ivan_dmitriev Reviews

White Rabbit (I) (2013)

Poor attempt to describe serial killers' personality

[4/10 · 18 January 2024]

Which passes off like a movie lionising Jeffrey Dahmer, really, and much more so than the recent TV series.

Poor casting of what looks like 30- and 40-something pretending at playing teens does the movie a disservice completely taking the viewer out of the movie. A lot of the scenes are laughable and not in a good way, because of that, some scenes are completely beyond belief, because of the differences of how people think and act in their teen age, here the producers didn't make an effort to actually research the pedestrian subject of life of high school teens and seemingly didn't even want to.

A cringy imitation of the "deep" and "psychological" movies of the 90ies, without substance, with the (still very minimal) gore and stylized violence of the 2010s searching for a meaning, which won't come until the 2020ies , a transitional period, for movies, and for society too. 4/10.

From the Shadows (I) (2022)

Cheesy B-movie

[5/10 · 15 January 2024]

With some nice homages to horror and thriller classics, SFX and scenes, I think it might be a sequel to another.

This is a very much covid Era filmed in a room about people in the zoom room being bored out of their mind in a zoom while ghosts zoom by. Some acting is very amateur improv-acting classes indeed.

Lots of creative ideas put together, and thrown against the screen, some stick, some don't.

I'd say it's something similar to the great classic "From Beyond", but in a new way.

Overall, a very enjoyable, albeit slow by moments, ride.

This is a padding sentence to reach the necessary length of review, so that it will appear.

The Bad Guys: A Very Bad Holiday (2023 TV Special)

Oh my this took a nosedive

[2/10 · 7 December 2023]

The quality of animation, physics, details, the atmosphere, the "lived-in" feeling of the world, the details of the fur, the dialogues, and almost everything about this movie took a trip to the "budget" lane.

It's surprising to see the director and the studio destroy something that could have been treated better, but maybe it's also a good thing, seeing that there are too many franchise-sequel-prequel-reboot movies around.

This looks graphics-and-world-building-wise comparable to 90ies Crazy Taxi videogame but unlike it or the Star Wars Holiday special won't leave fond memories due to being terribly boring even for the children!

Mamma Mia! (2008)

It's quite good, moreso in 2023

[8/10 · 7 December 2023]

Don't be deterred by the fact it's a musical and that the premise of the story is quite silly - a lot of the songs reveal themselves to be surprisingly complex and adaptable to many situations which they weren't originally thought for, I believe and the whole movie has, despite the silliness, a Virginia Woolf-esque air about it, much to the point that even the most basic trope of "absentee father returns" and its usual implication is subverted - we can truly never stop the time, no matter how much we desire to do so and it, and people along with it, always escapes through our fingers.

Surprisingly touching and profound.

Love Letter (1995)

A touching movie

[8/10 · 18 November 2023]

... but, I am not sure indeed what I would feel, or what would anyone feel if they found themselves to know that their late husband/boyfriend beyond having "a type", chose his wife to resemble his ex to a tee.

For the old-timers the movie's mostly about looking at the lost "not yet collapsed" economical miracle Japan and its accoutrements of large housing, expensive hobbies and largely free time of the people (which is, by the way confirmed by an extensive literature work). This is no idyll, but looking back, and especially with such a wonderfully-set platonic and epistolary story of love and connection, it appears to be so.

Definitely worth watching.

The Banishing (2020)

Mixing too many elements for it to be any efective

[5/10 · 6 November 2023]

Well, if only the scenario writer tried to make it more coherent and the director would have chosen an athmosphere and stuck with it.

It starts off as a it's kind of a homage to The Shining except everything is slightly different - the "one who sees", well it's not a kid, it's a redhead man, the victim writer is an priest who seems to be falling in and out of alcoholism for no good reason (and no, suspicion of wife's infidelity as lamely portrayed here is not a good reason to become an alcoholic), the Overlook hotel's black chef is a deafmute maid who gets murdered, not with an ax but with a garden shear (another cutting instrument) and so on - the problem with that approach is that this doesn't work when your setting looks extracreepy from the onset.

In the Shining it's.

