Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Ehrgeiz The 80ies were a very calm era in Germany. Student revolution and the terror by RAF was overcome, while the economical crisis of the 90ies was still ahead. But for some reason the people had great fear, especially of an atomic 3rd world war, which was in a way irrational. "Am Tag als Bobby Ewing starb" treats these subjects. A mother and her son move to some kind of hippie community (new forms of living together also were quite popular) near a nuclear power plant in rural northern Germany. The mother falls in love to the leader of the community. Her son, who liked more to live in the city, has problems to adopt the new lifestyle, but he soon finds some friends. He hates the hippies and is more into drinking, shooting with rifles and stuff. So the movie - which got some good renown by German critics move on. I personally felt some disappointment after watching this. For a satirical comedy, the movie had to much depression in it, as the community slowly decays. Also I did not like that there was sometimes so much distance between the mother and her son, as if they were no relatives. I think the goal of the movie was to portray the atmosphere in the 80ies. In this, it succeeds, but the plot is a bit pointless and awkward. I think sometimes, the more artistic German movie makers have a certain fear to give direct messages, everything is subtextual, a bit "dogma"-like, which is why they have this boring touch (for examples movies like "Halbe Treppe" or "Erleuchtung garantiert). If you'd like to see a comedy about leftist communities, I much more recommend Moodysons' "Together", which is way more funny and elaborated. The beginning of "Together" with the naked people seems to have inspired the beginning of this movie, too.

Karl Self This movie is a fictionalised re-narration of director and co-author Peter Jessen's experience of being dragged to a rural commune by his drop-out mother, and as such it's probably a lot more accurate than a docu-miniseries about the beginnings of the alternative/eco movement -- viz, the Mueslis, as they were so cruelly and accurately dubbed in German. Jessen achieves this by eschewing the two pitfalls of this genre, smarmy those-were-the-days nostalgia and cheap ridicule of a bunch of folks who were, at the very least, active idealists, albeit in often very smelly socks.(Tidbit information for neophytes: Why didn't they just wash the damn socks? Well, sheep wool was considered to be so vibrantly, wholesomely natural that not only does it clean itself, but you would actually be destroy its magical self-cleaning properties by placing them in the suds. I'm not making this up -- my mother had apparently read the same book, which afforded me olfactory properties that didn't exactly enhance my social standing among my peers.)The acting is absolutely exceptional down to the minor characters, and overall it's a wonderfully understated movie. It expects you to bring a lot of curiosity and a modicum of sympathy along, though -- if you think hippies are a bunch of commie bleeding-heart tree-huggers then you are probably better off watching something else -- Dallas, for instance.

basemnt-dwellr This film is about a group of people living together in the eighties on a farm during the time of demonstrations against nuclear power.I thought this film looked like it was made more for TV than cinema. Not worth shelling out your 10 bucks for the cinema.In the beginning I was reminded of a documentary or a private film by the look of the film, you know, shaky hand camera, the pictures not really in focus etc.The plot is almost nonexistent, the story line gets not advanced. Possible SPOILER: A woman who got abandoned by her husband and her adolescent son move together with a group of people who share a farm. Coming from the city the son doesn't like it in the village, but after a while he meets some new friends (among them a girl) and starts to like it. The mother starts a relationship with the leader of the group. But when the accident happens in Chernobyl, the group falls apart. That is all. There really is nothing else.I thought the change in the group came because of the Chernobyl accident. The fact that Bobby Ewing died was not really important for the plot (so why the title of the film?). I don't know, but I thought the film was irrelevant and forgettable.

DocM The day when Bobby Ewing died is a film about the origins of the green movement in Germany in the mid-eighties. A countryside hippie community founded in protest against a nuclear power plant is depicted as prototypical for the era - and this is the major problem of the film: All the stereotypes, memories etc. of the years gone by are packed into this film. Whether you actually liked or loathed the greens doesn't matter, there's something for everyone. What is not in this film, is actually a visible storyline or even script. In the beginning a mother and son arrive at the hippie community, apparently due to some problems earlier. The mother likes the new life, the son does not - why does not really become clear. In the end, its all different and the community's "chieftain" changed his mind also - again it is pretty unclear why... Was it all Chernobyl? Or because Bobby was dead? No one will ever know...