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Just perfect...

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

'Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken' ('Love in Thoughts'), while based on a true incident in Berlin in 1927, is a story about the confusion of adolescent hormonally driven needs and desires brought to the screen by director Achim von Borries based on a dramatization by Hendrik Handloegten, Annette Hess and Alexander Pfeuffer of the Steglitz Student murders. It is as much a tale of the decadent 20s in the Berlin that would breed the Nazi Party as it is a stirring thriller. And if think back to the times of this story, a similar theme was being played out in this country under the names of Leopold and Loeb! Strange crossover...Paul (Daniel Brühl) is a student poet from a working class family who makes friends with Günther (August Diehl) who is a gay and wild romantic from the wealthy class. Their common thread is their sense of rebellion against their families and the need for Byronic defiance in a world they find shallow. The make a 'suicide pact' - that once they discover true happiness in love, and knowing that true love cannot be repeated, they will commit suicide. The two lads go to the country home for a weekend party of drinking and carousing. Günther brings along his love Hans (Thure Lindhardt), a kitchen worker clearly not in Günther's social class, who begins having a sexual liaison with Hilde (Anna Maria Mühe), Günther's lusty, superficial, hedonistic sister. Paul is in love with Hilde, but at the party he observes her acts of sexual freedom and turns to plain Elli (Jana Pallaske) for his initial sexual encounter. When Günther realizes he has lost Hans to Hilde, the options of the 'suicide pact' play out in a gruesome way. Paul is left to tell the story, later becoming a novelist (condemned by the Nazis and thrown into exile).Achim von Borries manages to recreate this sick tale with all the feeling of Weimar decadence. It takes a while to get the characters straight, but once they are in place the development of each has a fearsome momentum. The young cast is excellent. It is refreshing to see a film that includes a gay main character whose sexuality is at the core of his life but at the same time the story is not focused on the gay character so much as being focused on all youth in a cumbersome time in history and in adolescent physiology! The film is in German with English subtitles and presents the actual events of the case in writing on the screen after the story is completed. Very Effective. Grady Harp

First of all: I really enjoyed this movie. I found it great. Secondly: Yes, there are a few points you might want to critisise. The question is: Do you really care about these points? The pros definitely overweight the contras though.It was one of those movies I felt comfortable with from the first second on. It is slow, it is poetic and you have that constant feeling of melancholy and sadness surrounding you. It is kept in amazingly filmed pictures. The soundtrack simply stunned me. Not to mention the three main characters. It is nothing like any other german movie I have ever seen and I never felt like watching a german movie because it is made on an international, hollywood-like level (meant in a true positive sense!).To give any movie the label `based on a true story' is always a bit cheap. But I generously forget about that and enjoy `a story of two young men, lost in love and life'. Yes - clothes, haircuts and make ups might not (fully) correspond to what it was really like in the 1920ies. Their lifestyle shown and the emancipated way women behave, might have been to advanced for that time. But I just don't know. I could imagine wealthy people to behave like this, in the roaring Twenties, after World War I.If you like slow, poetic movies - you should give it a try. It very much reminded of `lost and delirious', it has got a bit of `dead poets society' and (the calm, peaceful moments in) `the thin red line'.But if you expect another of those `typical' german movies produced in the last few years (which I find great too) and which mostly have similar plots and a similar character, you might feel in the wrong spot.

Oh my, I don't know where to begin. This movie was so unbelievably bad...First, the casting sucked a lot. Daniel Brühl and Jana Pallaske just aren't teens from the 1920s, they look like standard germans from today. The whole "party" looked like they were cast right from Berlin Mitte, with their 70s retro hairdo. Big No No! The most emberassing moment was the one where a "DJ" (??!!) started scratching on an old grammophone. And it gets worse by the minute, the whole plot is boring, badly written and poorly directed. The only highlights are Anna Maria Mühe and August Diehl, but they can't save this boring wreck from sinking. If you really want to see this movie rent it. It's not worth your $$ at the box office.

"Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken" is an awful German movie. "Good Bye Lenin" star Daniel Brühl should not do this movie. A boring story is paired with dumb dialogs and a very stupid ending. This film is definitely just a movie for die-hard german movie fans. It is just on the same level as a german TV production and should not shown in cinemas across Germany. I hope that this one will never be shown in cinema across Europe or in the USA!