Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Movie Deputy Reviews, where we are here on day nine of our 12 Days of Christmas. Can you believe that? That we are on day nine already.
[00:00:13] Yay. I am excited. Now, if you're thinking, if you are on our YouTube channel or on our Rumble and you are thinking that the poster to the side of me here is spelled wrong, I'm going to be getting to that here in just a second. This is actually the actual poster for the movie, but we're going to be getting to that here in a second. Yeah. Today is day nine and we are. Our participant level has completely blown me away. So please keep your answers pouring in to moviedepitymail.com or the Contact Us page on moviedebity.com I love seeing all the submissions, but the movie that we are talking about today is called Balloon and it came out in 2018. Now, if you see the poster here off to the side, it actually looks like it says Ballon because this form of balloon only has one O. Well, that's because the entire movie is in German. Now, typically, I'm not a big fan of subtitle movies, but this one is actually based on a true story.
[00:01:10] Now, you may be thinking, but wait, all of these movies are supposed to have something in common, and they do, but I kind of got to mix it up a little bit and stuff. And I can't make it too easy, but I don't want to make it too hard either. But this was.
[00:01:24] This is an important one. This is another one that's actually based on a true story.
[00:01:29] And it's about.
[00:01:32] Actually, before I get into that a whole lot, I want to jump over and share the original trailer for this movie with you and then we'll come back and talk about it some more.
[00:01:58] Now, I want to go ahead and say, if you are listening to the podcast, you don't speak German. This may be confusing.
[00:02:04] Come on over to our YouTube channel or to our Rumble channel and you'll be able to see that during the trailer. There are. There are subtitles on the trailer as well.
[00:04:16] So the movie Balloon, if you were watching the trailer with me, it is a story about two families in East Germany in 1979 who are trying to escape and get to West Germany. And so they build a hot air balloon out of materials that they can gather.
[00:04:35] And the first attempt doesn't go quite as planned. And so they try to make a second attempt at it.
[00:04:41] And though it doesn't end up going quite as planned, that it is a very inspirational Movie. Like I said, it is based on a true story.
[00:04:50] This actually did happen.
[00:04:53] Let me share the podcast image with you here. There we go. This is actually is you Can I just kind of just again shrunk it down into the square form for the podcast.
[00:05:01] And as you can see, I turned what looked like blonde into balloon here. But this entire movie is in German.
[00:05:09] I.
[00:05:10] You got to pay attention to the subtitles. It can be a little hard to do. But because the story, it was so inspirational and the fact it was true, I wanted to kind of check it out and review it. Now, being that the. Some of the subject matter is what it. What it basically is what it is, it does have a guilty rating. I am giving it a guilty rating. I'm also giving it a 6 out of 10 on the Deputy scale. Now, I really debated going higher. I appreciated that they did over Hollywoodize the story. They didn't like, try to make it bigger, try to make it better, try to make it more spectacular. They kept to the true nature of the story.
[00:05:47] And a lot of people may be thinking, okay, what are you talking about? East Germany, West Germany? Well, prior to the Berlin Wall coming down, there was. Germany was actually two countries. It was East Germany and West Germany. And so a lot of these newer generations don't realize that Germany was actually two Germanies. And so the fact that the people on the east and the people on the west, I mean, it was a drastic, drastic difference in how things were done. And just by crossing the border, it's like you could be killed for basically trying to do that. And it was just absolutely horrid.
[00:06:22] So what these two families faced with doing this and the things that they were judged not only by their peers, but by their friends, by their neighbors, by everybody around them. And it was just a big deal of what they were doing and who they could trust and just how everything was involved with this. So if you like history, if you like documentaries, this is, this is a movie, it's not a documentary. And so I do want to touch on that.
[00:06:53] But just the way that is done and the way that it's portrayed and the way it's like you're. You're drawn into it now, they're like, you may be saying, okay, well, why didn't you give it a higher score? Well, as much as I appreciate that they didn't over Hollywoodize it, that's also one of the things. It feels like there's parts of it that don't really add a lot to the story. I mean, it fills in some of the information, but it doesn't really add that much to the story and so it kind of takes away from it a little bit. I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to see errors, but it's just distractions of sorts.
[00:07:30] And so that kind of played a part with where I ended up with the score on this one as well.
[00:07:36] So is this going to be one for you? It's got a kind of a limited audience. It's kind of hard to find if you want to watch this.
[00:07:43] But it's available. I know you can access it through Amazon Prime Video and I'm not sure about other platforms for this as well but.
[00:07:52] And I think there is even an English dubbed version of this. I don't 100 quote beyond that. I could be wrong on that. I'm just going off what I thought I saw. It's been a while since I've looked this one up. So like I said, is this one for you? Like if you like history, if you like documentaries, like. So again, this is not a documentary, it's a movie.
[00:08:10] So it's not. I mean there's probably a few things that are exaggerated a little bit that aren't 100 true to form, but it's done beautifully. You feel what they feel, you are experiencing what they experience at least as much as you possibly can when you're watching it on the big screen.
[00:08:27] So if you're into stories like that, I do highly recommend this. As it is, like I said, it's just a very powerful story.
[00:08:35] And then I need to actually upload my trivia to the computer because again, I have it on the notes on my phone here.
[00:08:40] But for our Day 9 trivia for our 12 Days of Christmas, again, I'm just hoping that you were having as much fun with this as I am today's movie. Yeah, it's a little bit kind of.
[00:08:53] It's not what you would expect, but it fits in with the whole theme of all of the movies being tied together.
[00:08:59] Now does this have any Christmas theme or anything to it? I don't really think any of the movies have. Are Christmas themed this year. I'm trying to think of all the movies that we've been talking about. None of them really are particularly centered around the holidays. So I had somebody ask me that. It's like, well, why are you doing these movies if they're not centered around the holidays? It's because they share something else in common that I just kind of thought was interesting. And so I thought it was kind of an Interesting.
[00:09:23] Just kind of a tidbit to do. It's like the trivia is Christmas, but the movies are not. So if that's what you're expecting, I apologize. I don't mean to disappoint anybody, but that was just the direction we went with this year.
[00:09:35] But for our day 9 of 12 trivia, this one, the rest of our trivia is going to be too hard. And our Day 12 trivia is probably going to be like, I'm not going to say the easiest, but it's probably going to be the most fun one to participate in. But of course, we. I want you to participate in all of them so you have a chance at our grand prize, which is going to be amazing and again, like, and subscribe and encourage your friends to subscribe and everything to our YouTube, YouTube channel and get more people to participate in the trivia because I said if we hit those numbers, somebody's gonna win an amazing prize package. So I can't wait for that. And I hope you can't wait, too.
[00:10:15] But day nine trivia is what was the first artificial Christmas tree made of?
[00:10:22] Now, that may seem simple, but it's not quite as obvious as what you might think.
[00:10:27] So again, what was the first artificial Christmas tree made of?
[00:10:32] So that is our day nine question.
[00:10:34] So I hope you're having as much fun with this as I am. This is an adventure. It's going to be a lot of fun and I can't wait. I will be back again soon with another day of movie review and some more trivia for you too. So till later, guys. Bye. Bye.
