Change Your Image
ericoblair
Reviews
Zerkalo dlya geroya (1987)
Wow, that's quite a Mirror!
Proust meets "Groundhog Day" in a Donbass coal mining town of Stalinist Russia, with a soundtrack featuring Nautilus Pompilius doing "Goodbye America" – is it any wonder that Khotinenko's Mirror ranks as one of a half-dozen perestroika-era movies that have achieved must-see status for Russians, ex-Soviets, never-were-Soviets and the rest of us?
The high-dome version: Zerkalo/Mirror said two things well in 1987 and just as well today: (1) the past is more complex than you thought; and (2) you can't fix it but you can understand it better – which makes empathy possible and reconciliation within reach.
To describe much more is to deprive Mirror of some of its power to surprise, so enough said – OK, plus these extra credit questions: 1. Does the Mirror of the title reflect (as it were) A. Tarkovsky's Mirror of 1974? And 2. Is somebody trying to further Perestroika II by putting Perestroika I movies like this one on prime-time Moscow TV so frequently of late, as the reports have it? Isn't that a nice conspiracy theory to contemplate, for a change?
Arn: Tempelriddaren (2007)
Stunningly mediocre! Character development-free! It's..it's...zzz-zzz-zzz
Sorry, I dozed off for a minute just *thinking* about this one. Which is hardly surprising, since my girlfriend and I literally dozed off watching the video last night-- and have no desire to try revivifying "Arn" again this evening.
There are some commendable production values on display here from time to time, and perhaps these are significantly augmented during in-theatre presentations. But no venue is capable of injecting nuance, breadth or development generally into the opaque characters who march through this thing, most especially the hero.
In short, the endless, sententious and overblown "Arn" comes across like an epic dreadfully in need of an attack by the Monty Python company. Otherwise, bring a pillow.
Gospoda ofitsery: Spasti imperatora (2008)
Goes some (small) way toward restoring the balance
Soviet cinema (and other art forms) spent 70 years mythologising the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, with special attention paid to creating Bolshevik heroes (galore) and demonising their opponents (of all stripes). The cinematically tiresome and historically ludicrous results are still showing on Russian television, and will likely be for decades-- which makes one wonder what children growing up without ever having known the Soviet Union can possibly make of them. Why, they must ask themselves, are the Bolsheviks still heroes on TV when we know they weren't in history?
A film like Gospoda Ofitsery: Spasti Imperatora (Officers and Gentlemen: To Save the Emporer) makes a modest contribution toward redressing the balance. It's far from great cinema; it is, instead, cinema that tries hard, if you will, to entertain and de-ideologise at the same go. Here and there it succeeds. It clearly had a respectable budget and some moderately well-known actors, plus a special effects unit that could do a creditable job with battles scenes and explosives.
The plot involves a commando group of officers detailed to save the lives of the imprisoned Romanov family. There are several sequences which tell a good story in themselves, but the whole of the film is really not impressive or sustained movie-making. Briefly put, the signal virtue of this production is its point of view: the heroes are the actual good guys and the villains the actual bad guys. And in the context of Russian history-as-presented-in-the-cinema, that counts for a good deal.
One hopes that another Russian Civil War blockbuster, "Kolchak" -- due to be released shortly -- can add rather more to this step in the right direction.
The History Boys (2006)
Quite false and very sad
While it is accurate to note (as another viewer here has) that this movie "has had very little impact on critics or public" presumably because its dramatic lapses have carved out a well-deserved obscurity for it the problem lies less in the film's failure as a play adaptation, as has been suggested, than in the nature of the work itself: "The History Boys" rings so resoundingly false on both its (assumed) levels that it fails either to entertain or enlighten, and cannot do otherwise.
What we have here, first off, is a classic false dichotomy: that school instruction may be rendered in one of two (competing) ways, i.e. teach-to-the-test or impart knowledge for its own sake. In reality, of course, any marginally competent teacher who has ever set foot in a classroom recognises that both these approaches (and a good deal else) must perforce be part of successful instruction; yet this plot hole big enough to drive a lorry through, smack in the middle of the movie, is next made even *less* excusable by turning the proceedings into some sort of, how to put it, Alternative Lifestyler's Schoolteaching Fantasy, making some people ask, quite understandably, What exactly does this play/movie think it is illustrating-- "The Lighter Side of Homosexual Child Molesting?"
The first problem owes in part (but only in part, of course) to the difficulty of telescoping all teaching on the screen into either [1] impossibly erudite interlocution (intellectual references elicit whole series of on-key responses on the same intellectual level-- which might actually happen if, say, the students were G.B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill, but are unlikely otherwise); or [2] Moments of Revelation in which students suddenly understand something (and visibly indicate such) that they had not understood before; this makes dramatic sense (or at least moves the plot, which is not always the same thing) but has little to do with the actual revelations born of teaching, which tend to occur ex post classroom, when the students put the pieces together-- and then return newly aware of (and articulate about) an idea or set of concepts that have taken some time, naturally, to be absorbed, assimilated and/or modified for use in and by the budding adolescent brains to which they were directed.
