"Oh Boy" is a black-and-white Berlin-set tale of melancholy starring tom Schilling and directed by Jan Ole Gerster. For the latter it is only the second movie as director and the first in 8 years. Also, he played a minor role in making "Good Bye Lenin". So, with that non-prolific background, it was certainly a bit surprising how many awards this movie achieved and that it became the great winner at the German Film Awards that year. The movie only runs for little over 80 minutes and depicts conversations and interactions between the central character and usually one or two other people. Schilling is basically in every scene of the film. All the supporting players do a very fine job too, even if they only appear in a single scene like Schüttler, von Dohnányi, Lau or Brambach, a personal favorite. I mentioned Katharina Schüttler and I liked how the words displayed on the screen "Oh Boy" perfectly fit her interaction with our "hero" early on in the film.I quite liked the music. The jazz performances with the black-and-white cinematography give the film a very unique, melancholic note. At the end, I somehow had the feeling that there was a parallel between Gwisdek's character and Schilling's. You basically knew nothing really about them, even if you watched Schilling the entire movie. You find out a lot more about everybody he interacts with. Gwisdek won a German Film award by the way for his one-scene performance at the end, but this may have also been a career awards. I preferred other nominees (his own son) and I also thought Ulrich Noethen gave a better performance here in this film as well. Maybe it was some kind of unofficial career achievement award or had to do with Gwisdek being born in Berlin. Lau and Schilling were as well, by the way. The biggest supporting player is Friederike Kempter ("Tatort"), who gives a fine performance as well as an attractive, but very unstable young woman.I enjoyed this movie a lot. I don't know if you have seen any of Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes" works, but it reminded me a bit of that, only that I liked it even more. Highly recommended and it gives us a great portrayal of loneliness and life in the big city.

Jan Ole Gerster is still relatively unknown, a director who wrote and directed so far his greatest success. (A Coffee and Berlin, 2012) is a surprising tragi-comedy. Niko Fischer played by Schilling, who interrupted his studies and is trying to find himself in Berlin. The movie reflects the play of colors, through a black and white melancholy in the backdoors of Berlin, which brings a big city atmosphere. How quickly can someone get lost in the extent of a city? I Might emphasize extremely but it is a well-written story, with a crunchy plot, which is both dynamic and interesting. As far the idea of broken glass, leaves the feeling of hopelessness and disconnection. It is to focus on its central importance. I must mention the editing, sometimes it is dysfunctional in transition, so the story becomes a little bit stiff.The main actor Schilling, offers extremely good emotional articulation, he has a strong repertoar, and brings a lot to the movie. There is a spectacle or a slow-burning rhythm that you feel in this flick. Almost a kind of sophisticated intelligent elegance.When something is dying, there is born something new. Are we really all alone on this planet, or is it alOne? The ultimate truth lies within us. Stunning black and white tragicomedy with the addition of old school German actors, offers an exceptional journey, true the psyche of a young man...trying. Worth a sneak peak.

Oh Boy is somewhat reminiscent of Prozac Nation. The protagonist is an unlikable, spoilt child, leeching off others while breezing through life. It is an anti-"Coming of Age" film, showing how people refuse to "grow up" - even supposed adults. Niko's father is childish, his friend an underachieving actor and the former classmate he runs into is in a way still the little girl with a crush on him. It doesn't end there, even Germany itself refuses to "grow up", clinging to its Nazi past and sticking to absurd bureaucracy.On top of having an amusing story, Oh Boy has lovely cinematography. Berlin looks great in black & white, and with the lazy jazzy soundtrack it sometimes seems like a 50s film. Quite a promising start from Gerster, who won just about every German film award around.

"Oh Boy" features the same "plot" as countless art-house and student movies: A young man drifts through a big city, meets strange people, the end. There is probably a fancy name for this, but most people just call it pointless, boring, a waste of time. Regarding "Oh Boy" there is really no point in arguing with them.The "boy" (Tom Schilling) meets about 12 stale caricatures: a presumptuous bureaucrat, a snide coffee shop waitress, a wacky lonely neighbor, a fat girl who was bullied by him at school and is now thin and very blatantly mentally unstable, his rich & heartless daddy, stupid ticket inspectors ... These characters are neither funny nor interesting, they are just incredibly annoying versions of stereotypes recycled by a clueless author. He actually manages to dedicate two of the movie's scenes to the times of Hitler - in a movie about a young man's journey through the Berlin of today! That's world-class, in its own inane way. You are afraid to deal with current topics; you don't have a single original idea? Well, you can't go wrong with Hitler! He's still got a gigantic fan base that can't get enough of this guy."Oh Boy" is author/director Gerster's thesis project for a film academy. Therefore critics shouldn't be too harsh; they should concentrate on the promising aspects of this exercise. But there was a preposterous hype about this movie. It won the highest German movie award, the "German Film Award", for best feature film. This "best German movie of 2012" will be shown in art-house cinemas and Goethe Institutes around the globe. There is no reason to hold back punches anymore. Gerster's professors might be proud, but viewers expecting a good movie are bound to be seriously disappointed.While I'd give zero points for the author, the work of the cinematographer is quite good. "Oh Boy" is not only filmed in black-and-white, sometimes it really does look like an actual movie from the Fifties. And it has got an appropriate jazzy soundtrack to go with that. All in all there are several minutes of lovely Berlin photography. If B&W-movies do have a future, the name of the cameraman Philipp Kirsamer is definitely one to remember.In one of the two remarkably pointless Hitler scenes, the weather-worn old man Michael Gwisdek (born in 1942) gives a theatrical monologue about how he as a young boy witnessed the "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938, dreading that all the glass would hurt his bicycle tires the next day. This 5 minutes long, static monologue got him the "German Film Award" for best male actor in a supporting role. Awkward! Is the German cinema really that dead? ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 12)