![\"Ulrich](\"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/livesothers.jpg\" "\\"livesothers\\"")
Ulrich M\u00fche, as Stasi agent Wiesler, is the ear in the wall, listening to your most intimate whispers<\/p><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Man in the Gray Flannel Life<\/span><\/em><\/h1>\n\u00a0[xrr rating=5\/5]<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).<\/strong><\/em> Starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich M\u00fche, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Volkmar Kleinert, Matthias Brenner, Charly H\u00fcbner, and Marie Gruber. Music by St\u00e9phane Moucha and Gabriel Yared. Cinematography by Hagen Bogdanski, B.V.K. Edited by Patricia Rommel, B.F.S. Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. (Sony Pictures Classics\/Buena Vista International [Germany] GmbH, 2006, Color, 137 minutes, in German with subtitles. MPAA Rating: R.)<\/strong><\/p>\nEarlier this year<\/span>, <\/em>I wrote: \u201cI offer Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/em> as exhibit \u2018A\u2019 that the independent revolution is over.\u201d After seeing the captivating Cold War espionage movie The Lives of Others<\/em> from German writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, I realize I may have spoken prematurely. Let me now humbly (but gladly) eat those words.<\/p>\nMade on a shoestring budget of $2 million, The Lives of Others <\/em>is the most suspenseful psychological thriller I\u2019ve seen in a long time, ranking with Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s The Conversation<\/em> or John Frankenheimer\u2019s The Manchurian Candidate<\/em>. What\u2019s more, it presents one of the strongest pro-individual, anti-collectivist themes of any movie I\u2019ve ever seen\u2014all the more surprising because it hails from, of all places, Germany.<\/p>\nIts key lies in its title, which seems at first glance drippingly altruistic. The year, appropriately, is 1984, and Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich M\u00fche), is in his twentieth year as an agent of East Germany\u2019s dreaded Ministry for State Security, commonly known as \u201cStasi.\u201d The \u201cshield and sword\u201d of the Socialist Unity Party, 100,000 Stasi agents and 200,000 paid informers hold the small Soviet satellite nation in a death grip, monitoring and controlling the lives of its 17 million citizens.<\/p>\n
Captain Wiesler is a meticulous interrogator, ruthlessly wearing down suspects until they confess. An instructor at the Stasi academy, he trains future agents always to be on guard. \u201cThe best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation,\u201d he instructs his students. \u201cThe enemies of the state are arrogant. Remember that. \u201d<\/p>\n
A humorlessly menacing man, Wiesler leads a lonely, Spartan existence in an antiseptic, sparsely furnished apartment in a concrete high-rise that houses many fellow agents. One day at the academy, his former classmate and current boss, gregarious Oberstlieutnant Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), drops in with an assignment right up Wiesler\u2019s alley. One of their artists appears to be straying from the flock, and Wiesler has been assigned to watch him. However, the subject in question is no dissident, but the most celebrated playwright in the DDR, Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch)\u2014a citizen so loyal to the Party that he believes his is \u201cthe greatest country on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later that evening, spying from a balcony seat with opera glasses, Wiesler detects the mark of subversiveness on Dreymann\u2019s face as he watches the actors onstage performing his play. As Georg beams with proprietary approval, rising to applaud, Wiesler quietly utters to himself a one-word indictment that seals the dramatist\u2019s fate: \u201cArrogant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Georg lives with longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck)\u2014a radiant brunette who is as celebrated an actress as Georg is a writer (and to whom Wiesler clearly takes a fancy). While they are out of their flat, Wiesler\u2019s technical team descends upon their home, bugging the place. \u201cOperation Lazlo\u201d is now in full swing, and Wiesler and his partner monitor their subjects around the clock from the apartment building\u2019s empty attic.<\/p>\n
At first, the surveillance of Georg and Christa appears fruitless. At a dinner party they host, a hysterical theatrical colleague (Hans-Uwe Bauer), who\u2019s suffered detention and psychological torture at Berlin\u2019s infamous Hohensch\u00f6nhausen prison, accuses another director of being a Stasi informer. Georg is quick to defend his friend against the accusation.<\/p>\n
