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Your Learning Zone - Maybe... Maybe Not
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List Price: $96.98
Our Price:
Your Save: $ 96.98 ( 100% )
Availability:
Manufacturer: Lions Gate/Live Home Video
Starring: Til Schweiger, Katja Riemann, Joachim Król, Rufus Beck, Armin Rohde
Directed By: Sönke Wortmann
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786304279397
Format: Closed-captioned
ISBN: 6304279396
Label: Lions Gate/Live Home Video
Manufacturer: Lions Gate/Live Home Video
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Lions Gate/Live Home Video
Release Date: 1997-01-21
Running Time: 93
Studio: Lions Gate/Live Home Video
Theatrical Release Date: 1996-07-12
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Maybe . . Maybe Not (American title)
Comment: There is only one reason to watch this film: sexy Til Schweiger. He has beauty and magnetism, besides being an extraordinary young actor with subtlety, power, and depth. Unfortunately, these qualities are all but lost in this heavy-handed comedy. It is beautifully shot but, considering its comedic intent, rather darkly. The story and its underlying principles leave much to be desired.
Handsome Axel (Schweiger) works in a 30's-style supper club, presumably to remind us of the wacky social farces of that period. He spots an attractive woman and gallantly accompanies her into a bathroom stall for a quickie. His girlfriend Doro is in the next stall and informs him that they're through. Axel is a very pretty boy but, looking for a place to stay, he is rejected with varying degrees of vehemence by former girlfriends all too familiar with his womanizing. Alas, with the opening credits barely over, we've seen the high point of the movie. And no one else even comes close to having any sex after Axel's inauspicious coitus interruptus.
Axel is adopted by a group of gay men in his hour of need. Norbert, a middle-aged nebbish, gives him a place to stay in hopes that there is a `maybe'. What ensues is a series of awkward and tasteless gags, mostly involving Axel's discomfort being around gays. Stereotypes abound, and no one comes off particularly well. The straight men are dorky, unattractive, and strangely mortified by the use of common euphemisms for breasts. The gay men are selfish, unattractive, and impossibly flamboyant (in case we miss the point). Doro is shrill, intolerant, and controlling. Adorable Axel is shallow, thoughtless, and virtually monosyllabic.
When Axel speaks of 'us normal men' we know where the film stands politically. The gays appear in women's clothes much of the time, but speak in exaggeratedly deep voices (in case we miss the point). Axel is deeply offended when cruised by a gay man -- especially surprising as he is in a gay dance club, hot and sweaty, wearing a sexy muscle shirt, and he has asked the man for a light and directions to the bathroom. `Nuff said.
The plot thickens - and so does the humor - when Doro discovers that she is pregnant and decides to get Axel back. She finds him in her own bed with unsightly Norbert, naked, initiating a most inept seduction. Despite this rather awkward reunion, Axel and Doro get married. Axel drops Norbert because his wife is 'allergic to gays' .
The downward spiral continues unabated. Norbert, a strict vegetarian, hooks up with a repellent and humorless butcher, about whom the best one can say is that he has shaved every inch of his boorish body. Axel cheats on Doro with a beautiful woman who has a penchant for animal stimulants. At last we hit rock bottom when, during boisterous bout of hysteria, Doro gets slapped and goes into labor. This is funny?
Til Schweiger is scrumptious eye-candy, and looks stunning throughout the film in tight t-shirts, muscle shirts, open shirts, no shirts. Thank heavens for small mercies. But, in one unfortunate aesthetic choice after the other, the odious older men appear in greater states of undress more often than the beautiful young man.
The ending has a nice feeling and suggests some reconciliation between Norbert and Axel. It's too little, too late.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Get this out on DVD now!
Comment: I can't begin to fathom how the previous reviewer found this movie "dark and tense" - hello? It's a hoot! I cried laughing watching this film!
Also, she found it nice that the movie didn't pursue clichés about gays - well it's not a film about gays, now is it? Not exactly - I know and love the comics it's adapted from, and yes, their author is gay, but that's not quite what this is about. The main character is het Axel, and another review put it well by definig what's happening as "fish out of the water" story.
