Wenn ich dich wiedersehe

Piece of garbage about a widowed man (Joseph Brooks) who finds new love with a college flame (Shelley Hack)...but will it last? You seriously won't care.

Badly acted (Hack is so bad you stare at the TV in disbelief), poor direction with some really terrible songs (although the title song was a minor hit). I heard this movie was a good one for romantics--I'm a big romantic myself but I HATED this thing. It's done so poorly in so many departments it boggles the mind. If you want to see a good movie about a man finding love after his wide died get "Chapter Two". THAT one is fun, romantic and believable with a knockout performance by Marsha Mason. This one lacks everything the first one has.

When it first came out they actually had an advertising campaign telling guys to take someone they loved and lost to this movie--it might bring them back together (!!!!) My guess is if anyone took a woman to this movie she probably still hates him to this day!

I love to watch movies from the 1970s, especially romances, to check out the cheesy clothes, huge, poofy hair, bad disco music, etc. This and Moment by Moment, made the same year, win 1978's most cheesy romances of the year. Shelley Hack, who went on to replace Kate Jackson on Charlie's Angels, is beautiful but looks uncomfortable throughout. I've read she asks interviewers not to mention this film. Joe Brooks, who basically did everything in this movie (co-star, director, writer, producer, wrote and arranged the music), can't save the film either.

Still, if you love cheesy 70s movies, you'll lap this one up!

It's too bad, too, because the idea had a lot of potential. It just needed a better script, better songs, actors who could actually act and a director who knew what he was doing.

Mostly though, this movie is an exercise of ego for one Joe Brooks. He directs, he acts, he sings, he produces. Presumably, he also cast Shelley Hack, whose last name pretty much sums up the state of her acting ability, in the lead female role.

Where to start? The acting, if it can be called that, is an abomination. Shelley Hack is leaden and Joe would be lucky to be so good. He plays a jingle writer who aspires to greater things. Judging from the music, he's found his niche with jingles. It has a certain Barry Manilow light quality to it. Imagine hell being trapped in an elevator for all eternity with muzak playing Joe Brooks greatest hits, and you'll begin to get a taste for just how bad it gets.

Especially when Joe starts to sing. When Joe made "You Light Up My Life," the first decision he made was to dub Didi Cohn's voice with Debbie Boone's. Would that he showed as much sense here. Somewhere out there, cats start to howl when Joe sings.

The bottom line, watch if you must, but remember to bring a book to read. It's two hours of your life you'll never get back

This movie has to be seen to be believed. It fails miserably on every level. Fortunately, Joe Brooks handled the direction, writing, and lead acting role himself, so there are fewer people to blame for it.

As a romantic lead, Joe has about as much appeal as a potted plant. His leading lady, Shelley Hack, acts as though she were posing for the picture on front of a box of All Bran. It's pretty bad when the most professional acting performance in a movie is delivered by a little girl (Danielle Brisebois).

Joe plays a jingle writer who dreams of being a serious musician, even though all of his "serious" songs still sound like extended jingles, and the classical piece he composes to show off his true talent would be better suited for a group of musical saw players instead of an orchestra. Watching his dramatic gestures as he conducts this ear-splitting opus in the recording studio, as the dazzled Shelley Hack grins at him like a stuffed loon, is one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes ever filmed.

Joe was obviously hoping for another big chart-topper like "You Light Up My Life", but its inexplicable success was not to be matched by the cringe-inducing dirge that is this film's theme song. I don't know who performed it, but he doesn't sing it as much as he suffers through it. He seems to be battling his way through a particularly intense bout of constipation as he strains to expel the stomach-churning lyrics. But I doubt if even Debby Boone could've made this song any more tolerable.

When I saw this movie on HBO several years ago, I just had to have it. I watch my tape every so often just to gape in wide-eyed amazement at how truly awful a movie can be. As a bad-movie lover, I hold this perversely-entertaining cinematic messterpiece in high esteem -- it's the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE of romantic movies, and truly one of the worst films ever made.

You know what I loved about this film ? That both Hack and Brooks wore glasses. In 1978, that was a breakthrough! Remember all the film fatales that wore specks and then when they removed them were deemed beautiful ? Or even the ones like Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep and many others that had to remove them when they wanted to impress the guy ? Well today lots of girls wear glasses; it's a style thing and I would bet that no one under the age of 25 understands the importance of facial lenses in film. In the old days it just did not happen that a romance could develop between two four-eyes ( or eight eyes in this case) But it did in this film and THAT single thing is what makes it great.