> wow nice hotel Here it's >freaking creeptacular halfwayhouse

There is absolutely no way, even in the "strapped wartime 30ies Britain" they would even have moved in, much less spent any amount of time in this ruin with vast 2-floor Maginot-line-military-headquarters basement where one can get lost in a very non-supernatural way.

Sure, it's scary but it also makes little sense, because the creepy thing are ONLY creepy, and are so from the very beginning of the movie.

Besides that EVERYONE seems to know it's a "murder torture house", they talk behind the priest's family back about it. Bishop superior walks about and curses and threatens people; what? This goes on in the supernatural-horror style beginning , then this mere behaviour by a priest, when one expects a stereotypically priest-like behaviour, is enough to actually firmly entrench him as the antagonist, without us knowing anything about him - an effective move if he were "a supernatural antagonist", but wait - he turns out to be a chauvinist pig, a nazi, and a survivor of a monstrous cult, which suddenly is no longer supernatural.

However the cult, parodying the catholic church's atrocities in its charnel houses for the poor and downtrodden, is just a Brootherhood of the Mouldy Basement running a Friday the 13th-styled inbred catholic priests r*** dungeon. But they're so inbred they have visible defects, so yeah it's an un-clever parallel to the "Forced breeding" of the Lebensborn, but how are they nazis then, considering they'd proverbially be "the first against the wall" under a nazi home rule, being what they are.

And the supernatural elements just cheapens the "real horror" canvas, where the ending lecture of "The only necessary thing for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." is just a cherry on top. As for the child, this also is something counter-intuitive in our times, but people of that time and environment wouldn't consider it to be out of the ordinary for a natural child to be "out-dopted" then "in-dopted", as it was common for the poor but "noble" catholic families of the time to give away the children to the catholic orphanages, then to take them back; when they actually had money to bring them up. That last scene worthy of an Indiana Jones movie with the "to be continued" feeling is also completely out of place.

What a mess.

The Third Murder (2017)

Flaws appear on a rewatch

[6/10 · 4 November 2023]

The movie setting is definitely interesting, but the actors aren't of a calibre high enough to pull out the scenes, as a lot of the movies is just empty scenes and silent staring, for a lack of a better word.

Fukuyama probably has this habit of never touching his own face, even in moments of distress, which, in this movie is especially jarring. The movie would definitely benefit by having a director's recut shaving off those 30 minutes of empty staring time, as they don't, unfortunately, add anything to the movie. I'm not sure whether it's weak writing, or weak directing, otherwise unusual for him.

The best acting of all the main characters is to be had by Yakusho Kôji, best supporting role goes to Izumi Matsuoka.

Shoplifters (2018)

Absolutely wonderful movie

[9/10 · 3 November 2023]

Which doesn't have any outlandish elements, but shows life and social services just how they are in many countries, and particularly in Japan with all the Japanese peculiarities of keeping so much to themselves, people just ignore those living on the margins, for worse, and also for the better.

It is a loving and critical portrait of the Japanese society and a situation which is quite common in it, this movie does everything right about the, that the modern French movies do wrong about the French society. And - it's not an autobiographical story, so there's hope in some screenwriters being capable of writing good stories.

The Climbers (2019)

"Director! - no directing"

[3/10 · 13 October 2023]

... said Dora the Explorer.

And that's basically the most concise and non-spoilery summary of this movie. The premise of a group of climbers going on to conquer a mountain for the national prestige and the omitted question of the water rights between China and Nepal, in a difficult time for the former, seems quite straightforward and attractive to put onscreen. The trouble comes from the fact that the director can't direct anything except the "asadora"*(Morning Drama)-format Korean-style melodrama where the amount of drama must get over the top in the short 13 to 24 minutes runtime because otherwise the TV audiences will switch to something else or some other channel. In other words the movie is a jam-packed cheese cabinet, and at one time you're there furiously googling whether the character had the same fate in reality as compared to the movie, because the suspension of belief (not disbelief) is such that even the most elementary things start to appear doubtful.

