), while one crucial possibility, that the police might also be snooping around trying to recover the loot, is completely forgotten.

Clocking at 110 minutes, this is by no means a light feature. Some scenes drag on unnecessarily, especially attempts at slapstick that never really come out right. Instead of trimming down the fat, the director tried to cover up the lack of pace by - choppy editing. This is the single most outstanding technical problem in "Fack ju, Göhte" - the cuts are often so fast and abrupt they get in the way of the flow and the plot. Because of that, many scenes never have the time to really sink in, not even the draggy ones, and the comedic potential is thus lost.

Also standing out as really bad is ending the story with a typical politically correct "feelgood" closure, where an interesting societal outcast is turned into a castrated and "useful" member of the community. It makes me regard this film as one big predictable hoax and it makes me hope for a Hollywood remake, seeing how it will actually be an improvement for once.