Cast: David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela WinklerDirector: Volker Schlondorff
This was one bizarre film and I don't know how I can blog about this. It's been a long time and I may be rusty. Let's see. This German film is about a boy named Oskar who was born with a mentally of an adult and on his third birthday he was given this red and white tin drum in which it became his life. With his mentally, the adult world involving his mother, her two love affairs (one of them is a cousin) and Germany between World War I and II, he decided to stop growing and purposely threw himself down the stairs. He would stay as a three year old forever and would not grow an inch more. He also learned an ability to produce this annoying shrieking sound that would shatter glass around him and he does this when he's upset and that happened quite a lot in this emotional film. He also bangs on his tin drum no matter where he's at, in a classroom, a circus, disrupting a Nazi rally, a funeral. Eventually Oskar became an adult but still in this tiny body, his life was going in directions and he found new loves, deaths and World War II had just started. There's so many bizarre scenes and scenes that makes you go "Umm." and I can tell you there was two scenes that made me cringe and they both has eels involved. It's a long movie and I started watching it late one night and couldn't stay up any longer but I would have seen this in one sitting in the middle of the day or something. You rarely see a kid give a great performance and whoever played Oskar was very impressive. I don't see very many German films and there's some German directors I follow but this was my first film with Volker Schlondorff and I'm curious about his other films.
Score: 7/10