My Chinese wife's final words: If, as he said, people complained before for not believing that the Chinese have climbed Everest/Chomolungma, then now they will believe even less, as it just makes everyone appear incompetent

Really 3/10 , saved by the CGI, and I'm guessing the actors like Jing Wu and Jingchun Wang will be ambivalent to having this one in their acting career later on.

Little Fish (2020)

A movie about dementia

[7/10 · 4 October 2023]

...as they say if the Mountain won't go to Mohammad then Mohammad will go to the mountain.

Since people don't understand and won't voluntarily think about brain afflictions, notably the early-onset dementia, then some artists will make something to help the people along.

This is one such movie. It's a good enough movie for TV and bringing more understanding and empathy to people's daily lives, but indeed it's a bit didactic, but considering the subject it is not surprising.

Great character development and chemistry between characters, good cinematography , scene setting, and sound/music design. Solid 7/10.

Bones and All (2022)

This is not your typical movie

[8/10 · 4 October 2023]

... it blends several genres, but despite the criticism, it's quite serious and speaks about many social issues - some of them eternal, others contemporary - not to the Reagan era but to us.

The movie is meandering, like the path of a teen - or a human to finding themselves, and sometimes there are no answers, or all the answers are bad. Sometimes the treasure under the X which marks the spot is a rotten apple core.

This movie definitely has potential to be a classic, but this depends largely to whom it speaks and what does it speak about, which, I suspect is different for every viewer.

For me, it was an interesting and not-so-uncomfortable dive into the past, when one has the maturity to look at it, if not objectively - nobody has objectivity, but in a more forgiving and less raw way.

Anomaly (I) (2016)

Outrageously bad

[1/10 · 27 August 2023]

... and not even funny, just dreadfully boring, acting, direction, scenography and everything is on a level of a middle school play, except you know parents come to a middle school play to see their children perform, except here we're not parents... I have no idea of the real purpose for which this was made, but even giving everything to movie school students wouldn't have been that bad. Perhaps it's a brainchild of some trust fund kid gift to his trust fund grandkids, perhaps a grandchild or a child of a Russian billionaire is acting in this movie. .. I am at a loss. Perhaps it's one of those nebulous "tax evasion" movies done by the mafia to launder their other income, but ... historically, and in hindsight we know a lot, many HK Category 3 and action movies were shot by the Triads for that purpose and having watched those I can not remember one as bad as this movie.

If I could give 0/10, I would. Absolute bottom of the barrel it's not even funny.

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (2022)

See you never alligator, in a never crocodile

[2/10 · 17 August 2023]

What a bunch of nonsense for ages 3 and under.

There's a reason it was an illustrated bedtime story and not a movie, because its characters are flat, uninvolved and have no development outside the predictably twodimensional thinking of the pinheads responsible for the production and the script.

The advantages of a bedtime story are at least two, as my wife said, - first the drawings are cute, unlike the movie, and you can't miscast anyone, unlike almost every character in here, and the second - is that from one day to the next you get tired and fall asleep and forget about the nonsense which you were told about on the previous day. This brings the horrible truth of the "bedtime stories don't make good action movie" into full technicolor

End grade: 1 badly-animated repulsive CGI cat out of the box of compressed 300 mass-produced foam-stuffed-dioxine-ridden movie merchandise crocodiles.

Snipers (2022)

Unfortunately lots of American 50-cent ...

[8/10 · 16 August 2023]

..."reviewers" in those comments.

Yes obviously a movie about the Chinese army produced by the Chinese will glorify the Chinese army. Like every other European and American movie they make, and even like the DC/Marvel fantasy dreck.

Now with this out of the way, the movie is a decent sniper-vs-sniper action flick, with plenty of realism and plenty of simplification or oversight on the part of the producer and director.

Notable examples include:

• When John threatens his about-to-desert squad member that he's gonna "make it their mission" to prosecute the guy and they will "execute you for desertion", he's making something of an empty threat, already, in the wake of the experience the JAG (Judge and Attorney General for the US Army) gained during the aid to prosecution of the French-Indochinese conflict and WW2 - desertion wouldn't even be considered in the list of death-penatly-crimes even in a court-martial, but I could also agree that a simple US army Sergeant, even if he were from a special sharpshooter corps, would know that. Plus the heat of the moment, yadda yadda.

