1/10
Best Coffee Table Book of 1999!!!
16 August 2002
Warning: Spoilers
I loved this movie! It's the finest parody of Russian cinema to date. Who else but Sokurov could lampoon Tarkovsky so brilliantly. You thought "Stalker" was slow? Well, step up to the plate. "Mat i Syn" makes "Stalker" look like "Raiders of the Lost Ark". By no means should you miss this film! There's no excuse - even if you live a busy life, you can still enjoy this film to its fullest by holding down the fast-forward button on your VCR. Sokurov has given us the first feature length film that can be appreciated in 12 minutes.

I suppose the next great masterpiece of the form will come when someone has the vision and courage to exhibit a film that consists of no sound or image at all - 45 minutes of a black, silent screen (wasn't this already explored in "In The Soup"?).

Apparently the filmmaker (and fans) have forgotten that "motion" is the first word of "motion picture".

!!!MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Want to reach the heights of genius that this film achieved? Here's a step by step guide:

1. Find a talented photographer.

2. Find some subjects and a suitably picturesque landscape (think Tuscany!). If you need inspiration, watch some luxury car or perfume commercials.

3. Shoot about 3 rolls of film.

4. Photoshop the results to play around with saturation, blur & aspect ratio.

5. Now just get out your movie camera, film 40 of the best pictures and have your "actors" mumble their lines off-screen. Don't worry about writing it ahead of time - just let the actors say whatever they want (lines like "Do you want a drink?" and "Let's get something to eat" are really all you need to fill up 8 minutes or so). If you can't think of enough dialog - no problem! Just have them repeat what they say a few times. If that still isn't enough, just let the camera run anyway.

Congratulations, another masterpiece! As a bonus, if you want to distribute it over the internet, no problem! The static images will compress down to nothing with standard mpeg encoding - a 73 minute movie would probably be about 2-3 megabytes, even at the highest quality levels.
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