In These Times

After squirming through "The Lives of Others" in a Potsdam movie theater last year, I've been searching in vain for a commentator who would do it justice. That's why I'm grateful to Zizek for finally putting the record straight on this shamelessly overrated Oscar winner. The film's opening sequences certainly do capture the drabness of the East German experience (which I became intimately acquainted with in the 1980s, Stasi and all), but Donnersmarck immediately resorts to the flimsiest of cliches to get his "message" across. The phoniness of the loyal but noble East German intellectual is particularly cloying (what country did …

Posted to The Dreams of Others