• John, by the way would disengage after half of his squad was killed, as, again in the wake of those two conflicts, and the negative public reaction to them the American rules of engagement (ROI) were rewritten to preserve manpower, to reduce attrition, and the negative media fallout of an already unpopular, even in an anticommunist McCarthyist USA, war .

• Considering the time and that war, Capt. Williams would probably just mortar the entire hill from the start, not even try to get the body of the Chinese spy back. In fact, the Korean War actually marked a turn for the ready and indiscriminate use of artillery and air support, as well as an acceptance of mass collateral casualties even among the civilian population, by the US Army commanders, as long as they weren't caused by their direct fire orders, or if those orders carried the thinnest degree of plausibility - and as long, as it allowed to avoid sending GIs into the fire. It's an interesting turn of events, and a testament to how much mankind has progressed, but if the Korean war of the time was to happen in our time, most of the US and South Korean commanders would find themselves on the bench of the prosecuted at the Hague for their actions during that time (mostly firebombing and clusterbombing civilians in "forbidden-to-civilians military sectors" - the videos are freely accessible and up on Youtube for anyone to see). So overall, while Capt.'s behaviour is somewhat of a parodical comic relief, if that even could be called as such, his mindset is pretty realistic for the period setting.

• Unlike what you can see in other comments, the equipment of the Chinese is quite accurate for the time and they're not excessively "rich" in ammunition or supplies, they also wear the 1941 Soviet snow gear, which again is realistic. They also have an appointment with a rosy-cheeked couple of photo-journalists, which is - again a realistic staple of the time for the entire not-yet-split communist block of 1951.

And the rest is the usual sniper-vs-sniper which is up to you to see - overall a great movie!

Cliff Walkers (2021)

Very classical spy action flick

[8/10 · 14 August 2023]

...with nice pan and scan shots, colour and camera works and so on, based on several true stories, melded together. It's like watching ... Fargo come together with some Bridge of Spies and South by Southwest kinda ... very classic feel - the shortcomings are, well, in a classical movie about/featuring/having the backdrop of the WW2 atrocities essentially you can be violent and these days more violent - so the violence that there is in this movie already - that'd raise a few eyebrows in the 70ies and even in the 90ies, but you can't be realistically violent.

Mistakes:

dropping a clothed dead security officer out of the train window - that wouldn't happen at this time, they'd strip him naked first - to ensure he'd die and to slow down identification, as people - especially in the context of war and counterintelligence, used to be identified by their clothing back then

torturing people with electricity without taking any precautions with some amateur-looking electric chair contraption - the only torturing they'd be doing is being in that electric chair themselves, considering anything higher than 30 milliamps can be instantly deadly for a human and Japanese/Manchukuo killing their only counterintelligence source would instantly result in very bad stuff happening to the officer who would've killed him

very classical "spies sit together in a cinema" scene ... and other similar "mistakes" or rather - artistic choices based on the overall style.

Nice and definitely worth a rewatch.

The Wandering Earth II (2023)

10/10 if you're a child and

[11 August 2023]

.... 2/10 if you are a thinking adult.

If the first "Wandering Earth" was a dumpster fire of bad filmmaking and bad science, this is a burning garbage truck driving into a structurally unsafe and OSHA-non compliant flour factory and grain refinery which just happens to be located next to forgotten underground jet fuel storage and goes off in a massive and colorful explosion.

So yeah, the science in this movie is nonexistent, as it is with most of the engineering, the factual errors would be too many to enumerate here, but I think the writing team wanted to please Liu Cixin quite a lot, and what Liu Cixin has in his books is bad science and a singular idea that all non-human intelligences are somehow hostile to humans, which is a weird way to out oneself as a misanthrope to the world, but I digress, the movie is certainly visually overwhelming - in a recent "drinking from a firehose" that started with the unholy trinity of the Star Wars prequel and continued through the dreck which is the DC and Marvels' comic universes, here it's turned up to 11.