Gee, watch the phone scene beteween Axel and Waltraud, the movie theater one - among others... - and see for yourself whether this is a comedy or a "tense and dark" movie... Sheesh!
By the way, Dear Mr. Movie Magnate: get this film on DVD now - with English or French subtitles, because the original language needs to be kept (if not understood...) There's only one DVD edition available, but it's in German with no other-language subtitles... otherwise I'd get it now! Please, please, pretty pretty please?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting yet comic look at relationships of all kinds
Comment: `Maybe, Maybe Not' is one of the most odd movies I've ever seen. I liked it. I think I liked it because it is so completely different than all the American movies I'm used to seeing. In the beginning, the main character, Axel, decides to randomly have sex with some girl in the bathroom of his workplace. A woman in the next stall recognizes the key chain that dropped from one of the fornicating couple's clothes. She peeks over the stall to find her boyfriend of three years mindlessly humping another woman. She kicks him out of their apartment and throughout the rest of the movie he struggles with where to live. Initially he calls old girlfriends who all readily turn him away. Then he ends up at a `men's group' with a lot of gay guys. After that, he gets drunk at a party and goes home to sleep at one of their houses. This is when the gender preference battle begins. A lot of stereotypes were defied in this movie and I found that extremely refreshing. For example, it is commonly thought in American society that gay men are promiscuous, however in this movie, no homosexual sex is shown. There is one man-to-man kiss in the club and in another scene homosexual activity is inferred while watching slides but not directly shown on the screen. There are, however, two comparatively graphic heterosexual scenes. Another stereotype defied was the `effeminate gay men' stereotype. The main gay character, Norbert, didn't act effeminate at all, not even in drag. My favorite part of the movie however perpetuated and made fun of an existing stereotype - the stupid Stallone-loving straight guy. The guys in the movie theater were very intriguing. I thought they added welcome comic relief to an otherwise tense and dark movie.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Muss-Sehen
Comment: Every once in a while, I run a little at-home German film festival for my own amusement and edification. Sometimes the selections are oddly complimentary. After viewing the somewhat somber ROSA LUXEMBURG, I needed a little uplift, and this charming comedy was just what the Arzt bestellte, uh, the doctor ordered. Who says Germans are sullen and humorless? I laughed out loud at this one more frequently than I do with most American comedies. (Or is that not saying very much?)This fish-out-of-water comedy revolves around a likeable, but randy heterosexual turned out by his girlfriend after she discovers him and a pick-up in flagrante delectable. Former girlfriends aren't exactly eager to take him in, which is kind of telling, and eventually he ends up taking refuge with a gay man he meets by happenstance. No surprise, they bond in significant ways despite the differences in their sexual orientation. Or is there such a difference? Well, yeah, the MAYBE...MAYBE NOT question is pretty much a rhetorical one here, but it's still fun to see this naive straight guy bumble through Cologne gay scene and emerge a little better and wiser for the experience. (He learns to cook at least). The young German cast is very good. The only actor I'm familiar with was Katja Riemann as the beleaguered girlfriend. Riemann, who can also be seen in THE HARMONISTS and BANDITS, shines here. The male leads Til Schweiger (straight Axel) and Joachim Krol (gay Norbert) are perfectly cast, giving more depth to their characters than one might expect. And Rufus Beck as the more outrageous--and, admittedly, more stereotypical--gay friend "Waltraud" is a hoot. All in all proof that German humor is NOT an oxymoron!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worth it for the music alone
Comment: I've had occasion to see a number of good German films in the past year, and this is one of the best. It's the story of a straight photographer (Til Schweiger) who is initiated into the Cologne gay scene after he is tossed out of his apartment by his girlfriend, who discovers him cheating on her at the restaurant where they both work. Our hero ends up sharing a flat with a gay man, who then plots to seduce him. There are a lot of hokey plot contrivances to keep this one afloat, but they only serve to underscore the charm of the film's remarkably adept cast--with empashis here on Herr Schweiger. The film is punctuated throughout by camp musical interludes courtesy of Max Raabe and the incredible Palast Orchester, whom some of you may know from their "Charming Weill" album. "Kein Schwein ruft mich an" is just one gem among many. See it, if only for the music.
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