Winterkartoffelknödel

Shaft, Colombo, Kojak, Franz Eberhofer. Unlike his hard-hitting peers, Franz Eberhofer leads a slightly more mellowed-out style of life. A village cop on the wrong side of forty, he lives in a converted pigsty on the family farm together with his slacker dad and his psycho granny. While he's busy sabotaging demands from the mayor to work as a male lollipop lady, the heating in his abode goes bust, a mysterious foxy lady arrives in the quiet village, and a family of four is drastically decimated to a single lone survivor. Franz Eberhofer once again has to enlist the help of his histrionic colleague Rudi Birkenberger, his modern-day Watson, to crack the case.

Director Ed Herzog and his crew have once again managed to turn Rita Falk's intelligent and entertaining literary original into an intelligent and entertaining movie. It's tremendously enjoyable to watch, every scene works on its own and still adds to the plot. A large part of the reason is the great cast. Literally all the roles have been perfectly casted. Take for instance the (relatively unknown actress) Jeannette Haim as the mysterious moll Mercedes who drives all the village jokels wild. It's amazing how alluring she comes across even next to the blonder, younger, prettier Susi.

Finally we have prove that a German movie can be good and funny at the same time. Winterkartoffelknödel is so good I saw it twice already.

I still haven't read the novels this is based on (the chronology is supposedly off with the movie, this actually would have been before the book/movie Dampfnudelblues) and everyone who has read them tells me, they are even better than the movies, which is hard to cope. But as it is, this gets it right once again.

Actually it doesn't only get it right, it makes it even better. You have to like that special kind of humor of course. If you do, you will have a blast with this. The characters are small town "crazy" and this could be a German version of a Fargo world or something similar. Not that I want to compare the director or the movie as a whole with Fargo. It's the characters in it, that are similar.

You don't have to see the first one before watching this, but it would make sense. Not to mention that it's also a great movie too. Have fun (and you will), that's all I can say!