Of political messages, that other reviewers somehow noticed, besides the gaping maw of the absence of meaning into which all propaganda falls like in that gigantic black hole on Gargantua in Interstellar, there is none, except maybe the omnipresence of CCTV, so I consider this movie to be pointed in its intent to show the CCTV to everyone, but they're not the only ones who intend to show the CCTV to everyone, really - I suspect it was because Brother Xi was the first human to be digitized by the Digital Life project and now he's *eyebrow flick* watchin' ya, if you know what I mean , I'm just gonna leave it at that, but really it's a hilarious thing, coming from China of all places.

The second most hilarious meme which will remain after the memory of this movie is long gone, is that it's apparently easier for China to blow up the moon than to turn the internet on, again - in their own words.

Dear me, dear everyone, the director, or maybe the writer, did such a monumental pandering to Liu Cixin that any semblance of common sense of even following the laws of Newtonian motion - notably with the gravitationally bound pieces of the Moon, and in motion towards the Earth, somehow not falling to Earth but just happily and politely staying behind, gravity be damned, that it could be called Gravity 2: Electric Eclectic Wandering Earth Hulabaloo.

My advice, next time you have a writer like that, just tell'im his story is garbage like it is, and rewrite it, if Star Trek producers could do it with more decent stories, SO CAN YOU.

The Neon Demon (2016)

Boring and overlong movie...

[2/10 · 9 August 2023]

... which assaults into open doors/"qui enfonce les portes ouvertes", like we say in French. A cyberpunk fuccia-and-orange filter does not a movie make.

In the midst of Metoo and child sexual assault revelations - or rather - accountability coming to catch up with the criminals, since the revelations happened throughout 1960-1990ies it's just that the people in charge deliberately chose to ignore them and allow predators who should've been in jail for life to work in the cinema and modelling business, and a lot of the people in charge were predators and criminals themselves - so - in the light of all that there was no need for a movie where models murder each other and eat people to say that this entire industry is toxic.

Oh gee!

The Photographer: > uh, I'm just putting body paint on her officer, nothing suspicious > here and I told everyone to go home because she's shy and to > protect her dignity

I can't imagine any legitimate reason to have a portrait of a naked 16-year old - whether a boy or a girl, in a gold body paint .... I mean "art" as they will say, sure, but photographer-dude - you can just draw art .... the potential for abuse is just too great to allow this to happen.

But no, we're gonna film pseudo artistic movies about "glam" of abuse.

A House on the Bayou (2021)

discount Scar Jo in a traiwreck of a drama with a plot twist

[4/10 · 7 August 2023]

... which devolves into a situational horror comedy, so inept are the attempts of the two lead villains at acting, and the whole "relationship" drama is so juvenile it's hard to suspend disbelief that those two are supposedly parents of a kid. A kid, who's not 3, but the whole damn 14 or 15, I forgot, but still calls mom and dad whenever she gets a nosebleed. I mean this stuff just writes itself, the only thing missing there is a Seinfield laugh track and some musical cues to bring this whole trainwreck out into the limelight.

Also - not even the titular room of Johnny Wiseau had such small of a budget for the settings and decoration, I bet this has set some sort of a Guiness Book record for the whole $3.50 they spent filming in a Louisiana AirBnb.

> Hey Ana, don't listen to Isaac > doorbell > comedic musical call > At the door: Hello it's the paw-lice, we'd like to report an incident!

Suzume (2022)

Feels like it's not only a Makoto Shinkai's

[8/10 · 29 July 2023]

...hand which had to do with the scenario writing, as the story feels deeply personal in a strange way. The serendipitous meetings are common for the Shinkai movies and even for the late Ghibli, as the recent trend goes. The protagonists grow onto the spectators and some moments are truly touching. The story borrows somewhat of the previous manga and visual novels in regards to the ghost hunters and ley stones set up to protect the population, like Rumiko Takahashi's "Mao" or even the latest in the trope series "Zenmetsu no Yaiba". The trail of the historical earthquakes from *(possibly) Genryaku earthquake of 1185 immediately in the wake of the Dannoura battle, the Muromachi era Setonakai of 1510, through Kobe, the 1922 Great Kanto earthquake culminating with the most recent natural disaster to strike. The lesson of the movie is that only we ourselves can let go of our own trauma and close the door on the pain of the past while still preserving the memories of it.

