Goodbye, Lenin (mild spoilers)

Saw Goodbye, Lenin yesterday. It's a movie about a East Berlin family where the mother spends 8 months in a coma after a heart attack, eventually wakes up and her adult children are ordered to keep her away from anything upsetting. Thing is, the woman is an ardent Communist and during her coma the Berlin Wall has fallen and Germanies are about to unite. The children go through heroic efforts to pretend that everything is still like it was and nothing whatsoever has happened.

The movie is entertaining, and the parts of it that are supposed to be amusing are properly amusing. Nevertheless I kept having a feeling that the movie is designed to manipulate the viewer into crying. I have nothing against such manipulation on general principle, but it fails here, or at least does not work for me. I mean, there are the normally sad scenes with people being sick and all, and they are sad in a normal way, but this thing was clearly designed to make people cry nostalgically for a lost way of life, including and especially the people who never liked that way of life to begin with. My problem with it is that it did not work for me. And it's not like it's hard to manipulate me into crying, so a movie that tries to do so and fails must be really bad on some level, or just on a very different wavelength.

The only movie ever that was even worse at it was Burned by the Sun. It had two tragic main characters, and we were supposed to be sorry for both in turn. I sat through that movie wishing slow and painful death on both of them.