t_atzmueller

There was a time when I was working in a video-store or, as we call them in Germany, videothek. Good times and the pay wasn't bad either. It was a shared duty of all involved to sporadically check the DVDs for errors. It happened now and again that customers would wander in, complaining that the film didn't work – and of course that they didn't want to pay for a defect film. So, those films were taken home by the employees and watched with German diligence. (Just on the side: 90 percent of the times the disc and film was in perfect order and of course the customers merely tried to get off free; but that's another story). As you might imagine, this sent all imaginable kind of films through my player – don't even get me started on what we had to check which came from the "Adult-section".

Now, why am I brattling on about days past, certainly boring the reader beyond patience? I'll tell you: as justification. And I assure anybody reading these lines, in any other circumstance I wouldn't have touched anything related to "Erkan & Stefan" with a ten-foot-pole. But then came the faithful day when a cross-eyed teen in baggie-pants and over-sized baseball cap appeared before the counter, mumbling something about "didn' work, voll krass, eyh". So, here I was with "Erkan & Stefan – Der Tod kommt krass" at my hands, cursing god and humanity, even trying to haggle with a female co-worker to exchange this film with the one she had to check (a porn involving fecal matters, if memory serves right). She refused.

If you're not familiar with the "comedic"-duo Erkan & Stefan, consider yourself lucky. In layman's terms, we could compare them as the German answer to Ali G. aka Sacha Baron Cohen in the role of Ali G. Or, to call it's by the real name: they're ripping off Ali G. In reality two rather mediocre comedians from Bavaria, the two have slipped into the role of a Turk and a German, both bred and raised in the seedier, ghetto-part of Munich. Their trademark is combining local Bavarian slang with Denglish (a bastardization of German with English words) and Kanak Sprak (also called "Kanakendeutsch", spoken predominantly by Turkish youth in the third or fourth generation, who still haven't managed to grasp the basics of German). Their most infamous "word-creation" (of which, unfortunately, there are many) is "eyh, krass" or alternatively "voll krass". Apart from the Latin origin of "crassus", the word means nothing, apart from something being extreme, both in the positive and negative sense. Sometimes teens will also utter it without any detectable reason or random mingle it into half-formed sentences. As it is, many of their "word-creations" were eagerly picked up by kids and teenagers who came from the shallower end of the social hierarchy – or shall we say: Kanak Sprak spread like typhus.

This charade was played over the next ten odd years. While the critics cringed, muttering sweet pillow-talk like "the most untalented Comedy-Stars of the nation" and the "bottom of the barrel", while language-teachers tore their hair out and parents wept bitter tears over their kids turning into morons, the alter-ego of Erkan & Stefan made those two bozos rich and popular figures. Until the day they dropped their masks on live-TV and implied in fluent German, that they would no longer associate with the scum they've catered to and would no longer play morons for morons. One would go on to become a member of the council on behalf of the German party SPD, the other one tried his luck in a couple of movies, appearing next to Corey Feldman in "Lucky Fritz" and Stephen Baldwin in "Shoot the Duke", before vanishing in the depth of soap-operas and TV-crime-shows. In short, the good news: they're gone and the bad news: their legacy lives on.

That should sum it up, unless we've forgotten something. Oh, yes, the movie: It's a rip-off of "Weekend at Bernie's" and if you're able to find one single, competent gag or something that would raise as much as a smirk: keep it. From me it gets a round number of points: 0/10 (And if you're still with me, wondering what I charged the kid who was responsible for me watching this garbage, that he claimed was not working properly: roughly thirty bucks, because the DVD was long overdue).

Sure, didn't we all have a good laugh at Sarah Palins expense? Admit it: like me you were waiting gleefully for a new interview during the 2008 elections, waiting for Mrs. Palin to blur out another avalanche of nonsense, hog-wash and absurd gibberish while standing in the limelight. Somehow half-convinced that we were watching an episode of Candid Camera or that somebody had elected the village-idiot to run as vice-president of the United States. At the same time trying to ignore the fact, as one commentator put it, "that (had McCain won), this woman would be a 72-year old man's heartbeat away from being president" – somebody who couldn't find major hotspots like Iraq on a map, but was convinced that she could see Russia from her porch.

I've always been a fan of Broomfield's Gung-Ho-style journalism. Or rather let's say, I've always enjoyed his style without necessarily coming to the same conclusions (no, I don't think that Kurt Cobain was murdered by his wife, as Broomfield has suggested in his "Kurt & Courtney").

The "appeal" (if I may use the word in this context) of Sarah Palin is that she is one of the members of this profession that allows a good insight into her mind. Politicians have long since learned numerous tactics and skills regarding body-language, gesture and syntax to be able to "shield" them off from prying minds. At times this can backfire (to mind comes Bill Clinton, who gave his Spiel away when pointing and nodding in the wrong direction while proclaiming "I did not have sex with this woman!"). Another fine example would be his wife Hilary: comparing her body-language when she was "just" First Lady to nowadays, where she has obviously gone through rigorous training, is like comparing night and day. Save to say, Sarah Palin possesses no such skill.

Broomfield doesn't have to dig through the dirt much. Mainly, he only needs to sit back and let Sarah's (former) friends, allies and acquaintances do the talking. The dirt would appear virtually out of nowhere, as if just waiting to hit Broomfield's camera. We get what we would expect and probably knew from the very beginning: it's a picture of a complete incompetent, bungling yet ruthless and ambitious politician, who entered the presidential race with the same hope of somebody purchasing a lottery ticket at the petrol-station. In short: it would have been child's play to mock or ridicule the documentary's subject, but – being the gentleman that he is – Broomfield opted not to go down that path, so his film never seems like a hatchet job (in contrast, let's recall Michael Moore tearing into a certain actor, of whom he knew that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and hence was easy prey; the contrast couldn't be starker). "Don't demean yourself and ridicule fools – they'll do that all by themselves", like the saying goes. Interesting, entertaining and distinctly neutral (at least from Broomfield's side, who opted to heed that saying mentioned above). 7/10