Late Show

I grew up and went to university in the times of Gottschalk's and Schmidt's Late Night Shows in Germany. Watching this movie 15 years after it was produced still left me entertained. German private TV and media of the 90s well-observed, some brilliant acting. Even Gottschalk manages, though he basically plays himself. Yeah, and Dietl absolutely wanted to have his girlfriend Ferres in all of his movies. He could/should have done without. Who really convinced me was Harald Schmidt, who is actually an educated actor. I loved his cynical TV show and it is just great to see this cynic overacting as a cynic pulling strings. The scene where he loses control of his face when he consoles Engel's stalker nearly made me fall off the couch. I also liked the roles of Jasmin Tabatabai, Dieter Pfaff and Olli Dittrich. And it was good to see Helmut Zerlett and his band on the show again!

For a German comedy. German comedies are almost non-existent. Dietl is one of the exceptional directors for this stuff. Well, so and so. I can imagine that anyone from outside of Germany won't find this one very funny; though someone who is acquainted with the main actors could. Gottschalk is a lousy actor, but here he just has to play himself, and that's very much okay. The second hero, Harald Schmidt, has been a successful copy of any late night Leno or Letterman on German TV. Veronika Ferres is one of the worst actors in Germany, and even that fits in this movie: she IS a bad actress. Foreign people would enjoy a former well-known comedian from Cologne being the doctor who give him a jab of morphine to sleep for around 12 hours, and in any dubbing, the southern, alpine, accent of the money man wouldn't work.

I can imagine that the whole lot comes across as a 5, or maximum of 6/10 for the uninitiated foreign viewer. And it could creep up to maybe even 10/10 for those who know Cologne, German private TV business and especially the heroes. Meaning, I could enjoy almost the whole lot simply by being able to understand the self-irony. The I-don't-take-myself-any-serious-in-this-plot attitude of those who kind of play themselves, and the daily fights in their original, similar, positions.

Maybe I'm biased. I have to confess that I have severe problems to like homegrown movies (especially those German films they used to call "comedies"). But with Helmut Dietl directing I thought it at least possible that "Late Night" could prove to be an interesting film. It didn't. So what went wrong? I expected a biting satire about all those idiotic television programs that continue to overflow our everyday life and the people that "create" them. Obviously, there are great possibilities in that concept. Dietl tried to make this kind of satire, but he tried too hard. "Late Night" is a satire without laughs. The screenplay contains too many things that won't work (most of all the plot). As usual with German comedies, the film is mainly dialogue-driven, while visual gags do not exist or are clumsily executed. Only two or three gags really work. The directing is not up to Dietls usual standard. But the biggest problem is that this is a comedy about television, that was co-produced by a television station, that is cast with popular show masters and that looks most of the time like a TV-movie. I wonder what the people involved in this production wanted to say about television - that everybody makes **** instead of them? After viewing this movie, I am afraid that this is not true.

Surprisingly good film, which in retrospect turns out to be the third part of a tetralogy devised by Helmut Dietl about the German / German-speaking media society.

"Schtonk" (1992) was about the Hamburg-based print media (especially STERN, of course), "Rossini" (1997) was about the Munich-based film industry (Constantin Film), "Late Show" (1999 ) is of course about the depraved private television (RTL) in beautiful Cologne and with "Zettl" (2012) we then went to Berlin, the center of power. Of course, the dialectal colors that can be heard everywhere also fit. All four areas, all four cities mentioned, functioned as melting pots of the German-speaking area, in which Dietl can celebrate a swan song for the cultural industries of the old Federal Republic style.

The film "Late Show" was of course made in the 1990s, a time marked by decisive upheavals. On the one hand, there is a spirit of optimism (remember the euphoric founding of new television channels such as VOX, n-tv and VIVA in the first half of the decade), and on the other, bitter disillusionment as more and more flat-headed people like Beckmann, Kerner and Pilawa emerge as new television stars (, some of which still shape the television business today!!!) and gave a devastating testimony to the further development of the medium of television. One also remembers the events of 2004, when Rudi Carrell almost single-handedly destroyed EUROVISION hostess Anke Engelke's late night show via an interview because, as a woman, she supposedly couldn't handle such a show. So Dietl definitely knows what he is saying here.

Dietl's quotes from German film history are also well done: the Heimatfilm, Fassbinder and the lying soft-focus images (especially in the horse scenes with Veronica Ferres) in the "Emmanuelle" imitators always send greetings. There is more to this film than anyone was prepared to see at the time. It is a lost world that is portrayed here. In 1999, when the film came out, it was still very much alive. Social media like Facebook and You Tube still had their meteoric rise ahead of them. Unfortunately, ACADEMY AWARD nominee Helmut DIETL was no longer able to make his own film about it.

You should definitely give this film a second viewing, there might be surprising insights!

Helmut Dietls satire places Halrald Schmidt at the front of biting black humor. Furthermore, I found Jasmine Tabatabai worth mentioning as a victim of higher forces. Altogether successful, although unfortunately a somewhat weak ending - nevertheless recommended, provided one likes H. Schmidt!