Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

ppfr This movie is a masterpiece and surely one of the greatest film of the 70's if not of all time. It is a very original work from the brilliant director Volker Schloendorff which combines expressionism, avant garde, zeitgeist, and magic realism flavors. It successfully translates the complexity of Nobel Price winner Gunter Grass' novel. The face of David Bennent is magnetic throughout and the movie is served by outstanding performances from Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, Katharina Thalbach and even singer Charles Aznavour. This movie should be rated largely above 8 like Apocalypse Now (they both shared the Cannes Festival Palme d'Or in 1979) and it won the Oscar for best foreign movie in 1980. To be seen at least once in a life time.

billcr12 And now for something completely different. A German tale as told by Oskar, while at a mental hospital in the early 1950s. The boy ever grows up and has the ability to scream so loudly that he can shatter glass and knock people down with it. He is a child prodigy with adult intellect in a forever small body. He claims two fathers, Alfred, a Nazi married to his mother, and Jan, a Polish man executed by the Germans during the invasion of Poland.He becomes a carnival entertainer with a group of other dwarfs during the war, and when his girlfriend is killed, he returns to Danzig where he leads a criminal gang. The Russians soon take over and shoot Alfred. Oskar had stopped playing the drum after Alfred's death but starts playing again with two other musicians, and they become a successful jazz band. He is walking through a field and finds the finger of a girl he was in love with and becomes involved in her murder investigation. The whole story is told from Oskar's perspective. The Tin Drum is a very unusual experience.

shoesncandles 'The Tin Drum' is so bizarre and stirs up such a mix of appreciation, fascination, revulsion and whatever the best word for "thoroughly weirded out" is that I actually can't rate it. The best comparison I can offer potential viewers is 'Taxi Driver'. (And now that I've said that legions of American film buffs will damn me for a heretic, but it's true.) The central character is intentionally only minimally sympathetic--your fellow-feeling with Oskar (as with the protagonist in 'Taxi Driver') begins and ends with the sense that the world he lives in, a reflection of the world you live in, is a madhouse. Bad things happen to good people and the reverse, innocence is too often functionally equal to stupidity, people are jerks, and life is brutally, cruelly unfair. But the way he deals with it is grotesque, unrealistic and simply can't work. What keeps you watching is a morbid fascination with a single question: "How long can he get away with it?" (Fair warning: "grotesque" in 'Taxi Driver' and "grotesque" in 'The Tin Drum' take very different forms. The WWII setting does not make this 'Life is Beautiful'; the coming-of-age aspect does not make this a charming film. If you're an American and you're not used to the unconventional/off-kilter visions of childhood in some of the films of Europe, this is not the place to start. I recommend Francois Truffaut's films for that.)Other reviewers have criticized the film for promoting Oskar's attitude and choices, expecting the audience to like him. They're mistaken; I don't think you ARE supposed to like him. It's true that in American film making one is supposed to identify with the principal character(s) and cheer them on, as it were. But it's not a hard and fast rule; 'In Cold Blood' proved that. Oskar's twisted response to the chaos around him is as much a part of the film's social/political/human commentary as the chaos itself.'The Tin Drum' is based on a book, which I have yet to read but am curious to do, because knowing that I feel like I'm missing part of the picture. People who are familiar with the book seem to know a bit more about what in heaven's name is up with the weirdest of the weirdness in the film. I'd like to be able to claim more understanding of this formidable master work than I can right now.Some book-based films you're better off seeing before you read the book so that the good things still outweigh the "WTF?! That's not part of the story!" ('Apocalypse Now', 'The Vampire's Assistant') and some films are so intriguing that they lead you to gobble up mountains of original books ('True Grit', 'Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World').... and some films you just won't fully understand/appreciate unless you know the whole story. 'The Tin Drum', for me, belongs to the second group. But in all honesty, for a lot of people, it probably belongs to the third.

Rodrigo Amaro A 142 minute film that seems to go way longer in its horrible and tasteless moments "The Tin Drum" fails completely in a story that seems to have a meaning but it fails on how to show it. It is a pathetic, devious, diabolical, demented, derailed, deranged, dubious, flawed, shameful, disgusting, art pretentious and other adjectives that is best not to be written here. Unfortunately in this times of technology and internet someone who disagrees of a cult or brilliant thing is called a troll or things like that. I'm not a troll, and as you're gonna see in this comments many things that can be debated over this trash film awarded in 13 awards including the Oscars, I have a complete fundament about why this film failed in so many levels.How come someone can buy the story of an obnoxious and annoying little brat named Oskar and his desire of not growing up, and instead he keeps playing a little drum disturbing everybody and when he's vexed he screams like a opera falsetto and breaks all the glasses around him, scaring people away? It is said to many viewers and reviewers that he decides to stay aged three because of mankind's awfulness and madness, but at no moment before this story with the drum little Oskar watches this crazy world, everything bad happens later with the coming of the 2nd World War and other bad things that this character makes. To say that he's innocent is just silly. He's a diabolical creature that resembles Hitler in a way, immature figures who every time things doesn't happen in the way they want they scream higher and higher, and do bad things (Oskar will be responsible for many deaths through the film). And a creature coming out of the hell because he reminds of stories of angels who felt from the sky to become powerful among humans (Oskar fells from a ladder and after that he'll no longer grow, and someone needs to explain to me since when felling from stairs makes you no longer grow? I fell from a ladder when I was a child and that didn't changed a thing in me).For those who say that "The Tin Drum" used metaphors to show the horrors of war and Oskar represents so many things well, you're all wrong. These things wasn't presented this way. What does playing a drum means? What does the spitting change means? Why this boy is so special? He's not, he's annoying, inexpressive with a dangerous look in the eye (a look that reminds of Hannibal Lecter, Alex DeLarge and actor Bud Cort) and all I could think of was that I wanted to slap him in the face and say "Grow Up!". It is a very boring film, that even with two hours and a few minutes of running time it seems to go forever, and I had to divide the film in so many parts to absorb the whole thing to find that it didn't had nothing so special except some original and shocking scenes like the eels stuck in a horse's head found at a beach (the most disgusting thing you're gonna see in a non horror film) and then Oskar's family ate those eels; the first part of the story which was a little bit interesting (the opening is fantastic telling Oskar's grandmother story). Volker Scholendorff's film disappointed me big time! I heard so many favorable things about it (but I confess that I was blindfolded in terms of knowing what the story was, I only knew few things away) including the awards this film earned. And here's a reminder, awards don't mean that much. To think that this mess won Palm D'Or at Cannes (in a tie with the amazing "Apocalypse Now") and a Foreign Film Award at the Oscars (in a year that Germany's best film was "The Marriage of Maria Braun" recognized by German critics as one of the best of that period and to think that Rainer Werner Fassbinder never was nominated) is unthinkable! It is the worst film ever awarded at the Foreign Film category. Not just this film shows how awards are almost meaningless, jewels like "E La Nave Va", "Pixote", "Vargtimmen" and all Kieslowski films are all outstanding works of art that weren't nominated for an Oscar and those films had so much more to tell, to show, to stay in our memories, and if you haven't seen them skip "The Tin Drum" and go see them! Trust me, it's all good.There's so many wrong things with this film that I cannot say which was the worst but perhaps the concerns on under age sex scenes (which caused many problems with future releases in certain countries). Nowadays this film is totally incorrect with those moments, I dare to say that Schloendorff became a phedofiliac figure in filming those things (it's not graphic, but it certainly makes you feel bothered). I haven't read the book in which this was adapted and I don't think I will, it is such a pointless and bad story that I don't wanna see it twice. Run for your life because after that you might get depressed as fast as I am now. 2/10