Yet, through the course of his work, Wiesler makes some rather ugly discoveries about the investigation. He learns that it was ordered at the behest of national Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), a porcine bureaucrat who\u2019s extorted sexual favors from Christa under the threat of blacklisting her. Wiesler also eventually finds his friend Grubitz\u2019s schmoozing to be a cover for vicious social climbing and discovers that Grubitz is complicit with Hempf\u2019s scheme to use Stasi as a cat\u2019s paw to eliminate Georg, his romantic rival.<\/p>\n
Within Wiesler stirs a realization previously kept repressed: that his unquestioning faith in his country has enabled not his ideal of the perfect socialist state, but the hideous arrogance of avaricious thugs who run everything in the \u201cworkers\u2019 utopia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where once was the heel-clicking impersonality of a robot a conscience begins to grow. Wiesler comes to view Georg and Christa and their circle of Bohemian friends not as specimens under a microscope, but as real individuals, with hopes and dreams, loves and heartbreaks. Having grown a conscience, he soon also yearns for a heart, as he silently assesses the utter emptiness of his own life.<\/p>\n
Swept up in his subjects\u2019 personal lives, Wiesler\u2019s detached spying turns into voyeurism. But it isn\u2019t a perverted voyeurism, because, for the first time, the lonely captain catches a glimpse into a world of beauty, poetry, and music so alien to his two-dimensional existence. Sympathetic to the predicament of these enemies of the state, Wiesler begins covering for them, faking his reports, and remaining silent about Georg\u2019s gradual disillusionment with the DDR after an old director friend (Volkmar Kleinert) commits suicide.<\/p>\n
He overhears an argument in which Georg confronts Christa with knowledge of her affair with Hempf. Christa\u2014already insecure about her talent\u2014explains that she fears being blacklisted if she breaks it off. Wiesler feels compelled to protect her: He accidentally-on-purpose runs into her in a bar, pretending to be a fan, and tells her that her performances have inspired him. \u201cMany people love you for who you are,\u201d he says, sincerely. \u201cYou are even more yourself onstage than you are in real life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christa dismisses his compliment, telling Wiesler he can\u2019t really know her. \u201cDid you know that I would sell myself for art?\u201d she asks. \u201cBut you already have<\/em> art,\u201d he counters. \u201cThat would be a bad deal; you\u2019re a great artist.\u201d<\/p>\nThough his simple compassion, he gives Christa the strength to believe in herself and renounce her extorted affair with Hempf. But in doing so, Wiesler unintentionally sets into motion a nail-biting series of events that leads inexorably both to tragedy and redemption.<\/p>\n
The Lives of Others <\/em>is a superb film, top-drawer in every regard. Cathartic and ennobling, it recalls Fahrenheit 451<\/em> and We the Living<\/em> in its presentation of tragic heroes forced to examine their deepest-held yet deeply mistaken principles. Hagen Bogdanski\u2019s cinematography is compelling; through subtle differences in lighting he gives Silke Buhr\u2019s sets an additional dimension that places the characters in emotional context. Shot with tungsten-balanced film, Georg and Christa\u2019s incandescently-lit apartment radiates warmth; yet by capturing the omnipresent, fluorescent-lit settings of the Stasi world with daylight film, Bogdanski renders it cold and bloodless. Gabriel Yared\u2019s simple, haunting soundtrack is the perfect evocative counterpart for the action onscreen.<\/p>\nThe acting is realistic, but never naturalistic. Martina Gedeck is a pleasure to watch, not merely because of her physical beauty, but for her impressive emotional range. Ulrich Tukur\u2019s capacity to turn on a dime from regular guy to cold-blooded manipulator is simply scary. And Sebastian Koch combines a physically imposing presence with a gentle, almost fatherly manner, reminding me of a younger Rutger Hauer.<\/p>\n
But Ulrich M\u00fche steals the show as Wiesler. I have never seen an actor convey such a broad range of feelings within such narrow parameters. Where a Pacino or a Steiger would explode with ferocity, M\u00fche underplays, moving the audience with the sudden shift of an eyebrow, the drawing-in of a cheek muscle, or the quiet fall of a teardrop that betrays his sphinx-like fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n
M\u00fche began his acting career in communist East Germany. When government records were opened to the public after German reunification, he learned that his actress wife had been informing on him to the Stasi during the entire six years of their marriage. Clearly, he drew upon this reservoir of traumatic betrayal for this role.<\/p>\n
