Mrs. Ratcliffe's Revolution (2007)

Director:

Bille Eltringham

Writers:

Bridget O'Connor (writer)
Peter Straughan (writer)

Release Date:

28 September 2007 (UK)

Genre:

Comedy

Plot:

She left the land of Marks & Spencer and went to the world of Marx and Lenin. Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution...

Plot Keywords:

East Germany | Dysfunctional Marriage | Dysfunctional Family | Communism | 1960s

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Catherine Tate	...	Dorothy Ratcliffe
Iain Glen	...	Frank Ratcliffe
Brittany Ashworth	...	Alex Ratcliffe
Heike Makatsch	...	Frau Unger
Jessica Barden	...	Mary Ratcliffe
Christian Brassington	...	Thomas
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Nigel Betts	...	Uncle Philip
Ottilia Borbáth	...	Frau Glock
Béla Fesztbaum	...	1st Stasi Officer
Fanni Futár	...	Uti
Imola Gáspár	...	Art Teacher
Ákos Horváth	...	2nd Border Guard
Barna Illyés	...	Gym Teacher
John Kirk	...	Mr. Murray
Karl Kranzkowski	...	Rector
Uwe Lauer	...	Truck Driver
Robert Lowe	...	Otto
Piroska Móga	...	Ursula
Ben O'Brien	...	2nd Stasi Officer
Gábor Pintér	...	1st Border Guard
Alexander Scheer	...	Willi
Arndt Schwering-Sohnrey	...	Jerzy
Katharina Thalbach	...	Anna
Susan Tordoff	...	Mary's Tacher
Stephan Wolf-Schönburg	...	Herr Vort

Runtime:

102 min

Country:

Hungary | UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

UK:12A

Filming Locations:

Budapest, Hungary

Company:

Assassin Films

Carry On Up The DDR

After The Lives of Others and Goodbye Lenin, two good films about the old East Germany produced in the home country, along come the Brits with "Carry On Up The DDR", a truly shameful piece of "work." If there's anything interesting to write about this completely dreadful movie which I saw last night at the splendid Ritz in Belper, I can't think of it. So why write a review? Merely to accentuate the message from the one previous IMDb commentator here before me and urge you to avoid it at all costs. Waiting in a dark alley to get mugged would be better usage of time and money than paying for this shocking dreck.

If there's an interesting question to pose about it, it would be this: how could the two writers of Sixty-Six, a very good and at its conclusion really quite moving film, go on to produce this heap of amateurish, chronically scripted, sloppy, wildly historically inaccurate, half-dimensional, miserably thought-out garbage? My guess is that after the critical, if not commercial success of that soulful, intelligent Jewish father-son World Cup '66 movie, one that captured the spirit of the times quite uncannily well, they were asked by someone or other wanting to make a movie, 'what else have you got?'. Surely on the point of throwing away the script for Mrs R's R - something they wrote as fifth formers in between their Physics and Maths homework - they said, 'well, we've got this...'

What more to say? Perhaps someone should report the Worst Scene From A Movie in 2007, the Oughts, the 21st century, Cinematic History, etc: the one where to let the audience know what a dump of a state flat the Radcliffes were stuck in, a rat appears on the record player, disrupting the music. Wait: that's not it. Next shot is the East German neighbour bashing to death said (enormous) rat - rat out of shot, with heavy object. Cue next scene.

That was it. That was supposed to be funny (I promise you), on its own. No witty out-line, no cut to (the pretty bad, here) Catherine Tate making funny facial expression, no blood and guts-spurts-out-of-rat-into-rat-killer's-face (if only). Nothing.

Two cheerier things to finish with: one, the movie got some laughs from the Derbyshire audience, so it's possible that the film won't be as depressing an experience for you as it was for me if anyone forces you to go see it; two, the price of a Ritz ticket is one of the cheapest in the UK.

So, a grim embarrassment for the British film industry then: 'Carry On Up The DDR' pretty much sums it up for this writer, but with no Sid James,Kenneth Williams or Charles Hawtrey to redeem it.

T