Granted, in viewing a play or film about teaching we must accept a version of this telescoping, as the externals of most of the actual learning processes reading, writing and thinking are not of themselves the stuff of drama. But even given that, this is a play/film which telescopes far too much into some sort of mega-productive hyper-talking, and does it in a false-dichotomy instructional context that fairly begs us to dismiss the whole enterprise as a near-total absurdity.
Yet the author and director act as though it is their job to alienate stodgy-old-bourgeois-us, and fear that these impossible light-speed meta-dialogues just may not be enough for the job: so they add a Buggery-in-Half-the-School-Hooray! fantasy that leaves "tolerant" audiences nervously scratching their heads and "traditional" people repelled (and/or heading toward the exits). Thus the several arguments one notes among some "observers" about just how well the benign acceptance of homosexual child molesting (how else, please, can one term the serial groping of schoolboys' genitalia?) is here "translated from the stage to the screen" would seem either an exercise in some sort of denial/deflection or simply an obscenity.
If the object of the groping teacher's advances had been *girls'* genitalia, he would have faced immediate arrest; if the boy-groper were a priest, tar, feathers and a railway tie might be the locals' response. Unbelievably, this film apparently seeks to claim some special indulgence for its own version of child abuse: it does not simply acquiesce in adult-male-abuses-juvenile-males behaviour, but encourages it, proposing the abusing teacher a kind of hero to his victims.
Viewers evidently unconnected and/or unconcerned with any particular social agenda have sent along reviews making the points above (and some related ones) in various ways; I urge you to read them. As to comments along the lines of "What a wonderful film about growing up!", "Brings back fond memories!" and the like: While cringing at these, of course, one still hopes that their authors have got access to professional assistance or have otherwise come to terms with their situations in ways that permit productive lives without endangering others.
In sum, the teaching/learning paradigm proffered in this film is as phony as anything Britflicks have ever tried to perpetrate. "Mr Chips" and "Educating Rita" are sober models of realistic naturalism by comparison, and Anderson's now-classic "If
" becomes nothing short of "War and Peace". As to the issue of artistic freedom v. moral licence: as long as there is no effective Truth in Blurbing law to ensure that potential viewers know what is afoot in "The History Boys", this film belongs in an Absolutely Must Miss category to which a very, very small group of genuinely offensive commercial features beg to be consigned. Those involved in the making of this film who did not perceive the nature of the behaviour it propagates should be embarrassed; those who did understand but contributed anyway for money, career advancement, titillation or whatever else should be ashamed.
The Good Shepherd (2006)
Ample rewards here for the committed-- of mind and body
The good news on Mr De Niro's version of "CIA: The Early Years" is plentiful enough:
(1) the script has more than sufficient history and skulduggery, both real and made-to-fit-the-movie, to keep the cleverer sections of one's brain engaged throughout the film's long running time; (2) there are considerable and sustained chunks of good acting on display, including fine contributions from sources you'd expect (John Turturro, John Hurt, Sir Michael Gambon, De Niro himself) and some you might not (Alec Baldwin and Angelina Jolie); (3) the production values,attention to period detail and the like are impressive throughout, cumulatively producing just the kind of atmospherics a good spy movie needs; and (4) the conclusions to be drawn are, if you will, clear without being obvious: some but not all of the dots are connected for you, while the direction and tenor of the film leave progressively less doubt about what the whole enterprise is saying *tout court*.
Bravo to all that. At the same time, however, one would be remiss in not mentioning several irritants, e.g. Why couldn't the make-up people age protagonist Damon (and Jolie to an extent) more convincingly? For that matter, why use Damon in the first place? While he has shown himself a fine actor in certain roles, this one fairly cries out for Russell Crowe, one would think (or was he simply otherwise engaged at the time?). And what are British viewers to make of Billy Crudup, playing an Oxbridgeian, potentially Philby-like character
but with an accent which seemed to be hovering around between the Midlands and the mid-Atlantic looking for a place to land?
Finally, a philosophical question: Given that the film is based in large part on the life and experiences of James Angleton (the externals thereof, in any case), was it wise to offer up this version of Angletonwho was nothing if not a colourful characteras a virtual cipher?
All told, this is a film which amply rewards the committed viewerbut do bear in mind that the commitment is one of both mind (no simple Bonding here) and body (at nearly 3 hours, preponderantly the posterior and kidneys).
My advice: furrow the brow, train a bit and go for it!