I rewatched The Lives of Others

[noise]

It's a movie about a government that used surveillance powers to keep the citizens properly intimidated. Oddly enough the powerful abused these powers for personal gain. They were basically above the law. For some reason I couldn't relate to the story at all. No modern parallels. The country was the GDR, aka East Germany under the Stasi.

IMDB info

[Voice for Peace]

1. I also just re-watched it the other day. OUTSTANDING MOVIE highly recommended nt

[Populist_Prole]

2. One of my top 3 fave movies of all time

It's not just skewering of the surveillance state and totalitarianism, it's also a wonderful story about people and the wide range of different things that affect them, which can make good people bad, and bad people good, the the giant grey area in between.

Oddly enough, demonstrating typical conservative blindness of a forests for trees, this very same film has been a staple for years in many "good movies for conservatives" lists since the Bush era. They like it solely because they think it's an indictment of communism: Yet in their partisan idiocy fail to see the irony of the surveillance state with their whole-hearted support of the patriot act....well, at least under their beloved W.

[tblue]

3. Love that movie!

I know it's in YouTube. I gotta watch it again. Did you ever think we'd live under Stasi-type surveillance???

[DFW]

4. The reactions of west German and east German audiences was remarkable.

My wife saw it in Leipzig in the east and again with me in Düsseldorf in the west.

At the end of the film in Düsseldorf, the theater was abuzz with heavy discussions of what the public had just seen.

At the end of the film in Leipzig, the room sat in stunned silence, having just had their recent past rerun before their very eyes.

[KT2000]

5. Timeless parallels

IMHO - The man whose job it was to listen and report saved the man he was observing. I imagine there are people faced with such choices today.

[noise]

6. Sadly there were all sorts of parallels

to the US. What stood out especially was the sense of entitlement of the powerful and how they didn't care who they hurt to get their way.