The Lives of Others<\/em> is flawlessly crafted, completely engaging the heart and mind. Most impressive is the fact that it\u2019s Henckel von Donnersmarck\u2019s feature film debut, released while he was still at the relatively young age of 32. In a recent interview, Henckel von Donnersmarck\u2014who saw life behind the Iron Curtain first-hand when he visited family in the DDR as a child\u2014spelled out his thoughts on communist repression as well as independent filmmaking:<\/p>\nThe [phrase] \u201cIndependent film\u201d makes sense to me only if it means that the director has full artistic control. How could a film be independent otherwise? \u2026 I know that very well from East Germany: Until the Wall came down, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had Final Cut on everything: novels, plays, films, even paintings. Make no mistake: hardly ever did they actually censor anything. But looking back at the art of those four decades, you can still feel the state in everything, and most of the art of that era is very impersonal and boring. Because the artists censored themselves, often without knowing it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Imagine my surprise, then, when the PC crowd at the recent Academy Awards ceremony\u2014who feted environmental scam-artist Al Gore for his global warming crock-umentary\u2014also bestowed the Best Foreign Language Film award upon The Lives of Others<\/em>, rather than upon heavily favored Pan\u2019s Labyrinth. <\/em>(I think it deserved the nod for Best Motion Picture overall, but I\u2019m not unhappy that the Academy gave that award to director Martin Scorsese\u2019s The Departed<\/em>, a consolation prize for snubbing him so many years).<\/p>\nThis cinematic masterpiece is a cause for celebration. Rarely has a filmmaker burst on the scene in such total command of his material. <\/span>The Lives of Others<\/span><\/em><\/strong> belongs in the same company as Orson Welles\u2019s <\/span>Citizen Kane.<\/span><\/em><\/strong> I can only hope that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck still has a <\/span>Touch of Evil<\/span><\/em><\/strong> yet to come.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRobert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 \u00a0 The Man in the Gray Flannel Life \u00a0[xrr rating=5\/5] The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). Starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich M\u00fche, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Volkmar Kleinert, Matthias Brenner, Charly H\u00fcbner, and Marie Gruber. Music by St\u00e9phane Moucha and Gabriel Yared. Cinematography by Hagen Bogdanski, B.V.K. Edited by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,45,37,3,71,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dramas","category-foreign-films","category-independent-films","category-mreview","category-political-dramas","category-suspense-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).<\/strong><\/em> Starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich M\u00fche, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Volkmar Kleinert, Matthias Brenner, Charly H\u00fcbner, and Marie Gruber. Music by St\u00e9phane Moucha and Gabriel Yared. Cinematography by Hagen Bogdanski, B.V.K. Edited by Patricia Rommel, B.F.S. Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. (Sony Pictures Classics\/Buena Vista International [Germany] GmbH, 2006, Color, 137 minutes, in German with subtitles. MPAA Rating: R.)<\/strong><\/p>\n Earlier this year<\/span>, <\/em>I wrote: \u201cI offer Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/em> as exhibit \u2018A\u2019 that the independent revolution is over.\u201d After seeing the captivating Cold War espionage movie The Lives of Others<\/em> from German writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, I realize I may have spoken prematurely. Let me now humbly (but gladly) eat those words.<\/p>\n Made on a shoestring budget of $2 million, The Lives of Others <\/em>is the most suspenseful psychological thriller I\u2019ve seen in a long time, ranking with Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s The Conversation<\/em> or John Frankenheimer\u2019s The Manchurian Candidate<\/em>. What\u2019s more, it presents one of the strongest pro-individual, anti-collectivist themes of any movie I\u2019ve ever seen\u2014all the more surprising because it hails from, of all places, Germany.<\/p>\n Its key lies in its title, which seems at first glance drippingly altruistic. The year, appropriately, is 1984, and Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich M\u00fche), is in his twentieth year as an agent of East Germany\u2019s dreaded Ministry for State Security, commonly known as \u201cStasi.\u201d The \u201cshield and sword\u201d of the Socialist Unity Party, 100,000 Stasi agents and 200,000 paid informers hold the small Soviet satellite nation in a death grip, monitoring and controlling the lives of its 17 million citizens.