Word: grassed
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...party faces serious problems in its quest for legitimacy. One is a strategic question which caused a major rift at the convention--whether a presidential campaign is the most effective way of establishing a political party with the strong grass roots tendencies of the Citizen's Party...
...Grass' Oskar speaks of himself in both the first and third person and Schlondorff tries admirably to integrate subjective and objective camera angles. His camera prowls, mimicking Oskar's roving, steely eyes, cutting neatly between the three-year-old perspective and the view of an omniscient, unobtrusive lens. But he fails to remain consistent, breaking now and then to leave Oskar's field of vision, sneaking in a shot that is too objective. A cleverer director might have found a way to convey images, like Oskar's mother's adultery with his Uncle Jan, without abandoning his point of view...
...view on life, the film changes tone: now it is bleak and blue, now it is warm and red. Does Schlondorff misunderstand his little hero or has he simply made only token efforts at linking each sequence to the whole? He manages to reduce the most profound chapter of Grass' novel, a discussion about art and life between a midget magician and a soliderly artist to a frolicking picnic atop a cement pillbox...
Schlondorff feels he must play with Grass' symbols and he has included many of them: Oskar's red and white drums, the smashed glass, the eels, the death of Oskar's mother by over-consumption of fish, Oskar's valiant attempts at sex, cemetaries, the death-dealing Nazi-party pin. Yet unlike Grass' novel, Schlondorff's film refuses to tie these ugly images together; time has strange dimensions and the laudably meticulous attention to detail--violent and spectacular--leaves us empty. The Tin Drum is full of disturbing moments: Oskar is forced to drink a stone and urine soup; eels...
...build a film on three adjectives: barbaric, mystical, bored. But if Schlondorff had kept those words in mind as he guided his camera over the russet rooftops of Old Danzig, he might have crafted a film that captured the anguish of the 20th Century as well as Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum...