Hollywood Movie Friendship Review

Friendship shifts focus to the other end of the spectrum, to concentrate on the comic and apparently true-life travails of two young Ossies who decide to head toward San Francisco in 1990 in search of freedom and real junk food.

In fact, the film's virtue is its vice. It always wants to be so intense and so headlong, that spirits must never flag (my God, let's not let this become a normal German movie, all serious and depressing), and the boys and the girl are wildly ecstatic about every experience they have, no matter how awful. We are treated to a constant stream of montages where the kids shout out the window of their speeding (and often careening) car to show us how free they feel in the USA. Their naivete about what's permitted in America and what isn't is astonishing, but without that naivete the film wouldn't work at all.

Nevertheless, there are some excellent comic sequences here and there that do work, and that lead one to think that Goller is a director to watch and that his next film will be much improved.

Venue: Taormina Film Festival -- Beyond the Mediterranean
Production Companies: Wiedemann & Berg Filmproduktion, Mr. Brown Entertainment Produktion
Cast: Matthias Schweighofer, Friedrich Mucke, Alicja Bachleda
Director: Markus Goller
Screenwriter: Oliver Ziegenbalg
Producers: Quirin Berg, Tom Zickler, Max Wiedemann
Director of photography: Ueli Steiger
Music: Peter Horn, Andrej Melita, Martin Probst
Costume designer: Maria Schicker
Editor: Olivia Retzer, Markus Goller
Sales: Bavaria Film International