Not bad overall. 8.2/10.

Full River Red (2023)

It is a great movie, but

[8/10 · 27 June 2023]

... you have to know a thing or two about Chinese history to watch it - this is no Great Yellow Emperor, the Last Emperor and similar aesthetic-agenda-driven-eye-candy from ages past.

I watched it with my Chinese wife, otherwise, the most salient parts of the plot and the reasoning would be difficult to understand, especially that the movie does take a liberty reimagining a part of Yue Fei's story.

A lot of the reviewers seem to have a stick up theirs, as this movie is not "subtle propaganda", in fact the military propaganda is deliberately unsubtle, and overt, and calling it subtle would be like saying "Actually Starship Troopers is pro-fascist" and missing the point of taking the reader for a ride and breaking the fourth wall, by suggesting that one should think for oneself and that those portrayed as either patriots or traitors may not even be those who they're said to be.

Besides that the magnificience of the innovative cinematography - as much with the color palette and shots, as with the musical canvas accompanying the show was a great choice - subtitles might be welcome, but I'm afraid they will also distract from the visuals and the plot, and even with rudimentary knowledge of the culture, we can guess that a "national folk hero" like Yue Fei would get a share of his own Chinese theater pieces which get a metal-rap rearrangement here, reminescent of another excellent movie which shows well-known character in another light - the 2006 "Marie Antoinette".

One could probably say that "the movie is misogynistic" because almost all the women seen within it die to the hands of plotting and cold-hearted men, however, seeing the amounts of death, I would say that it's a comedy only in the way the Dante's "Inferno" is one - that is an observation on the mores of the Song dynasty and the harshness to which it pushed both men and women to survive and rise in the governmental ranks. Overal, the presence of women here is akin to the same in the "East-West" drama from 1999 - it's not the movie which is misogynistic, it's the environment of the late Song dynasty or the Stalins' USSR special mission town which is not conductive to niceties of a milder and kinder era.

As for the 'recitation' scene that many have found awkward and clashing with the rest, I on the contrary have found it very fitting, because what was living in those past ancient ages, if not learning to recite dozens and hundreds of documents by heart, because paper and writing was the affair of a rather more educated milieu, and - also following the leader - even "a corporal", no matter how initially stupid the order would sound. It did also sound like something which is done in primary school, and Yue Fei's poem is indeed recited in China, "except the second part" as my wife said, because obviously the Jin dynasty, to the shame of many Chinese reviewers here saying this is nothing but "propaganda of acquisition of land", is part of China already, and the very idea "get back the stolen lands" of Dalian , Qingdao and so on of the 'foregin Jin' would sounds ridiculous to everyone - hence , considering that Jin is part of China, the non-recitation of the second part of the poem, especially by primary schoolers is perfectly logical.

Additionally, all things considered, and if you think about it Yue Fei might not actually appear patriotic, pushing for a war, that with the benefit of hindsight we know was lost, because Song didn't last "a thousand years" after than but the Yuan - foreign Mongolian invaders ;D dynasty came after that. A mountain bore a molehill in other words.

The movie ends on an open note, and as the girl is petting a stone lion, while a mass of soldiers recite the poem, it is inviting the viewer to reflect on this hermetically-closed plot and on their own assumptions, and what this would mean for this tiny peaceful piece of future the girl will grow up to be in a sea of war. Perhaps it might even contain the answer to the displacement of the Song by the Yuan.

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

A movie from another time

[7/10 · 26 June 2023]

Theater acting was very noticeable in this production, and the practical effects were as well, theater-like down to the last scene and the formulaic combats of the "this one person must die to advance the plot" variety.

Overal, a bunch of joyous kung-fu-ish nonsense - you will see what I mean, intertwined with a very theatrical drama featuring specific postures for different emotions and a bunch of men whose traditional theatrical exaggerated angular eye and flowing beards makeup probably contributed quite a lot to the extreme insistence of Western popular media on "slant-eyes" and "fu manchu" stereotypes, without understanding that a lot of the Shaw Bros movies of teh time featured classical Chinese theater conventions.

