Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

GazerRise Fantastic!

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Charlot47 Good-humoured and not too serious fiction about the young Goethe, tall and sometimes gawky Alexander Fehling, during his stint at a law court in the modest Hessian town of Wetzlar.There he falls for the charming, gifted and sexy Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein), but sees her marry for family reasons his rich and influential boss Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). He also suffers the loss of his best friend Wilhelm Jerusalem (Volker Bruch), who blows his brains out. Out of these traumas comes a passionate semi-autobiographical novel, "The Sorrows of Young Werther", which overnight makes the still unsure young man a national hero. What Lotte says of the book, that it is not objectively true "Wahrheit" but creatively poetic "Dichtung", applies also to the film. The consummation of their love in a ruined abbey, ending up entwined naked in the mud, with subsequent colds that confine them to their separate beds, is filmed realistically but remains fantasy. More than a nod to Richardson's "Tom Jones" and, in the portrayal of the immortal artist as a young dog, to Shaffer's "Amadeus".

jotix100 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, the great German poet and playwright was indeed too young as the story begins. He is a terrible law student in the Frankfurt of the 18th century. Failing to pass the bar exam, he makes a bad impression on the panel that are conducting the oral dissertation. His father, furious with young Johann, decides he must go to another place that will prove not to be as distracting. So young Goethe is dispatched to Wetzlar, an unsophisticated spot, quite a contrast with the city he left behind.At the law firm where Goethe goes to work, he meets another colleague, Wilhelm, who is a kindred spirit who sees in the new arrival a friend. It is Wilhelm who introduces Johann to the local society. Johann falls hard fro the opinionated Lotte, the oldest daughter of an impoverished man. She is the oldest of seven siblings living outside the city. Johann and Wilhelm decide to pay her a visit in which young Goethe falls deeply in love with the charming young woman.Unknown to Johann, Lotte's father sees the opportunity when the occasion arises to accept a marriage proposal for his daughter, when Johann's superior at the law firm sets his eyes on Lotte. The fact causes the young man such distress that drives him to write his sufferings into a manuscript he dedicates to his beloved Lotte, the woman he cannot have. Lotte, reading what Johann wrote in his despair decides it is worth publishing the memoirs, something that surprises Johann on his return to Frankfurt where the book is a best seller.Directed by Philipp Stolzl, the film does not break new ground. It is a glossy account of a period in the life of the young artist whose work is revered as one of the best writers of the German language. The film is light as written for the screen by the director with Christoff Muller and Alexander Dydyna. A young Goethe as depicted in the story was quite a charmer in his dealings with the love he felt for a woman that was not meant to be his. It also conveys the fact that in spite of what his father wanted for him, Johann's mind was better suited for literature than a law career.Alexander Fehling has the good looks demanded for the role of Goethe. Miriam Stein fares much better with her Lotte, an accomplished portrait of the young woman who must help her family that needed her sacrifice. Moritz Bleibtreu is an accomplished actor seen here as Albert Kestner, the man that won Lotte because of his wealth and social standing rather than by getting her love. Volker Bruch is seen as Wilhelm.Our only objection we had in watching the film was the poorly colored subtitles in the version that was shown recently at the Landmark Sunshine that made us strain our eyes to follow the translation.

gregking4 Playwright, poet and author, Johann Goethe is one of the most famous German writers. This lavish production is part biopic, part colourful historical drama and part romance, but it makes for an entertaining and bawdy romp along the same vein as Tom Jones, Shakespeare In Love, etc. The film mainly concentrates on the youthful Goethe's life before he successfully published his first novel, at the age of 22, which made him the toast of Europe. When we first meet Goethe (Alexander Fehling), he is an aspiring poet. But after several rejections from publishers, who feel that his work is uninspiring, Goethe follows his disapproving father's advice and heads to the small town of Wetzlar, where he gains employment as a law clerk working for the officious Ketsner (Moritz Bleibtreu). He shares a room with a fellow law student, the boisterous and socially uncouth Wilhelm (Volker Bruch). He also falls in love with the beautiful Charlotte (Miriam Stein). But Charlotte's father is struggling financially, and arranges for Charlotte to marry Kestner. Goethe and Kestner become rivals, which eventually leads to Goethe being imprisoned. His misadventures and the doomed romance provides the material for Goethe's first novel The Sorrows Of Young Werther. Fehling (who had a small role in Inglorious Basterds) brings a rakish charm, with, energy and charisma to his performance as the irreverent, hard drinking, 17th century slacker Goethe. Bleibtreu is suitably cold as the rather dull Kestner. Stein is feisty and sassy as Charlotte. Director Phillip Stozl (the grueling mountaineering drama North Face, etc) directs the material with a light touch. He makes great use of locations to enhance the film's atmosphere. The production design is excellent, and the film's setting reek of authenticity.

Karl Self Goethe! is on a mission to rehumanize the godly "prince of poets" Goethe ("with O-E"), and largely succeeds. The movie picks out the period when young Johann is still trying to appease his dad by taking on a day job as assistant to the district attorney (or the mid-18.th- century equivalent to that job description) of boondocksville Wetzlar, after having faltered his legal studies in the much more mundane Strassburg. In other words, immediately before young John's groundbreaking success of "The Sufferings Of Young Werther". Goethe befriends social drop-out Jerusalem, struggles with his staunch superior Kestner, and eventually falls in love with charming ingénue Charlotte Buff, only to lose her to the better-established Kestner. Around the same time, Jerusalem commits suicide after an unhappy love affair with a married woman. Goethe processes his troublesome experiences by writing his first pageturner.To my mind this movie succeeds in bringing Goethe closer to the modern reader -- it only fails on one count: utter historical veracity. It's not a documentary, folks. Goethe failed his doctorate, but possibly not through laziness; what exactly Goethe passed his time with in Wetzlar is unclear, but he probably didn't work as a legal clerk; Kestner was therefore not his superior, and Jerusalem didn't shoot himself in front of Goethe. There, I said it.Personally, I thought two points of the movie were icky: I didn't buy that Charlotte and Goethe would have bumped uglies immediately after their first kiss (and especially not in the middle of the falling rain), and I thought the scene, when a despondent Goethe arrives in Frankfurt only to find out that Charlotte secretly had his novel published and that it turned out to be a smash hit bestseller (yadda yadda yadda), was extremely cheesy.Where the movie excels is to take us into a time that was, by modern standards, very damp, dark and filthy, but also wildly romantic.