John Cusack as 'generic Jewish post first world war art dealer', Noah Tucker as 'Adolf Hitler the young artist', and Leelee Sobieski as 'lovely young lady apparently descended from Polish royalty, damn my anti-monarchical position, let me be her servant'.



I just watched it last night; I thought it was a really good film. You?

the guy who played Hitler is a very good actor --- that's pretty much the only positive thing i could say about this film without being dishonest.

Crap.

Adolf Hitler, the sensitive art student. What a protagonist! Reminds me of a line in a Bellow novel about when his character heard Wagner it was really "the soundtrack to a pogrom."

It was crap despite that. Molly Parker is too lovely not to watch this film, though.

Noah Taylor - he is the future Mr. Burun - was great at portaying Hitler as a sniveling, whiny shit.

Uncanny...I was just talking about this film today. I thought it was great. I'm not afraid to admit that I enjoy a lot of Cusack's films, and this one was great. I admit, I do have something of a WWII/Nazi/Hitler fixation. Nonetheless this is a good film. The thing I really dug was at the end when Cusack says "Hitler dude, fuck this nazi bullshit, let's hang out and make art." And Hitler explains that the politicking is his art and the world will be his canvas. The idea that Hitler saw the world as his canvas, and everything that he created while in power was toward his masterpiece just really strikes me. I understand that this was merely a film, but it's still really an interesting idea.

Not Crap

I enjoyed this film a lot. Hitler needs humanising, otherwise it's just too easy to say he was a "monster" etc.

Hitler may need humanizing, but he doesn't need to be made into a cartoon for some cheesy John Cusack vehicle.

Gramsci wrote:Hitler needs humanising, otherwise it's just too easy to say he was a "monster" etc.

This is true.

The film was CRAP.

I don't understand why someone would think it was crap. It explores a bit of a historic scenario that hasn't been seen before, both in terms of the time and place of post WW1 Munich, and also the economic relations and differences in attitudes between classes in that situation, and how and why class conciousness and anti-semitism can and did come to get thrown into the same basket. I don't think this film ever had any aims to make big bucks; I don't feel any cynicism towards John Cusack regarding this film because it's nice to see actors who can make the big bucks get involved in films for the sake of doing good acting in good films - did you know he took no salary so this film could get made? And if this was a play, it would be a very interesting one. As it is, it's shot very nicely and has a feel all its own. It's not crap.

C2: lemme just say that i have no intention of trying to dissuade you (or anyone else) from enjoying what you clearly like. if you find a film that i can't stand enjoyable, that's cool. to each his own.

but i'm not exaggerating here when i say that i think Max is hands down one of the worst films i've seen in the past few years, up (or more aptly, down) there with What Women Want, Soul Plane, Mean Girls, Way of the Gun (which i literally couldn't sit through), and the atrocious Vanilla Sky (which coinicidentally co-stars the same guy who played Hitler in Max).

my ex-girlfriend's roomate's boyfriend worked at a video store. he had a stack of DVDs he left at their place while he was in China. Max was among the titles. after seeing Cusack on Conan a year or so before, talking about this film in earnest, calling it "a thinking person's movie" and the like, i must say i was intrigued to finally see it. i wasn't expecting something on the level of The Shop on Main Street, but even so, Max was a tremendous disappointment; one of the most lazy, pseudo-profound movies i'd seen in recent memory.

here are some comments, from amazon.com, that articulate my problems with this movie better than i probably could at such an ungodly hour:

This sophomoric little movie is not to be believed. Where to start? It has its art history wrong. It has its politics wrong. It has its psychology wrong. And yet it repeatedly trumpets its silly message loudly in almost every line of dialog: All Hitler needed was a good therapist & some positive reinforcement...

The greatest travesty has to be Rothman telling Hitler that he must learn to put his feelings on canvas, like Max Ernst does. Good grief! Max Ernst's genius reduced to psychobabble.

I can't give this folly any more time. 0 out of 5 *s.

Not to nit-pick, but Hitler was not the aspiring artist after WWI in Munich; it was before the war in Vienna from 1906 to about 1911. The German army was not broken by the Third Ypres campaign in 1917; it folded after its almost successful offensive in 1918 (broken by American soldiers and Marines). So it goes throughout this dull and uninteresting film.

This has got to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen, excluding movies with words like "bikini" and "car wash" in the titles (that is, movies which aren't trying to be good). Yes, it explores the connection between power and aesthetics... but not in an interesting or entertaining way. John Cusack's acting was absolutely horrible as this role is clearly far too ambitious for his limited range. Don't get me wrong--I loved him in "High Fidelity," but he stunk up this film something awful. It takes what might conceivably be an interesting premise--that Hitler was, at heart, a frustrated artist who turned evil after he couldn't succeed at art but integrated art and aesthetic considerations into his rhetoric and other aspects of the reich--and makes it funnier and more ridiculous than any post-Dana Carvey-era SNL sketch. Everything about the film was unconvincing, from the young Hitler, to Cusack's missing arm... I was absolutely shocked to see the number of positive reviews this film had gotten. AVOID this movie. It is just bad, bad, bad. Take a cue from the fact that they are being sold used for under four dollars... SUCKS! See other reviews for discussions of historical inaccuracies.

i pretty much agree with everything in the above, except i didn't particularly care for High Fidelity.