tushania Reviews

La France (2007)

Frank, sad, genuinely romantic, very WWI

[8/10 · 20 January 2012]

I am extremely surprised at most of the reviews submitted here. It is as if the Americans are really as our (stupid) stereotypes paint them: unimaginative, uneducated, dull, practical.

Questions spring to mind: would they enjoy "The Little Prince" by Saint-Exupery? Would they say that it's silly? Did they ever read or heard a poem of any kind? Did they ever read Remarque or Dos Passos or saw Deer Hunter or anything good? Did they literally took apart every fictional movie or book they saw by the criteria of factual consistency, realism and strict adherence to genre? I really, really don't understand people that criticize a movie about war because there were not enough explosions or bomb craters in it. I refuse to believe that they never had seen a good movie about war without action heroics (we certainly have, Soviet cinema did a lot of nice and gentle (and popular) dramas and humane comedies about war). It's like criticizing a comedy for the lack of good old-fashioned clowns in it.

And most of all it surprises me that even the social context doesn't push them in the right direction. A couple of guys here saw the film at an art-house festival. I imagine that they would be OK with the most absurd and gory things if someone put a "trash" and "experimental" and "surreal" stickers on the poster. But war films, they are about tactics and M1s, right? I think the musical numbers in the film are the most beautiful part of it: they set the tone for the lengthy and disjointed dialogue about Atlantis and whatnot. They are obviously efficient at 1) bringing out the sensitive in young soldiers without heaping macho melodrama; 2) exploring the androgyny of a soldier (an interesting theme); and 3) just evoking the "war is a silly, strange place to be for all of us, but were are here" Vonnegut kind of feeling.

I wonder if other reviewers read Vonnegut.

Song of Heroes (1932)

A powerful and uplifting ode to the real heroes of Soviet Industrialization

[20 April 2011]

A fascinating, powerful and stirring ode to Industrialization as an entity, a living wave driven by enthusiasm and will of the Komsomol (youth organization).

Of course, there were other sides to the building of Magnitogorsk industrial area. After all, a good deal of workers there were forced labor, convicts, many of whom were tried as generally unfit for society, using the broad-defined 58-1 article of the Criminal Code.

But Ivers looked for the force, the wave, the vibe of the ultra-fast and ultra-fierce Industrialization. And he managed to show it here.

The images are straightforward yet powerful, and do not feel outdated. Mind you, it's 1932, so torch processions weren't a Nazi trademark yet, and the expressions "storm troops" who "storm" the obstacles were associated only with the bold heroes of WWI and Civil war.

It's a pity that English subs in the rip I found on internet are lacking. For most of the film text is optional... But the intense song that ends the film, subs are way off (lyrics are way better and there's more of them). And they say that the multi-national crew of this film (including avant-garde poet Tratyakov who composed the lyrics) sometimes got drunk in their shack - they lived alongside simple workers - and sang this song all night long.

So this is a must-see for anyone who watches Russian and Soviet early cinema; if you've seen Stachka, Man with a Movie Camera or Battleship Potyomkin, you better see this film (it's known in Russia as An Ode for the Heroes) and Old And New (General Line) by Eisenstein.

ps:i watched this in VGIK, the main movie school of Russia. therefore a big disappointment with lyrics.

Mean Guns (1997)

A gem of a B-movie, concise and sure, refreshing a host of clichés and singlehandedly making mamba THE music for action scenes.

[8/10 · 20 April 2011]

A gem amongst B-movies of its age - specifically, the ambiguous 90s age, when you weren't exactly sure if something was B or A variety just by looking.

The premise itself is ingeniously simple - upturn a couple of IKEA plastic boxes full of guns, assorted ammo and baseball bats on top of a crowd of small-time hustlers, big-time killers and middlemen entrepreneurs, with a deadline and a 10 mil prize ahead of them. Hilarity will not hesitate for a moment to ensue.

The movie demonstrates a surprisingly sure and purposeful grip of its unsophisticated material. The writing is full of self-indulging one-liners and disconnected shock scenes, but manages to remain concise and dry overall. The directing is full of action movie clichés (though less so if you consider that it was done before The Matrix or Bad Boys or Shoot 'Em Up), but retains a certain stylish fleur of mamba shindig where only the cool ones are invited.

The acting is accomplished entirely by the way of good casting (suitably so for cutout characters that this movie so nicely puts to use) - Lambert as an unstable Leon-type children-loving killer with a weight on his conscience, Halsey as an implacable killer with a heart, a worn-out accountant-journalist with a dirty conscience, a cool blonde killer girl with a chrome-plated Desert Eagle and so on.

Every cliché that this movie invokes it surprisingly fresh - no less because these clichés managed to become clichés without a worthy, contemporary manifestation in the actual films worth watching. Maybe these are common in literature or cheap TV, but in cinema, they lurk modestly in the background.

Here, they are in the spotlight. And they create drama - maybe not a tearjerker, but epic enough to be respected and not laughed at benignly.

All of the violent scenes are rendered with an aesthetic detachment, and at the same time, with geeky admiration for the heroes' undeniable coolness. This combination makes Mean Guns a singular experience - you're cheering for typical B-movie shootouts, but at the same time admire the stop-motion hallucinatory flashback-murder scenes; you're laughing at simple street-wise humour that Ice-T impeccably projects (from his personal experience, no doubt) - but you stop and wonder at the surreal scene where a roomful of crooks tries to shoot each other with empty guns in time lapse.

After all, the location alone makes this movie unique - an ultra-clean, high-tech, dystopian prison, smack in the middle of a large city, littered with cold bodies and warm cartridge cases (or vice versa). Prize is in the middle of the labyrinth, and a cynical, steel-toothed demiurge is at the top of it; he seeks death but scoffs at weak attempts to deliver it.

All in all, this movie in my eyes puts to life a chaotic reality of William Gibson's Sprawl (from his Neuromancer cyberpunk trilogy0. An assortment of selfish crooks, sophisticated in their choice of gadgets and styles, each one with a dark secret in their closet; somewhat flat personas, trigger-happy but cautious, in the middle of the lawless but tech-ridden world; this is Mean Guns all right.