Reclaim Your Brain

The premise is great – coked up TV exec, responsible for such Reality TV tripe as a Eugenics show (designed to create the next gen of Wunderkind), gets his comeuppance and turns his passion into making better shows for the masses. His grand plan, naturally, is to hijack the ratings boxes, sending populist crap into the toilet and instead draw out poetry, documentaries, black and white classic films, all in an attempt to reset the cultural foundation of German society.

Unfortunately, the film quickly looses the momentum it accrued during its first kinetic ten minutes, and by the end, when without irony the lead character decries the fascists making decisions for the public while he and his friends themselves are dictating what does and doesn’t succeed, the film treads some frightening ground indeed.

In fact, this is one of the more blatantly fascist films I’ve seen come out of Germany since the black and white days, with imprecise irony failing to mask the underlying hate that the film celebrates. With its attempt at a light demeanour and counter-cultural leaning, there’s a certain evil to the whole thing. Elitism, didacticism and a snide, snarly tone are irredeemable, and when the film tries to switch to some bizarre slapstick it is simply covering the repugnant with the banal.

It’s awful, indeed, but also dangerous, worse in the end for having started out with such promise only to fail.