Russian Language Hall of Fame

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All the noms look interesting to me, good choices! I haven't seen any but it's a good group of films. I might have went with Solaris as my choice.

Planeta bur
looks interesting. I wanted to see that but never could find a decent copy. I've seen Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) which is a recut of Planeta bur, dubbed with additional film footage added by director Derek Thomas...later to be known as Peter Bogdanovich.



Let the night air cool you off
All the noms look interesting to me, good choices! I haven't seen any but it's a good group of films. I might have went with Solaris as my choice.

Planeta bur
looks interesting. I wanted to see that but never could find a decent copy. I've seen Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) which is a recut of Planeta bur, dubbed with additional film footage added by director Derek Thomas...later to be known as Peter Bogdanovich.
I watched Planeta bur on youtube. It wasn't the highest resolution, but I think it might have added to the experience for me.



Only got 40 minutes left of Leviathan, had to go out. Finishing it now and jj said it's cool to start reviewing after. So remember as always it's full of spoilers.



Leviathan




Always see this on best of the 2010's lists, had no clue what it was about, expected depressing and that's what i got of course. This isn't a new favourite but it is good and i totally get why some love it. My only issue is i could see a lot of it coming a mile away. For example i knew Lilya and Dima were going to have an affair right from their first private conversation when Kolya left the room for a second and they got into small talk which lead to her asking Dima to talk to her husband. It was following the classic affair set up of preoccupied and difficult to talk to but loving husband being cheated on with close friend who is easier to talk to, even had him leaving them alone for a second and her mentioning he wasn't easy to talk to. Having it so he didn't actually do anything wrong but it was also easy to see how this could happen, an attempt at keeping everyone likeable. Feel from there i could see where a lot of it was heading and it reduced my interest somewhat. It's an interesting social commentary but it's never going to get past respect, if it doesn't suck me into the means it chooses to tell that social commentary.

Enjoyed the setting as it felt different. I'm used to either large cities or remote snowy locations in Siberia in Soviet/Russian films, this felt more like the middle ground between the two. Felt more like Scandinavia or something to me, of course i realize Russia is the largest Country in the world it encompasses a tonne of different landscapes. Felt the movie was very cozy and quiet making it easy to watch even during its harsher moments and i think the location played a big part in this.

Weird thing is i didn't realize this was from the Loveless director somehow. I knew he directed The Return but i thought this was someone else. It was definitely similar to Loveless, dude revels in bleakness and trauma i'd be shocked if any of his movies have happy endings or even a strong sense of hope, guess some could be read that way though. I preferred Loveless by quite a margin but that was mostly due to relating to it more since it was partly about a long destroyed relationship, i'd say they're similar in quality overall. All i'd personally say is i don't think some humour would kill him, even just irony that's not laugh out loud funny. Dunno, that's definitely a selective criticism with me, i don't apply it to everyone and sometimes i heavily praise directors for their unrelenting bleakness. Sometimes i also feel lightening up a bit could only improve things and that's personally what i felt here. May be a visual thing too, Stalker for instance blows my mind when we first get to The Zone, it's like the most beautiful thing i've ever seen but truthfully it's mundane it's because outside The Zone is so harsh and nightmarish. This is well shot and has pretty lake shots and stuff but it just feels like neverending grey to me. Don't think Loveless had the same problems for me, first thing that comes to mind there is the nighttime scene where Zhenya is walking around naked, not we are literally living inside a big bubble of depression here. Who knows, it works for the film but everything put together keeps this from becoming a favourite. One last complaint is i don't think it had to be as long as it is. The film wasn't so long that it was hard to get through or anything, i'm more saying i don't think it used its time as well as it could have. There's quite a few talking and hanging out scenes which i didn't feel developed the characters or the plot much, following the affair being revealed for instance there was so much moping about and scenes with no talking and i just felt okay i get the point this isn't doing much for me tbh let's move on.

