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Posrednik (1990)
7/10
Great late-Soviet sci-fi indie!
15 November 2008
Warning: Spoilers
Unusual and high-brow. Low-pace and creepy. Existential and extraterrestrial. Takes over Tarkovsky and Sokurov. Sends shivers down your spine. Schitzoid and paranoid.

ET intelligence invades the earth by hacking right into commonplace terrestrials' minds in an average Soviet town. "This is a scenic location around here...", as the tagline goes, also serving as a password for the ET intruders.

Caution! this is very different from any US sci-fi movie. In fact, this is a different cinema genre. Also beware in case you have mental disorders )Otherwise just roll a joint, relax and open your mind for the offbeat stuff... And make sure you plan your next visit to your shrink )
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Westler (1985)
3/10
Pretty weak
2 April 2008
First - the good things about the film. Nice blond Rainer Strecker's character seems a good representative of East Berlinean gay archetype in the 1980s :) Some of the GDR tokens - Nina Hagen, obligatory military service for men, the Baltic for a week off, Prague over weekend, signs in Russian every now and then - will definitely make some modern Germans nostalgic... That country is gone for good - or for bad :)

Now the actual critique. The good, albeit trite, collision - love across the barb wire ("why can't we two simply live together") deteriorates as the film reels. Poor "pseudo-documentary" script. Strained story-telling. Awful MIDI-synthesizer soundtrack. Far from best use of 90 minutes' screen time. Obtrusive exploitation of how-bad-communism-is type of details. Was this meant to be a propaganda film?

Recommend to watch something else. If you are looking for films on GDR - there are better ones, try e.g. "Nowhere to go" (Die Unberuehrbare)
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