<\/p>\n Captain Wiesler is a meticulous interrogator, ruthlessly wearing down suspects until they confess. An instructor at the Stasi academy, he trains future agents always to be on guard. \u201cThe best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation,\u201d he instructs his students. \u201cThe enemies of the state are arrogant. Remember that. \u201d<\/p>\n A humorlessly menacing man, Wiesler leads a lonely, Spartan existence in an antiseptic, sparsely furnished apartment in a concrete high-rise that houses many fellow agents. One day at the academy, his former classmate and current boss, gregarious Oberstlieutnant Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), drops in with an assignment right up Wiesler\u2019s alley. One of their artists appears to be straying from the flock, and Wiesler has been assigned to watch him. However, the subject in question is no dissident, but the most celebrated playwright in the DDR, Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch)\u2014a citizen so loyal to the Party that he believes his is \u201cthe greatest country on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Later that evening, spying from a balcony seat with opera glasses, Wiesler detects the mark of subversiveness on Dreymann\u2019s face as he watches the actors onstage performing his play. As Georg beams with proprietary approval, rising to applaud, Wiesler quietly utters to himself a one-word indictment that seals the dramatist\u2019s fate: \u201cArrogant.\u201d<\/p>\n Georg lives with longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck)\u2014a radiant brunette who is as celebrated an actress as Georg is a writer (and to whom Wiesler clearly takes a fancy). While they are out of their flat, Wiesler\u2019s technical team descends upon their home, bugging the place. \u201cOperation Lazlo\u201d is now in full swing, and Wiesler and his partner monitor their subjects around the clock from the apartment building\u2019s empty attic.<\/p>\n At first, the surveillance of Georg and Christa appears fruitless. At a dinner party they host, a hysterical theatrical colleague (Hans-Uwe Bauer), who\u2019s suffered detention and psychological torture at Berlin\u2019s infamous Hohensch\u00f6nhausen prison, accuses another director of being a Stasi informer. Georg is quick to defend his friend against the accusation.<\/p>\n Yet, through the course of his work, Wiesler makes some rather ugly discoveries about the investigation. He learns that it was ordered at the behest of national Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), a porcine bureaucrat who\u2019s extorted sexual favors from Christa under the threat of blacklisting her. Wiesler also eventually finds his friend Grubitz\u2019s schmoozing to be a cover for vicious social climbing and discovers that Grubitz is complicit with Hempf\u2019s scheme to use Stasi as a cat\u2019s paw to eliminate Georg, his romantic rival.<\/p>\n Within Wiesler stirs a realization previously kept repressed: that his unquestioning faith in his country has enabled not his ideal of the perfect socialist state, but the hideous arrogance of avaricious thugs who run everything in the \u201cworkers\u2019 utopia.\u201d<\/p>\n Where once was the heel-clicking impersonality of a robot a conscience begins to grow. Wiesler comes to view Georg and Christa and their circle of Bohemian friends not as specimens under a microscope, but as real individuals, with hopes and dreams, loves and heartbreaks. Having grown a conscience, he soon also yearns for a heart, as he silently assesses the utter emptiness of his own life.<\/p>\n Swept up in his subjects\u2019 personal lives, Wiesler\u2019s detached spying turns into voyeurism. But it isn\u2019t a perverted voyeurism, because, for the first time, the lonely captain catches a glimpse into a world of beauty, poetry, and music so alien to his two-dimensional existence. Sympathetic to the predicament of these enemies of the state, Wiesler begins covering for them, faking his reports, and remaining silent about Georg\u2019s gradual disillusionment with the DDR after an old director friend (Volkmar Kleinert) commits suicide.<\/p>\n He overhears an argument in which Georg confronts Christa with knowledge of her affair with Hempf. Christa\u2014already insecure about her talent\u2014explains that she fears being blacklisted if she breaks it off. Wiesler feels compelled to protect her: He accidentally-on-purpose runs into her in a bar, pretending to be a fan, and tells her that her performances have inspired him. \u201cMany people love you for who you are,\u201d he says, sincerely. \u201cYou are even more yourself onstage than you are in real life.\u201d<\/p>\n Christa dismisses his compliment, telling Wiesler he can\u2019t really know her. \u201cDid you know that I would sell myself for art?\u201d she asks. \u201cBut you already have<\/em> art,\u201d he counters. \u201cThat would be a bad deal; you\u2019re a great artist.\u201d<\/p>\n Though his simple compassion, he gives Christa the strength to believe in herself and renounce her extorted affair with Hempf. But in doing so, Wiesler unintentionally sets into motion a nail-biting series of events that leads inexorably both to tragedy and redemption.