ZetsubouKaiji
Well-Known Member
This was the second Russian film I've watched (I guess Stalker is Soviet, but whatevs), and the second Strugatskiy brothers adaptation. This is an unrelenting piece of cinema, a work of single-minded vision dedicated to bringing us into a world that is unwelcoming, oppressive, filthy, and anti-intellectual (a bit like Warhammer). It's also hella self-indulgent and incredibly boring, a slog that feels longer than its generous runtime of three hours.
There is a plot, but it's as if it's told by someone that knows the source material very well, but also expects you to know it as well, so a lot of details are skipped over, or rushed, in favour of more scenes of filth and woe. I found the plot gard to follow, but I was not that attentive.
The themes of what you are willing to do for your fellow human beings, no matter how shitty (in more ways than one) they are, are under-explored. This looked far more interesting from a first glance, but I feel that there is actually not that much to the film in terms of substance. I thought it would be didactic, but it's more a case of escapism into a hellish place of squalor. Watch a trailer, and then you've pretty much got the gist of this.
The incredibly long takes make for a lot of weird scenes, with a lot of background detail, to be sure, but also a lot of hackneyed acting and bumbling action in claustrophobic locales. There is also something amateurish about actors acknowledging the camera and addressing the audience, almost in a mockumentary fashion. It's a very odd form of exposition, and a lot of it is unneeded.
It's far from the worst thing I've seen, but there is not that much interesting discussion to be raised from it, I feel.
Oh, and if movie club is a recurring thing, this should be the logo:
It sums up the experience so well.
You redhead bastard! You've been thinking about the movie because you're a dirty intellectual that should be strung up. I bare my ass at you and fart violently.
Hard to be a God is Idiocracy if it were long winded, pretentious and crushingly unfunny. The main character has gone to a world that has rejected any kind of intellectual pursuit until they've descended into an unthinking state of pathetic squalor. All progress has stopped and everyone is just content living in a decayed and shit caked world. Any one that tries to make it better through invention or art is persecuted if not killed.
The main character of idiocracy is more of an every man, but he eventually tries to help the world and set it back on course. The Don in this movie does eventually get around to doing stuff, but for most of the movie he's just the smartest guy in any given room mocking the poor simple bastards he's surrounded by. The movie he goes around the more frustrated he gets with the state of this world, but given the rules he's supposed to be following he's not allowed to do much to effect the situation. Given that he's a scientist he might have the powers of a god to effect the world, but he's not allowed to use them. He can only try to convince a powerfully stupid world of its folly.
As for the rest of it I am 100 percent in agreement with all that @HasseRovdjur said. I think the most disappointing thing for me was that the movie wasn't that visually striking. It's well shot, but I've seen all of its tricks before and the constant pointless continuous shots are monotonous. Continuous shots can be cool when used wisely. they can be used to create extra tension or to give a sense of continuity. However, they can really drag too if they're not showing anything of particular note, especially when they're in a movie this badly in need of editing. Watching the movie, it doesn't look like something that took six years to shoot.
Whenever watching a foreign film there's always going to be some cultural context lost. There was definitely a disconnect for me because a lot of the movie was supposed to be humorous in a dark way, but I'll be damned if I got the humor. It could be I just don't get Russian humor or it gets lost in translation, but I didn't laugh once while watching the movie. I was mostly bemused the entire time.
With no shame I will say that I was bored and lost track of the plot in the middle of the movie, but I went and read a quick summary to fill in the blanks. Now I understand what happened in the movie and damn is this movie long winded for such a nothing plot.
Like the redhead bastard above me, this isn't the worst film I've seen, but it is crushingly boring and doesn't have nearly the depth it pretends to have. It's a pretentious arthouse film that tries to get by on using a lot of drawn out conversations that never go anywhere and using a bunch of overused camera gimmicks to give the illusion that the things happening on screen are significant if you just think about them. They're not though, they're reeeally not. That's why I give this film one spit on fish in milk out of 10.
@GenSan gross that cake isn't even covered in muck. I hope you at least pissed yourself while eating it.
