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Reviews of 4
Displaying all 2 reviews
Maicol Andrés Ordoñez
25Jun08
I feel lucky to have found this movie. It’s like buried treasure. The movie was hypnotic and stylish and didn’t add up to beans but it kept me watching as hot as it is here in LA.
The thing with this movie is that as I watched I was thinking it was like a Russian Werckmeister Harmonies for about the first half hour and then I switched to thinking it was a Parajanov homage and then it was a Tarkovsky and so I kept on listing. I think the reason that happened was because I never really felt the movie was taking me anywhere with all its ideas and its images. It’s something Bela Tarr is guilty of in his movie Damnation and what Carlos Reygada’s should be punished for doing with Japon.
(I’m kidding…sort of.)
I still liked the movie though. It was well shot and intelligently written and dammit it had a few images that I’m really glad I saw; I wouldn’t want to forget them.
- Currently 3.0/5 Stars.
Kim Packard
12Mar08
Four dogs… and four machines, pounding on the pavement, appear at the beginning of the film. One of the dogs is hit by a car. Such juxtapositions of nature and technology suggest the clash between interests of modernity and sentient beings in contemporary Russia. Three customers and a bar man appear next…the stories that the customers tell each other are outright lies or distorted…and abuse of alcohol is a dominant theme throughout the film. People drink to stay warm and keep going, rolling with the punches life deals them. By the end of the film, one of the three customers is imprisoned for murder while another is killed in a car crash. The third, a young woman, buries a sister who chokes to death on bread chew used for making doll masks—-the sales of dolls support their large extended family. The senseless waste of human resources is the main theme that unifies this film which ends with a scene of soldiers boarding four war planes headed towards war zones.
- Currently 4.0/5 Stars.