Stellead
Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful
Suman Roberson
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Mathilde the Guild
Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.
Mark M
DO NOT BOTHER! Horrible acting and average dancing. Forget it I just couldn't get into it when Germany was starving like my home country England. Rotten as I said besides your toenails need clipping don't waste the 90 minutes or so of your life! Furthermore, the story-line was thin and all over the place and the acting did not make me like any of the characters - The acting was over the top and it felt like Happy Days or the movie Greese with swastikas! Sad as the director Thomas Carter, tried but the cast choice was very strange. Willie is there and as Peter is driven away by the police he loudly screams "Swing Heil!" over and over again, which is very silly and pathetic. Evey - she was the worst actor and very wooden. SAY NO!
jzcalguy
I've read some of the reviews and feel I need to give a history lesson to some of them. This was 1938-1939. The Nazis hadn't gone berzerk with the killing of Jews and Gypsys etc. They may have been doing it in secret, but it wasn't common knowledge. That being said, the attempts to "cleanse" their society was indeed in full swing. *pardon the pun. They wanted nothing to do with outside influence, the training of the next generation was Hitler's plan. The HJ were to be the next generation of leaders, policemen, and general authority figures.Youth will rebel, it seems they always do to some degree. That's what these kids were doing. The movie is a very small view of what was going on. It's not the big picture.... it's basically Peter's struggle with who he is, who his father was, and his immediate environment. You can't really say the movie isn't accurate, because none of you is Peter.I love the movie. I love the music and the heart Peter puts into it. He loves the music... as he loved his father. And the Nazis tried to take both of them.
TxMike
Taking the biblical reference, in this story we have a Peter "The Rock" and a "Doubting" Thomas. It is 1930s Germany and the teenagers have latched onto banned music, "swing" music, much of it by Jewish-American musicians like Benny Goodman. But Germany also wants its young men to become members of Hitler's Jugen (HJ) as a way of preparing them to become Nazis when they grow up.The nominal lead character is Robert Sean Leonard as Peter Müller. But the best performance here is by Christian Bale as his close friend Thomas Berger. They are part of the larger group of "swing kids" who gather to play swing music and dance. A risky activity at this time.The core of the story centers upon Peter who recognizes the evil of the Nazi propaganda, and resists it, while Thomas resists at first but eventually is swayed. The two friends increasingly are at odds, culminating in a fight near the end.This is both an entertaining movie, even though it involves a very serious subject, and also a historically significant one, as it relates to the Nazi doctrine. I suppose, looking at it now, it was the severe viewpoints, the "supremacy of the race", that got more and more Germans to turn against it and resist. As well as most of the rest of the world.
movie-viking
The music is fabulous, the dance scenes won awards, and kids can identify with these teens --or at least sense the joy their own grandparents (or more likely, their great grandparents) felt when dancing or playing 1930's Swing music. THIS FILM (SLIGHTLY EDITED) WOULD BE A GREAT TEACHING TOOL FOR GRADE SCHOOL ON UP...!With minor editing of swear words, vulgar sexual comments about young women, (including the teen boys' discussion of hiring women in the red light district) and a few of the PG 13-to almost R dance shots of young womens' undergarments replaced with milder shots of women in the otherwise joyful dance segments...SWING KIDS could be used to SHOW KIDS how the Nazis COULD QUICKLY transform the innocent ................into the guilty. Teachers could use clips from this film to ALSO teach persons about the almost FORGOTTEN Holocaust against the disabled..."Arvid was a cripple. He didn't belong..." says one TEENAGER. Everyone KNOWS the Nazis persecuted the Jews. But the Nazis also persecuted - the DISABLED, like the character Arvid, (a great SWING musician) who is driven to extreme action - in part maybe because he was disabled. One senses these teen boys - and their fellow teen companions - love their music and dance as much as teens do today. They deal with the steady, sometimes seductive, sometimes violent, advance of Nazis into their world...partly thru dance. (PS this film is based on actual German teens who loved swing music)
