Owing to my eternal indifference concerning '90s-to-present german cinema, i've never seen this one before. I liked the director's 2015 whiplash-inducing single-shot tour de force Victoria though so i was going into this with plenty of goodwill. The thing has long achieved cult status mostly in the german subcultural landscape, with certain quotes and soundbites having made it into tons of music as well for better or worse, some of it good, some completely atrocious. Without any glorifying nostalgia goggles on - nostalgia being a concept that hasn't ever done much for me anyway - i gotta say this quirky dramedy is kind of a mixed bag. Most strikingly in retrospect, this is so much a cultural artifact of its time and you could easily name previous influences, most notably Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, '80s-'90s Jim Jarmush, some early Tarantino and Guy Ritchie... yeah, pretty much the film-bro canon of its time with the directorial works of the film's producer Tom Tykwer also lending themselves as possible inspiration. All of it gives this one a kinda dated quality although its strenghts still prevail. I love all the drama and the pervasive sense of melancholy. The comedy, however, hasn't aged well at all and marks this very much as a product of its era and to make things worse, though i can see how it's been an enormous influence on german cinema since, i feel like the industry has taken to heart all the wrong lessons from it, endlessly replicating the wacky comedy aspect while lacking any of its emotional pull. It's really in the second half, when the comedy is largely abandoned and things are allowed to go real dark, that the film actually comes into its own, making it totally worth enduring the shaky, somewhat corny first act.