One thing i did like a lot was Kolya himself. So often in these criticisms of society films the person suffering from it is a really good, impossible to dislike person. It's sort of manipulative that way because it makes those just doing their jobs easy to hate as stand ins for society, like a shortcut, it also asks nothing of you as a viewer to root for him coz how could you not? You don't even need to engage with what the film is saying it's as simple as wanting a good person to be treated well. Kolya feels a lot more real than those types of characters, he's can be a bit of an a-hole, he doesn't do anything horrible for the majority of the film but you get the feeling if you knew him in real life it'd be much more likely you wouldn't get on than you would. It isn't the opposite either he's no villain, he's just a run of the mill dude who the film isn't trying to make you think of as a friend or someone to look up to, it just doesn't present him as the last person this should ever happen to because it often isn't and it shouldn't need to be to make you care. I love that he barely smiles even before the bad news and that he always looks unkempt. There's honestly very little attempt to make you feel sorry for him outside the circumstances, it doesn't even go for the he's a great father despite his flaws cliche, he seems fine as a father but there's nothing notable about his relationship with his son. He'd never be the poster boy for a cause basically. Most importantly though he looked like Sid Justice/Vicious and that's always a plus.

Wasn't a fan of the Mayor character, felt too cartoonish to me. The moment he said "tear down that bastards place" i could no longer take him seriously. This sorta felt to me like a condensed version of The Wire. Showing you how the people in power use it and how it effects members of society, difference is there'd be more to him than bland crook. He was shown as some drunken foulmouthed slob, the sort of dude you know has killed at least four hookers. Yeah okay, i'm sure they are sometimes exactly like the caricature i have in my head but i'd have cared more about his scenes if there was a little more to his character. Like the scene he showed up drunk did absolutely nothing for me, felt like an unfunny comedy scene because it was so ridiculously overdone. His relation to the church and how he was clearly beholden to it despite his power was interesting, but it didn't save him from those initial scenes and i think that scene he's talking to the Bishop was another thing which was too dead on as i guessed then it was a church he was building. There was no need to have him say "we are working on this together".

Kinda struggled with Lilya too. She just looked mopey and barely said anything for large parts of it, understandable, i don't even know what i'm asking of her but i wasn't that into her scenes for quite a while. Think it could be unintentionally expecting certain things after seeing Loveless, as i found the main female character in that captivating. They were very different though the one in Loveless is a lot more brash and confident so it's unfair of me to complain about something that wasn't even intended. Was just flat out weird how the affair happened too, not that i have a problem with the way it was done it actually felt unique. No buildup, no passion between them, she was dealing with the exact same stuff as her husband so no extra pressure, not even any alcohol. It just happened. Actually, everything about it was utter insanity. Why on earth would they have sex on that trip with their kids? I find it amazing that's how they chose to have them get caught, guess it was to add in the embarassment of others being there but man, nuts. Kinda loved it because it was so weird.

Sorry, this is way longer than i intended it to be and most of what i said isn't interesting, just ended up all over the place. Good nom Neiba. From all this moaning you'll probably assume i hated it but i honestly didn't. I think it acheived most of what it set out to do and i often defended it in the middle of some of my criticisms because i know it's only a personal reaction i had to some of it (could have even been just the mood i was in) rather than the film failing. Zvyagintsev is a good director but i feel Loveless may end up my favourite of his largely because i saw it first, the more i dwell in these kinds of worlds the less it does for me.



Love Solaris. Not positive i'm going to rewatch it though as i remember it a lot more than Stalker or The Cranes Are Flying and i already think highly of it so don't feel i need to give it another chance. We'll see towards the end though.

Glad to have you Citizen



I just finished Leviathan but I'm not sure if I'll get around to writing something about it this evening or not, since I'm quite tired now and also I have no idea what to write haha.

Nice to see that CR is in, and that I finally have motivation to rewatch Solaris.



