Ostfriesen auf der Bank - Der Film

I am familiar with 0-budget locally made community movies. But this was sadly not what I would even consider a movie.

I think the idea behind the movie was pretty obvious: "Let's take our YouTube sketches and make a real movie, guys! We could ask on Twitter for people who have cool talents we can include!" -- and then they ended up with a whole lot of random people that all want their 2 minutes of fame, which leads to a movie that is just scene after scene after scene of random, unfunny jokes, random characters and random interactions. In that sense it's similar to the TGWTG movies like To Boldly Flee.

The plot claims to be "We found a bench and must return it to the rightful owner in Cologne" (an origin story to their YouTube channel), yet 90% of the movie the characters seem to be wandering around aimlessly in Ostfriesland and make absolutely no progress.

The scenes have no logical order and could be re-arranged and dropped as you like, withou affecting the narrative. Cut down to the relevant scenes, this would be rouhgly 10 minutes long.

Look, I get it. It's a community coming together to produce a piece of art for themselves and they're sharing it with the world. And that warms my heart, really. I've seen Deichkind, Deichbullen, etc. And so have no aversion to seeing local community "actors". But these other movies were _real_ movies, with a plot and things happening. Here however, all this lovely work unfortunately did not go towards making a movie, but just 30 YouTube sketches that are pasted together.

When the community comes together and this is screened in the local town hall, everyone will have a blast, recognizing each other and local places and stuff. But if you're not in that group, you will most likely get nothing out of this movie.

From a technical standpoint, at least all scenes were in focus and the audio was passable.