User Reviews

I was flipping through the channels at 1:30 this morning, and stumbled upon this documentary. I had never heard of Ryzhy before, but I found his life and poems very interesting. The film is shot and edited quite nicely... it has a spooky, sad, nostalgic, old-Polaroid-picture sorta feel to it. It was perfect for a late-night/early morning viewing.

Especially interesting to me were the segments involving Ryzhy's son, and the montage-type sequences that accompanied the readings of his poems. The soundtrack was excellent as well... really suited the run-down suburban landscape of the film. It reminded me a bit of some of the Montreal "post- rock" bands. I believe that he credits listed Low and Calexico as contributors to the soundtrack.

I'd recommend it!

What inspired my 5 is the vast amount of irrelevant shots with no commentary. Just randomly in the documentary, they start showing footage of Russian people that they recorded. And it usually takes half a minute for the commentary to come in. That half a minute is extremely agonizing. And these useless shots become even greater in size and mass toward the end of the movie. The documentary didn't really teach a lot about Ryzhy either. I've been researching Ryzhy and been trying to collect more information about him but the most this movie provided was two of his friends and some of his family members. The movie doesn't even answer the question that it seeks to answer. Why did he kill himself? The ending is truly agonizing because right after sitting through half a minute of footage of Russian people to get the answer that the movie has been building up to, it's "I don't know." Severely disappointed. Terrible cover too. This movie is good if you're looking to brainlessly watching something and you don't care what, mostly because it's free on YouTube with no ads.