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Well-directed but utterly shallow biography of ’60s model, hanger-on, and faux-radical Uschi Obermaier, who flees her home town and noxious parents, moves into Kommune 1, an experimental radical living space, and then becomes a super famous beautiful person and spends the rest of the film…well…reaping the rewards and negatives of that.
This film might have had unique things to say about German radicalism and the nation’s youth’s attempts to reinvent the national character after the Nazi and reconstruction eras. Na. This is a hymn to Uschi’s overpowering coolness and the right to ignore the world once you become rich enough. Crammed with sex, drugs, reasonably obscure rock’n’roll (except for Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” again: please, filmmakers, stop using it), a couple of Swedish guys playing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (alright, one’s Swedish, the other’s German), rifle-wielding mustachioed German nightclub owner-adventurers (specifically, Dieter Bockhorn, played by David Scheller), endless boob shots (those of lead actress Natalia Avelon mostly) and plenty of penises too (penii?).
Eight Miles High evokes the decadent side of the ‘60s with glee and atmosphere, and also the preening self-righteousness of some of the radicals, especially in Uschi’s first boyfriend Rainer Langhans (Matthias Schweighöfer) and the Kommune 1 crew; and there are some neat observations on hippie-sexual double standards, but also repeats the same scenes over and over (Uschi’s boyfriend du jour gets dick sucked by someone else. Uschi gets angry. Fight. Make up. Repeat.) Somehow it needed five screenwriters to concoct this eye-catching bit of fluff.
