When will we end the feline on rodent
violence issue in this country?

When I was in college, one of my Professors found us watching Tom and Jerry  on one of the televisions that were in the hallways. (We were doing this while waiting for the classroom to open up.) He couldn't believe we were watching cartoons rather then doing something productive. So I told him that Tom and Jerry is just a metaphor for the immigration issues of the 19th century in America. He probably lost all respect for me there, but  I've made a game out of trying to give things a meaning much deeper then they are.

Today you get to see a part of this. I'm going to tell you about a movie, but I don't want to review them, you know in case Boog wants to do that later. So instead I'm going to tell you about a movie you've never seen and tell you about it's (pseudo-)hidden meaning.

Not this one...

Today I'm going to talk about Bandits...uh not the Bruce Willis movie of 2001, the German movie of the same name made in 1997. I have not seen the 2001 version, but I assume they are not the same movie. This movie was directed by someone you don't know and starring 4 people you don't know. I'm not trying to be rude but seriously here's the IMDB page for the movie. I doubt you know any of them. I've never seen them in anything else, and I watched more then my fair share of Germany's movies while stationed over there.

This one.

The Bandits we will be talking about is about 4 female prisoners in Germany who start a band in prison. They get a chance to play at a ball for the police and politicians, but break out instead. The movie then becomes a road trip movie. They later seek shelter in a bar, and decide the bar's band sucks enough that they take over the stage. When the cops show up, they take a hostage (one American that the bass player likes, he's named West of all things.) escape the cops, and keep going.
At one point they find out a record producer has put there music on the radio, (they sent a demo tape in while still in prison,) but he doesn't have their permission to do it, so they get him to pay the money, and keep going.

This movie has a server case of WTF going on sometimes in that scenes will sometimes become music videos. There's a scene where they are stuck in traffic on a bridge and one of their songs comes on the radio and a person in the next car notices them. A choreographed dance then breaks out on the bridge only to be interrupted when they get to the front of the traffic jam and find that the jam is to search every car for them. There are several music video-esque scenes in the movie, and most are not too jarring, but it does leave most people going wait what?

So what could the hidden message be according to me? I see the prison as being East Germany, they escape only to find that they really aren't used to this new world and they really can't get comfortable. The love interest being named West is what really does it for me, I think he's supposed to represent the promise of the West, pretty but flawed. He's played by a German male-model. I won't ruin why he's flawed in case anyone does want to see it. There are even times when some of the characters want to go back to prison. Even today there is a chunk of the German population who thinks things were better when the wall was up and want to return to that way of life.

As much as I poke fun of the weirdness of this movie, I really enjoy it the music is catchy, it's interesting, and you'll probably never see anything like it. So give it shot, surprisingly it's not hard to find. It's just pricey.