Overall, not a bad movie for a relaxing evening which brings some unintentional laughs.

The Knockout (2023– )

Excellent TV series, and an occasion for the Western countries

[9/10 · 13 June 2023]

... to take note and think beyond the media.

This TV show is based on real events, namely the dismantlement of the government-affiliated and government-corrupting criminal syndicate in the city of Jinghai. There's no spoiler to that, really, because one can go onto wikipedia and read about those events.

What's different, and preoccupying in reality, and preoccupying for those of us who live in "democratic" countries, however, is the glaring inefficiency of our police forces.

This TV series might be "propaganda" in a way that is filmed and the very ending of contains is a deliciously quaint "thanks to the Party" movie quip, however this contains a reality.

China executes corruptioneers, while the West praises them and puts them in positions of power. I know dozens of people like the protagonist regularly making the headlines of our newspapers and our government (France) can do nothing about them. The average waiting time for a police intervention from a call call in China is under 15 minutes. The average waiting time in France is between 40 minutes and several hours. Average ER waiting times in Europe are counted in hours.

Same for other public services. All the while the rich are enriching themselves. We are, collectively, going down the Gao Qiqiang's Xinhai road.

That is very worrying, because ANYONE promising the same level of efficiency will actually rafle the ballot boxes and when you're unable to provide basic services like that, a dictator becomes a (good) option - that which most will vote for - which could end in a collapse afterwards - already seen in 2023 Russia, between this and ethnosupremacist police brutality and undercurrents of civil war in the US the future looks extremely grim - OR - otherwise - you have the Chinese system, which works, produces real results and TV series detailing how those results were produced.

This is the message of this movie and everyone better take note of it.

The Long Season (2023)

A very-well made drama ...

[10/10 · 13 June 2023]

... about ordinary lives of ordinary people, which, due to its amazing details and filmography explains a lot, not only about China, but about the ex-USSR and the Eastern Europe.

This is the first humane look, without the hand-wringing so common among the Eastern European "independent" film-makers, at what and how the transformation of the 90ies really happened and what it meant (not much, either good or bad) for the ordinary people.

Overall, this is an excellent multi-decade multi-character character study, which, I am sure will be included in movie schools and anthropology curriculas for decades to come.

10/10.

The Bad Kids (2020)

Excellent TV series

[9/10 · 13 June 2023]

Which actually dives into archetypal children's behaviours, and the consequences of the adults around them never growing up and never fixing themselves.

The deaths are very well thought out and placed, and the fact nobody cares about them only serves to highlight something that everyone knows but is afraid to admit to - when was the last time you actually knew about your neighbours, talked to them or got interested about what was happening in their lives?

The answer is probably - "Never", and is the same answer which is to be given in place of most parents who're too "busy", too overworked, or too traumatized themselves with their childhood traumas to get interested or to understand what's really happening in their children's lives.

I highly recommend this drama, along with other recent Chinese productions.

Virtuosity (1995)

Did not age well

[3/10 · 30 May 2023]

Besides totally standard for the 90ies chain-produced action movies lack of intelligence in the cops, and the "underdog saving the world", the movie is tedious.

There was a current of those "Escaped/Released Convict help Catch Worse Released Convicts" starting with Demolition Man, and ending, arguably with Collateral, but oh boyo there was so much schlock produced. Looking at it without the rose-colored glasses of childhood and nostalgia, this is just a tedious run-of-the-mill action the 107 minutes of each feel like one of the modern three-hours-art-house-horror-exercises-in-futility.

Some tech ideas hail back from The Lawnmower man and are better realized in Johny Mnemonic, but the general understanding of technology by Holywood at the time was awful. The nanotech is a nice touch but there's no saving this movie with just that.

As for the ideas of society, something Action SciFi is at least supposed to pay lip service to, being "Sci Fi" - looking back at it from 2023 it's just a bad piece of cop-a-ganda , and will probably serve as a 101 college lecture supporting material, sometime in the 2050 or 2075 when people are going to be studying the end of capitalism and the end of USA.