Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Top Notch Adlon, January 30, 2001
One of several films from the writer/director pair, Percy and Eleanor Adlon, featuring Marianne Sägebrecht. As with others (Sugarbaby and The Baghdad Café) we are presented with quirky story and innovative cinematography. Rosalie (Sägebrecht), the matriarch of Greenspace family is presented with the daunting task of maintaining the lifestyle to which her family has grown accustomed embarks upon a series of zany plots to keep the bill collectors at bay. These include emptying her children's bank accounts, forging checks, juggling 37 credit cards and three mortgages all in an effort to keep every member of her enormous family happy. This is punctuated by routine visits to her local Catholic Priest (Judge Reinhold) where she confesses her trespasses. When her daughter demands a new PC for her birthday, she swipes her parent's airline tickets and buys it for her. She promptly becomes a pirate of the online banking world to keep above water. This film is a hysterical satire of the American consumer society.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Baby wants to . . . buy.", June 16, 2005
The first half of Rosalie Goes Shopping reminds me of a David Lynch film - - full of freaks and fantastic settings - - but without the depravity. And freak movies need some depravity, otherwise you can't sympathize with the freaks. A family full of half-Bavarian, half-American children who are, at the very least, slow, need a bit of the old ultraviolence done to them so you can identify with them. But in Rosalie Goes Shopping love is all around. No need to waste it.
Rosalie Goes Shopping is a cross between Eraserhead and The Sound of Music, leaning a little too much toward The Sound of Music. You need someone or something that threatens the heroine more than her own psychotic need to buy things. ("We've never tried to tell each other how to live out our dreams," Bavarian-born Rosalie tells her husband, the Arkansas pilot she met when he was in the Army, stationed in Germany.)
Rosalie's mother and father visit from Bavaria. Before her parents arrive, Rosalie (I still can't get the theme song "Rosalie" out of my head) criticizes her mother for being cheap by not wanting to fly first class. But then Rosalie turns around and steals her parents' return tickets to trade them in for cash. And the mother's the one with the problem?
One of Rosalie's teenage sons has some kind of disorder and can't stop tapping his foot. At the dinner table he's crammed in next to his grandmother (she's been on a plane for fifteen hours), and the grandmother keeps asking him to stop tapping until she finally loses control and slaps him. Rosalie intones, "Ja, the old Germany." All grandmutti wanted was for the kid to stop tapping. She wasn't trying to send him off to join the Hitler Youth. If the kid can't help himself maybe Rosalie and her husband who comes to the dinner table almost naked after a shower (no wonder one of Rosalie's more "normal" daughters likes daddy best) could have arranged the seating differently.
Rosalie Goes Shopping is a joint American/German TV production, directed by Percy Adlon, best known for Bagdad Cafe. It's interesting to see foreign filmmakers' impressions of US society - - slick films like Witness (Peter Weir) and rougher ones like Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders).
And films that criticize capitalism like this one are rare. (Documentaries like The Corporation usually do a better job than American fiction films, which tend to support the status quo. Hollywood movies pull back at the last minute and make the problem a single corporate villain rather than a global economy that turns some people into serfs so that other people can live like tsars [Working Girl, Other People's Money]). Movies like El Norte tell another story.
The second half of Rosalie Goes Shopping is more interesting, when Rosalie sets her plan to save her family's way of life in motion. But I never understood what exactly she did to get two million dollars from a local bank ("We don't worry about all that nonsense they do up North") and launch her multinational scheme to help little people crushed by the system. I guess it had something to do with the "interest" she was always talking about. By that time I didn't have too much of that left myself.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Bavaria in Arkansas, January 6, 2009
Marianne Sagebrecht is brilliant in this comedy about living beyond one's means. Dated, yes, but hilarious, and Brad Davis was hot as ever. Judge Reinhold is great as the parish priest.
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