Die Zeit der bunten Vögel

This movie has a lot to recommend it. The paintings, the music, and David Hewlett's naked butt are all gorgeous! The plot, a story of redemption, forgiveness, and courage in the face of adversity is also very interesting and touching -- and it's not predictable, which is saying quite a lot about a movie in this day and age. But, the acting is mediocre, the direction is confusing, and the script is just odd. It often felt like it was trying to be a parody, but I never figured out what it was trying to be parody *of*. And if it's not a parody, well, it remains a movie with great potential that it didn't live up to.

The ending ties things up a bit too neatly, but this is a ravishingly beautiful film. Good ensemble work by all the cast (although the lovely Uma has obviously had some acting classes since this role)...However, the art direction is the true star - it's definitely worth checking out for that alone. This may not be Boorman's best work, but it didn't deserve the panning it got from the mainstream media when it came out.

This "farce" about a wealthy millionaire who puts his spoiled children out of their plush lifestyle, forcing them to live in a Brooklyn slum building he owns is a strange little item. There was possibilities in the storyline but Coleman's children (which include Uma Thurman) are so flighty they get on your nerves quickly. Circumstances occur that force Coleman to enlist his children's help and the movie gets unglued at the end. Both Dabney Coleman and Joanna Cassidy, both fondly remembered from the "Buffalo Bill" tv series of the mid 80's, deserve better.

This film brought out the barracuda in most of the major critics. And did the public take one bit of notion? It did and flocked elsewhere.

But I still remember the overall impact this forgotten little gem had on me when I watched it some 14 odd years ago in one of these little arthouse cinemas that had all but vanished as multiplexes became the latest rage. 'Breathtaking' was the word for it. This reaction was caused by the picture's extraordinary visual beauty: cinematography as an art form has never been more ravishingly demonstrated as in the composition of light, shade and colour. I remember a series of scenes so beautiful I wanted to stop the moving pictures occasionally and just be a picture.

But like other visual masterpieces, its triumph did not extend to the screenplay and dialogues that were often boring, sometimes even downright foolish.

One of John Boorman's finest films. Dabney Coleman rises above his paper-cutout character status of the "bad guy" to become a basic family man with real family problems and the "kids" played by Hannah, Glover and Amis are really fun characters. The plot actually has twists in it that make the whole thing fun to watch and the ending has a "rightness" to it which lets you come away from the film with a good feeling about life and people. A really good way to spend a couple of hours.