FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE THE BEST MOVIES IN OUR VIDEO STORE! Barry Levinson - Diner 

Women are not strange at all. And they're not mysterious either, unless you happen to be a man. Young men in particular look at women with a mixture of desire, fear and admiration that is beyond their control. To understand what that must have been like for men in the late 50s, I listened to the conversations of our bouncers from the bar (= young men, entirely without female contact, drinking Coke and smoking pot together in front of Playlstation 4): Back in the late 50s, the Playmates on page three of certain newspapers might have been stranger than any alien race. And if a young man from the late 50s actually had a date with such a woman, he had to restore his mental equilibrium afterwards with the therapeutic consumption of cheeseburgers, black coffee and Lucky Strikes, together with the boys. Diner is about such young men from Baltimore. They all share a problem: painfully and awkwardly growing up when they should have been adults long ago. For some, however, adolescence lasts much longer than society's standards (I know about this; I'm from Berlin). The boys in Diner are best friends, although their paths are soon to part. University, jobs, marriage... it is possible that they will never see each other again. But for now they cling to each other for mutual security - because out there lurks the world with RESPONSIBILITY (which in turn has a lot to do with women). The boys from Baltimore have plans, but they are never as real as their dreams! Diner is episodic, about sexual adventures, romance, drunken weekends and hungover mornings with lots of coffee afterwards. Some of it may seem a little unbelievable, but all the situations fit the pattern of being afraid of women. In one bizarre sequence, a young man demands that his wife pass a sports quiz before he will marry her. Symbolically, the situation is true because the boys are not actually looking for women, but for imitation men. Moreover, we learn from a married man how marriage works: Completely without communication. He does not talk to his wife at all, because she functions exclusively as a "wife", never as a companion or confidante. She is a strange creature who doesn't even know all the top 10 hits from 1958 (but what might be going on in her head that he, in turn, wouldn't dream of?). Diner is a funny film that, above all, listens very carefully. Typical dialogues that we have probably all had in one way or another are rendered with absolute precision. Of course we have to translate the language, clothes, cars of the 50s into the here & now. Sometimes you think that director Barry Levinson has not created any three-dimensional characters at all in this prelude to his Baltimore trilogy. But then I came up with an even more disturbing interpretation: maybe these men didn't possess any three-dimensional characters at all?