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Ironiya sudby, ili S legkim parom! (1976)
Awful propaganda for selfishness and degradation
This is an awful movie. Here's the story: the shy middle-aged surgeon Zhenya Lukashin lives in Moscow and plans to marry for the first time in his life. He tells his girlfriend Katya that he was going to marry another woman a few years ago, but on the very last moment he fled to Leningrad because he didn't really want to be married. Jerk alert! He half-heartedly tells Katya that he won't do that to her.
On New Year's Eve, he goes to the sauna with his friends and gets drunk. He soon forgets that he has a fiancée. One of his friends has to go to Leningrad to celebrate New Year with his significant other. He and Lukashin are so drunk they fall asleep, while the other two friends don't remember who is supposed to fly. So they stuff Lukashin into a plane.
He arrives in Leningrad and is helped off the plane by a grumpy fellow passenger. He annoys and embarrasses another passenger with his stupid drunk behavior and takes a cab home. He almost pisses himself and calls for his mother, before miraculously opening the door with his own key. He has no idea what happened and falls asleep. (the context here is that the Soviet state built lots of identical-looking houses, gave the streets in different cities the same names and that people had similar-looking stuff in their homes. Never mind that this is the definition of an industrialized country).
Somewhat later, the home's owner, Nadya, returns. She is blonde, tall, slim and pretty. She is shocked to find a drunk stranger in her bed and tries to remove him, but barely manages to make him understand what happened before her own fiancé, Ippolit, arrives. Ippolit is serious and old-fashioned. He doesn't believe the story about how Lukashin ended up in Leningrad and opened Nadya's door with his key. He thinks Nadya is cheating on him and leaves in anger.
Nadya and Lukashin get to know each other and fall in love. Nadya turns out to be a teacher of Russian language and literature and tells that she had an affair with a married man for 10 years. Ippolit loses all respect for himself and is entertains suicidal thoughts. As for Katya, we don't even learn what happens to her.
I used to like this movie when I was younger but now it makes me sick. The actors who play Nadya and Zhenya are blonde and angelic-looking, while Katya and Ippolit are depicted as dark, sour, old-fashioned and repulsive. The message is clear: it's a virtue to be at the mercy of your impulses like a leaf in the wind. It means that you're a child of Eden, whose soul hasn't been corrupted by our sick society. Conversely, being sober, conscientious, concerned and reliable, trying to control yourself and your life, having expectations from yourself and from others, makes you a miserable sellout who needs to be put in their place. Expect a friendly punishment from your friends, who are trying to help you. It's for your own good. Never resist any impulse, whether from within or without, whether your own or other people's. Whatever comes your way, be nice and go along with it.
The movie contradicts itself by depicting society as controlling and repressive and forgetting about this fact when it suits the story. In 1970, the Soviet government made passport checks mandatory on planes, so it was impossible to travel with somebody else's ticket in 1975. Even before that, drunk individuals weren't allowed to travel by plane. And why didn't Nadya call the police when she discovered a drunk stranger in her bed? Also, it's impossible for somebody this drunk to sober up in 2- 3 hours.
There's nothing original about the story. Weak, clueless, selfish losers have always tried to make themselves look humble, sensitive, spiritual, artistic and philosophical, while trying to make hard-working and responsible people feel stupid and guilty for being "boring".
In my opinion, the only good things about his movie are the song "Over my street" by Alla Pugacheva and the poem in the end. Everything else is saccharine, mind-numbing propaganda for stupidity, selfishness and depravity.
Khadak (2006)
Absolutely pointless
I was very excited about watching a Mongolian movie for the first time, and this turned out to be a complete disaster. There is literally no story. The movie starts with a nomadic family having to move to the city because their animals die. In the city part of the movie, things start getting more and more weird. The two teenage characters run around constantly, the camera turns upside down, a female voice slowly counts to 10...... if you don't get it, you're supposed to feel stupid and guilty for failing to appreciate the deepness of the hipster directors, I guess. Just like in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes". Don't waste your time on this.
Dare mo shiranai (2004)
Very long and boring
What a waste of time. No idea how this movie got such a high rating on IMDb. It's incredibly long and boring: 2h 20mins and 80% of what you see is kids playing video games and buying groceries. I'm not a shallow person that needs fantasy, dizzying action and violence and smart-aleck dialogues, but this was boring even for me.
The only good thing is that you get to see ordinary Japan. From watching VICE documentaries you can get the impression that Japan is a sleek, scentless technological utopia/dystopia full of emotionally stunted autistic virgins who marry cartoon characters and single moms who make money by eating their own poo in front of customers, so it was nice to see ordinary, human Japan.
Schatjes! (1984)
A good depiction of our disturbed society
Whether consciously or not, this movie is about the decay of adult authority and the rise of our narcissistic consumer culture, in which impulses and self- gratification are the highest good and everything else be damned.
The movie starts with two teenagers, a girl and a boy, setting off a bomb in their parents' bedroom for no apparent reason. Their two younger brothers (aged around 5-6) continue to annoy the parents.
The parents then try to discipline their daughter for having sex with her tennis instructor; their older son for looking at his sister's breasts; their younger children for throwing food into their parents' faces. This only makes the children more mean and vengeful.
The adults in the movie look like bumbling fools, especially the father. He's a pilot in the Dutch army and works with US officers, but instead of battling the Soviets in the Cold War, he has to fight a war against his children at home.
When the older children discover that their parents want to send them to a reformatory, they put their sleeping parents into a car, dump them in the woods, return home and barricade the house.
The father brings some of his army comrades to help him force his way into the house. But the children have found one of his father's guns and the adults flee in panic.
In the end, the drunken father breaks into the house at night with an axe (this was directly inspired by "The Shining"). The four children flee in a car. Their parents pursue them, also in a car, but get buried in concrete by accident. Nobody learns their fate, they seem to have disappeared. The children go on to lead chaotic and eccentric lives.
The movie has a dream-like, nightmare-like quality about it. The problem seems mundane enough -- disobedient teenagers -- but one is left with a depressing sense of helplessness and confusion.
I'd give this movie a 10 if it was a condemnation of our nihilistic consumer society, but it seems the makers were welcoming the changes and made this movie as an artistic warning to older people. Therefore I give it a 5. I liked to see the Netherlands in the mid 1980s and the actors are pretty good.