Maybe I'm biased. I have to confess that I have severe problems to like homegrown movies (especially those German films they used to call "comedies"). But with Helmut Dietl directing I thought it at least possible that "Late Night" could prove to be an interesting film. It didn't. So what went wrong? I expected a biting satire about all those idiotic television programs that continue to overflow our everyday life and the people that "create" them. Obviously, there are great possibilities in that concept. Dietl tried to make this kind of satire, but he tried too hard. "Late Night" is a satire without laughs. The screenplay contains too many things that won't work (most of all the plot). As usual with German comedies, the film is mainly dialogue-driven, while visual gags do not exist or are clumsily executed. Only two or three gags really work. The directing is not up to Dietls usual standard. But the biggest problem is that this is a comedy about television, that was co-produced by a television station, that is cast with popular show masters and that looks most of the time like a TV-movie. I wonder what the people involved in this production wanted to say about television - that everybody makes **** instead of them? After viewing this movie, I am afraid that this is not true.
