Change Your Image
NIKITIN-1
Reviews
Harvard Man (2001)
The apocalypse
If I were to express my true views of this film, it would not be allowed on the internet. Totally egregious, a travesty, a cinematic endeavour that has successfully set humanity back at least 30 years. I just can't understand what possibly possessed this guy to make this film, let alone for Buffy to star in it. Not to mention its racism. Evidently, black people don't go to harvard, but if they do, rest assured that they play basketball and carry guns!Besides the only two blacks in the film were a gun toting roommate and a nymphomaniac neighbourwith designs on the two white protagonists, all that was missing was to have them eat some fried chicken and have grills. I am lost for words. Let me use some pseudo-deep philosophy to ponder it, similarly to Kirkegaard, as would be said in the film. I really hope that as many people as possible watch this film and consider how its release was ever made possible. Honestly, why did his black Harvard roommate attack him with a gun???
Soy Cuba (1964)
Why does everyone focus on the technicalities?!!?
Just about every comment posted here eulogises Soy Cuba's camera-work, which is certainly understandable as it is remarkably filmed, but this is done to the neglect of other extremely important aspects. Whether they are bigger fans of the camera-work or of the direction, however, all the commentators on these pages seem to share the caveat that arguably the main point of the film - its plot - amounts to nothing more than "silly propaganda" or a curiosity of totalitarian film making. Such an attitude is a terrible oversight! Soy Cuba is about people's desire for freedom and a better life, and the revolutionary potential of this desire when conditions reach a point beyond which people will no longer endure. It is about self respect, and courage, will and humanity and a human, filial patriotism; it is about the distillation of Cuba as an idea and a cause for justice and empowerment. I cannot understand how deeply postmodern and jaded, or just plain superficial, someone has to be to notice all the nuances of angle and light and completely miss the deep emotional and spiriual poetry of the content (in fact, the US government certainly paid good attention, for it banned the film until 1992)! It is like discussing Korda's portrait of Che Guevara in terms of focus and aperture alone!Did they not feel goosebumps as they watched the scene of the students on the steps, and the dead dove? I am lost for words! Indeed, if it were just a vapid propaganda piece, what explains its de facto censorship in the Soviet Union? I am quite sure that many of these commentators must have visited the Caribbean on holiday at one time or another; I know from my own experiences, and they ought to have immediately realised on seeing the film, that the portrait the it paints of Cuba remains the reality of Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Haiti today, some 65 years later. Watching this film, we should above all feel indignant, rather than heaping praise onto disembodied and decontextualised technicalities such as camera-work. To dismiss it as propaganda yet ogle at its images is akin to prostituting this beautiful, very deeply moving, and inspiring film, the same way that Cuba herself was prostituted. Shame on you.