<\/p>\n The Lives of Others <\/em>is a superb film, top-drawer in every regard. Cathartic and ennobling, it recalls Fahrenheit 451<\/em> and We the Living<\/em> in its presentation of tragic heroes forced to examine their deepest-held yet deeply mistaken principles. Hagen Bogdanski\u2019s cinematography is compelling; through subtle differences in lighting he gives Silke Buhr\u2019s sets an additional dimension that places the characters in emotional context. Shot with tungsten-balanced film, Georg and Christa\u2019s incandescently-lit apartment radiates warmth; yet by capturing the omnipresent, fluorescent-lit settings of the Stasi world with daylight film, Bogdanski renders it cold and bloodless. Gabriel Yared\u2019s simple, haunting soundtrack is the perfect evocative counterpart for the action onscreen.<\/p>\n The acting is realistic, but never naturalistic. Martina Gedeck is a pleasure to watch, not merely because of her physical beauty, but for her impressive emotional range. Ulrich Tukur\u2019s capacity to turn on a dime from regular guy to cold-blooded manipulator is simply scary. And Sebastian Koch combines a physically imposing presence with a gentle, almost fatherly manner, reminding me of a younger Rutger Hauer.<\/p>\n But Ulrich M\u00fche steals the show as Wiesler. I have never seen an actor convey such a broad range of feelings within such narrow parameters. Where a Pacino or a Steiger would explode with ferocity, M\u00fche underplays, moving the audience with the sudden shift of an eyebrow, the drawing-in of a cheek muscle, or the quiet fall of a teardrop that betrays his sphinx-like fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n M\u00fche began his acting career in communist East Germany. When government records were opened to the public after German reunification, he learned that his actress wife had been informing on him to the Stasi during the entire six years of their marriage. Clearly, he drew upon this reservoir of traumatic betrayal for this role.<\/p>\n The Lives of Others<\/em> is flawlessly crafted, completely engaging the heart and mind. Most impressive is the fact that it\u2019s Henckel von Donnersmarck\u2019s feature film debut, released while he was still at the relatively young age of 32. In a recent interview, Henckel von Donnersmarck\u2014who saw life behind the Iron Curtain first-hand when he visited family in the DDR as a child\u2014spelled out his thoughts on communist repression as well as independent filmmaking:<\/p>\n The [phrase] \u201cIndependent film\u201d makes sense to me only if it means that the director has full artistic control. How could a film be independent otherwise? \u2026 I know that very well from East Germany: Until the Wall came down, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had Final Cut on everything: novels, plays, films, even paintings. Make no mistake: hardly ever did they actually censor anything. But looking back at the art of those four decades, you can still feel the state in everything, and most of the art of that era is very impersonal and boring. Because the artists censored themselves, often without knowing it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Imagine my surprise, then, when the PC crowd at the recent Academy Awards ceremony\u2014who feted environmental scam-artist Al Gore for his global warming crock-umentary\u2014also bestowed the Best Foreign Language Film award upon The Lives of Others<\/em>, rather than upon heavily favored Pan\u2019s Labyrinth. <\/em>(I think it deserved the nod for Best Motion Picture overall, but I\u2019m not unhappy that the Academy gave that award to director Martin Scorsese\u2019s The Departed<\/em>, a consolation prize for snubbing him so many years).<\/p>\n This cinematic masterpiece is a cause for celebration. Rarely has a filmmaker burst on the scene in such total command of his material. <\/span>The Lives of Others<\/span><\/em><\/strong> belongs in the same company as Orson Welles\u2019s <\/span>Citizen Kane.<\/span><\/em><\/strong> I can only hope that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck still has a <\/span>Touch of Evil<\/span><\/em><\/strong> yet to come.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 The Man in the Gray Flannel Life \u00a0[xrr rating=5\/5] The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). Starring Martina Gedeck, Ulrich M\u00fche, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Volkmar Kleinert, Matthias Brenner, Charly H\u00fcbner, and Marie Gruber. Music by St\u00e9phane Moucha and Gabriel Yared. Cinematography by Hagen Bogdanski, B.V.K. Edited by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,45,37,3,71,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dramas","category-foreign-films","category-independent-films","category-mreview","category-political-dramas","category-suspense-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}