Volker Schlöndorff
1979
142 minutes
This is your classic 1970s foreign weird-little-guy movie, which you didn't even fully have pegged as a proper genre before you started this 250 film journey. It's based on an enormous Gunter Grass novel that you sadly didn't have the endurance to get very far into. Someday a day may come where you have more patience for sitting and reading, but recent events have shattered your attention span so much that you're lucky to make it through a full two hour film or even a thirty minute television episode. You mourn for the days when this wasn't the case. This film is going to test your patience pretty severely itself, clocking in at over two-and-a-half hours.
You are once again very uncomfortably going to end up watching most of this at the coffee shop. The protagonist is a sort of child-dwarf who made a decision to stop aging at age ten. He is also obsessed with a tin drum that was given to him as a toy, and he has an ability and propensity to scream at a pitch that can shatter glass. The whole weird film is told from his point of view.
You're going to squirm out of your seat for some of the coming-of-age parts. At some point he falls in love with a teenage girl who is roughly his own actual age, which is going to lead to the awful (mostly implied) spectacle of a young-looking but legal-age girl stripping down in front of the protagonist followed by a scene in which he is implied to have oral sex with her. You'll be cringing and adjusting your laptop screen a lot in the coffee shop to make sure no one is looking over your shoulder and wondering what the fuck you are watching at 9am on a weekday. "Nahh, it's okay everyone, it's an art film!" Thankfully no one seems to notice, but Jesus Christ...
Eventually the main character Oskar falls in love with a fellow dwarf, who is sadly killed by artillery fire during WWII. The story ends pretty abruptly at the end of the war. You're aware the book covers a little more after-action, but that's gong to be a Wikipedia wrap-up for you. You've hit your grotesque German dwarf content limit for the week. Sorry, Herzog.
Time to choose something different: