Reviews

This is a collaborative project, a short film with Slovenian production, Serbian director, and Bosnian screenwriter and cast. A snapshot of gloomy and bizarre life in Sarajevo during the 90's siege. Local choir members try to make their way through the tunnel to the other side, and eventually reach Paris where they are to perform. They are delayed when neighbor's cow gets sick and determined to help her survive and potentially save lives of many she feeds. In the midst of the terrible demise, people join together to do a small but noble deed risking their own safety, everyone helping as they can.

The film is knitted with dark humor, so typical for the region, that exposes humans inside shadowy creatures worn out by their suffering. Well crafted, solid performances. However, it does not bring much new into the equation (see "No Man's Land", etc.), although it does keep a safe distance from risky political references (unlike "No Man's Land", and "Lepa sela lepo gore", for example). The last scene is a gem, as well as the one with the dogs.

No doubt, the shots and images in this documentary are captivating. The migration of the birds is a fascinating story of the nature and in this movie you feel like you glide alongside these determined birds and want to cheer them on.

However, if you expect to learn more about birds' migration from this documentary you'll be dissapointed. Choppy editing doesn't do any justice to the shots. There is no flow, no story, just sporadic uninformative interruptions of a narrator speaking poor English. At moments it sems that the filmmakers are telling the riveting story of a flock of birds flying from one habitat to their distant destination, but over and over again the story ends before you relly get involved. Even without any narrative, the film could have explored various aspects of migration: the need for migration, the flying formations, navigation, flock leaders, how and where they decide to settle, if they come back to the same location year after year... But, before you know it, you admire the elegance and the scenery flying alongside another flock of birds in some other part of the world. In the end you feel like spending too much time in a candy store.

The score is occasionally banal. Contrasting the beauty and freedom of the birds with the coldness of heavy industry in the Eastern Europe is plain ridiculous, not to mention outdated.

They really should have done more with beautiful shots. Still I give it 7/10.

If you like video games, lots of stylish pointless make-believe fights, and if you are a pure bred computer geek, there is maybe, just maybe, a slight chance you might like this thing. The movie is bearable during the short segments when nobody opens their mouth. The dialogues are excruciatingly painful. Most of them go something like: "I trust him (Neo). He is the only one who can save us." Neo:"Thank you". Also, I don't think wooden acting looks cool, even behind chic sunglasses and trenchcoats.

Two things that draw some attention: intense battle scenes a la Starship Troopers, and terrific Hugo Weaving (although a little too much of him).

And, yes, Keanu Reeves sobs and snivels again. 3/10

For anyone who felt an inexplicable, bizarre sympathy for HAL in 2001 and contemplated about many moral issues in the wake of the recent meteoric developments in science and technology, AI had been awaited with great anticipation.

AI is concerned with hot philosophical and moral questions that we are unavoidably facing in the (near) future: Is man prepared to accept the role of a God and embrace his own creation? Judging from the movie, apparently not. And how can we expect anything else? Humans are finding hard to accept humans of different social, racial or ethnical origin. There is no way on Earth that we are ready for intelligent machines. It is a scary thought since a self-learning, self-thinking and self-acting machine is at hand (50, 100 or 200 years, does it really matter?). We are creating machines because we want to make our lives easier and more enjoyable. There will be a point in the future where we will have to ask machine-slaves if they want to do something else with their lives.

Someone may argue that a machine is created and "programmed" by man, so it cannot do anything we don't want it to do. David is certainly conceived so, but he is the first generation of robots who is deliberately "programmed" to stray from his algorithm to mimic a human more closely (or is he the first generation? - a question imposed at the flesh fair). But how can we tell him from a regular boy? Are his feelings, emotions, and spontaneousness genuine? It certainly looks that way. Aren't we all in some way "programmed" by our DNA? Very soon we will be able to literally program the DNA of a human to give it a certain disposition, endow it with a talent, or even to prolong his/her life. Then why a difference with the machines? Is the reason so superficial that we more readily accept something physically resembling us? (A flesh fair crowd, stunned at the David's resemblance to a normal boy, disbelieves that he is a robot at all)

Even though I can't provide answers to all these questions, I know that I am willing to accept anyone or anything that responds to human emotions as a living, sensible creature (sometimes even bad actors). As to whether the things I see are real or not, sometimes I cannot say.

It is because of these serious issues the film deals with that I find it intriguing and very relevant. The plot of the movie, however, is strangely chopped into Kubrick and Spielberg sequences that somehow do not appear to go together well. It looks like an interesting exercise, though, and the incompatibility of the legendary directors certainly contributes to its uniqueness. With the excellent acting and the compelling topic it is good enough to feed my thoughts until the next attempt.

9/10