I just finished Leviathan but I'm not sure if I'll get around to writing something about it this evening or not, since I'm quite tired now and also I have no idea what to write haha.
Same. That's why that's a big nonsensical mess haha. Quite liked it but didn't love it: that should of been my review!



Let the night air cool you off
Spoiler alert. I spoil the ending in the first paragraph


Planeta bur

The propaganda in this one was a little much and right on the head. Masha is in space with vocal exposition about how she has been commanded to stay in space as it is the only hope. She leaves a message saying she's abandoning her post to check on her friends. At the end we find that she has potentially doomed all of the cosmonauts by disobeying her orders, which means choosing yourself and your friends/family over the good of the country is bad. Only to find at the end that she did the righteous thing and followed orders that benefited the country and everything worked out great because of it. I can take some propaganda if it has other valuable qualities, but that was a little much. And I know that description isn't great, but you'll see when you watch it. The plot doesn't really feel that important or powerful to me though, so maybe it was just tacked on because the government insisted on that sort of thing back then.

I also didn't really care for the dialogue or acting most of the time, but it wasn't necessarily distracting or bad. I will say that before they got to Venus, the movie was super-duper tedious. I was forcing myself to pay attention and just kept dozing off. I turned it off thinking maybe I was just sleepy, but then I couldn't sleep. I did some other stuff and went to bed. After I woke up and was awake for a little bit, I went back to it and still started dozing off. And this was only like 20 minutes. That's not really a valid criticism of the film, because there could be any number of factors that lead to that.

Business picked up when they get to Venus though. And while I never really cared about the plot, the visuals, music, and atmosphere all clicked for me. The soundtrack was nothing new or groundbreaking, but it was solid sci-fi electronic music that worked with the murky visuals, not-quite good rubbery monsters and silly Venus Soviet-traps. I really dig how everything looked like it was being filmed through a weird color and water filter. I watched it on Youtube in 240p; usually inadvisable, but it looked fine. And it either desperately needs a remaster or it needs for nobody to ever touch it. I liked the dated look of the colors being faded and seemingly being on a foreign planet too long and being exposed to some sort of weird radiation that causes everything to bleed together. I felt like the whole thing looked very foreign and odd. It was very fitting for a movie about being on another planet. This movie could have had no plot at all, maybe an adventure movie or something, and just toured the planet and I would have loved it. That said, I do like it despite the stuff I said before. It's not great, but it is unique. The visual component of the film is great, and I expect that to be the trend in this hall of fame.



Yeah there's a major spoiler in like my third sentence so don't read it until you see it. I now have a warning above and below it so you can only blame yourself haha.



I will say that before they got to Venus, the movie was super-duper tedious.
Maybe that's why I don't remember anything about the film before they got to the planet haha. I plan to rewatch this one next, so I guess I'll see for myself.





Leviathan / Левиафан (2014)
Directed By: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Starring: Aleksei Serebryakov, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Elena Lyadova

Leviathan moves at a slow pace, and focuses on the consequences of actions more so than the events themselves, with a number of key plot developments being understood through context and dialogue alone. It's a film that doesn't provide all the answers, and instead dwells on the reality of injustice and wide-spread corruption, and its affects on the lives of ordinary people.

There are plenty of establishing shots of the surrounding area and its lack of vibrancy, giving the film a barren and isolated atmosphere. It does a great job reflecting the rather bleak lives of the main characters, and the cinematography is definitely one of the film's highlights. I also rather enjoyed Anna Ukolova's performance, and would've liked to see more of her and her sarcastic charm.

When this film first came out, I heard a lot of high praise for it, so I was a little disappointed when the story turned out to be quite predicable. I lost a bit of interest towards the end of the film after Dima's involvement came to an end, and I think I personally would've preferred something that had more mystery or political intrigue, though that wasn't the point of the film. Despite suffering a bit from high expectations, I'm glad I finally got around to seeing it.


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