Oh Boy!, a compelling tragicomedy in Black & White, is an ironic portrait of a young man (Tom Schilling, in a believable, unforced performance)  who drops out of university and ends up experiencing the streets of the city he lives: Berlin. The film deals with the desire to participate in life and the difficulty finding one's place. His credit card is gobbled. His driver's license is withheld in an Orwellian interview. He loses interest in a girlfriend. He tries repeatedly to purchase regular coffee, but cannot seem to be able to find any or close the deal. He smokes constantly. The musical skeins that permeate the film evoke some of Woody Allen's charming if hapless counterintuitive dioramas of irony reflective of many of the issues that rived Europe in WWII, including a subtle but evident leitmotif of Nazism as it manifests in efforts to expiate or scrub the persistent leftovers,  Oh Boy! is a winning debut from director Jan Ole Gerster. A major theme running the...(Read Full Post)