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mrphik
Reviews
Dylda (2019)
Gruesome fantasy
Wow, just wow. I cannot believe I have just watched this delusional gibberish of a movie in its entirety. Granted, I have encountered my share of movies that I found grossly objectionable for one reason or another but they all had some redeeming qualities that made their existence worthwhile, perhaps for a perverse reason, such as serving as a warning to future generations. Not this one. This movie is a most awful and gruesome delirium born in the night of human ignorance and degradation. Perhaps its purpose was to serve the vanity of its creators - but it fails even at that... On another thought, I shall give it two stars: one for exposing the increasing irrelevance of international film festivals, another for exposing the worthlessness and twisted judgment of professional film critics.
The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
Feels scuttled
A delightful old comedy that, unfortunately, feels like it unexpectedly ran out of time - or funding.
Vinni-Pukh (1969)
An unorthodox adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh with cult-like following among generations of kids and adults alike
This series of cartoons is loosely based on the A. A. Milne's story of Winnie-the-Pooh as brilliantly retold (rather than simply translated into Russian) by Boris Zakhoder. The scriptwriters created three 15-minute masterpieces by discarding all the boring and irrelevant characters (most notably Christopher Robin, Tigger, Kanga and Roo) and beefing them up with original graphics (sooo superior to Disney's!), wacky songs and hilarious jokes. Quotes from the Vinni Pukh cartoons and humor based on them (much of it R-rated or worse) have become deeply ingrained into the culture of Russian-speaking people - probably even more than the Star Trek's "Scotty, beam me up!" in the United States. A must-see for any foreigner who wants to socialize with Russians.
Obyknovennyy fashizm (1965)
An extraordinarily powerful reminder to the future generations of the horrors of German nazism
It is hard to draw parallels between this brilliantly narrated compilation of both Allied and Third Reich's archive films and Hollywood's productions such as "Schindler's List" or "Jakob the Liar". While the latter present limited, sanitized and artificial-looking depictions of life under the Nazi rule, Romm's "Ordinary Fascism" pulls out all the stops in its selection of documentary material to draw the viewer not only into absolute horror about fascism and nazism in the 1920s-1940s Europe, but also to a firmest of convictions that nothing of the sort should be allowed to happen again anywhere in the world.
Note the timing: the film was released in 1965, in the Soviet Union's heyday at the height of the great societal and intellectual "thaw" that followed the Stalin's death and the denunciation of Stalin's totalitarianism by Nikita Khruschev. Never explicitly mentioning any of them explicitly, the film targets tyranny and despotism no matter what form they may take; the release of such a film would have been impossible under Stalin.
A good indicator of the power of this film could be the fact that it is available in most video stores in Germany.