Eight Miles High (2008)

Waste of time

That was an excellent one.

Boring

Beautiful, moving film.

As I said earlier, we met Uschi and Dieter in Aspen, Colorado in 1982. I got a letter from her from Northern California in September of '82 prior to their trip to Mexico. I'm looking at it right now. She was excited that they were going to have a friend make a tepee for them and spend the winter living in it on the beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The Uschi and Dieter that we spent an evening with gave no hint of being the type of people this movie portrays. They did not seem to be the dark and tortured souls that this movie shows them to be. They were happy, outgoing, talkative, generous and excited about the future. Dieter loved to fish. They loved Colorado. They enjoyed crossing the USA and had been all around it, but the movie make no mention of that time at all. The movie also gives no mention of her artistic talents. Uschi made scrimshaw, and as an artist I can tell you it was excellently done. She was going to have an exhibition of her scrimshaw in LA but I do not know if she ever did. I can't say they were friends of mine, exactly, having only spent one evening together but they were acquaintances and I have very fond memories of them. I'd always hoped one day I'd see their bus on the highway so I could say hello again. I don't know if this movie was authorized by Uschi as an accurate portrayal of their lives, but I do know it made me sad for them. My wish is for her happiness and hope that these last 30 years or so have been as happy as they could be.Uschi, if you ever read this, blessings and happiness to you.

Saw this on Netflix streaming movies. Much of the movie is in German with English subtitles, but some of it is in English.Uschi Obermaier was (is?) apparently a real person who joined in with what we would call the hippie free-love movement in 1960s Germany. But she was also a model and a very successful one. Much of her modeling was nude or semi-nude, graphically depicted in the film, and the actress certainly has a Playboy-worthy beauty.German actress Natalia Avelon plays Uschi Obermaier . While she is the central character her life and travels take her many places and with many famous people. The beginning and the end of the film are the same, she is standing nude on the beach, watching a raft burn, symbolic of her relationships that had died and the men with them. In between is her story.The critic Ebert has a very good and accurate review. Interesting film, but I lived through the 1960s and 1970s, I remember those days, and watching this one didn't do much for me.

This film describes itself as telling the story of Uschi Obermaier, a 1968 "icon" in the "student revolts". What it in fact shows is that she was nothing more than a girl with a good figure trying to make it out of small-town Bavaria. Apart from making money doing photo shoots and living in the Kommune I for a while, she did not do anything worthwhile for the movement. And this all the film cares to show us as well. Most of the film is actually based on her frustrating and uninteresting relationship with a guy from St.Pauli with whom she drives around in a van with for most of the film. Her thick accent is way too exaggerated, her non- acting tedious and the overall story predictable. The film is full of clichés from the 60s like free love and rock 'n roll and are not explored in any new or interesting way. Add to this the bad remake of the song 'Summer Wine" which is over-played incessantly during the film renders this a very poor 2 out of 10.

It is stupid to talk about this film seriously. It is a total stupid picture about history. Not more than a comic-strip. It has nothing to do with reality. If we Germans make film about erotic it is always total stupid. Thats a great problem. It is not possible to make a seriously film about sex and drugs and rock- roll - because everybody here this it is only a game and not a real way to go with intelligence.The first scene in this film- father - mother and naked daughter shows us all. Only artificial - stupid without any felling or telling about a true story. All characters are only like in the Muppet's show - but this film should be no parody!! If should be slapstick it would be better- Only the journey to India and the naked are girl are good--- I've been waiting for the German teen girls who are sleep with David bowie in his Berlin time. Would they be shown so stupid too?