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Double Agents: Cold War Revisited in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Spy thrillers have long fascinated the masses. Ever since the two World Wars, people have shown great interest in intelligence and counterintelligence, which only increased during the Cold War with its two adversarial camps. The most famous of the literary and cinematic secret agents is James Bond, the super-spy by English author Ian Fleming. He […]
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The unseen side of Japan: Nobody Knows
Hirokazu Koreeda did a fantastic job of telling the story of these young children, abandoned by their mother, who have to fight for survival. The oldest boy, Arika Fukushima (Yûya Yagira) is smart, witty, and hard working. His mother often leaves him in charge to do everything from cooking, to paying the bills and taking […]
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The Odd Couple: Dysfunctional Russian Lives in Boris Khlebnikov’s Help Gone Mad
What would happen if you transferred Miguel de Cervantes’s peculiar twosome of Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa or Samuel Beckett’s equally eccentric pairing of Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot to the Moscow of the 21st century? This is exactly the experiment Help Gone Mad, an interesting Russian independent film by Boris Khlebnikov, seems […]
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The Way Back
Russian gulags were never known for their fair treatment of their prisoners, most of which were political prisoners, given unbelievably long sentences, often on chumped up charges of treason, espionage, or criticism of “Comrade Stalin.” The prisoners held in this gulag were no different. Although a reasonably unknown film, the cast is made up of […]
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Golden Boys: The 84th Annual Academy Awards Coverage
The 84th Annual Academy Awards have just come to a close. So what can we take away from it other than Billy Crystal being a charming, but aging host or the ladies gushing about Brad Pitt’s outfit? For starters, there were two big winners among the films: Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3D adventure, and The Artist, […]
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I Saw The Devil: revenge at any cost
Min-shik Choi is back as the psycho killer in the murder-thriller I Saw The Devil. Min-shik’s character, Kyung-chul is cold, ruthless and deceptive. In the opening scene Kyung-chul is seen assisting a young woman with a flat tire. Soo-hyeon, the fiancé of the woman in the car talks with her on the phone as she […]
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A Life Less Ordinary: Roman Karimov’s Inadequate People and the ‘Russian Realities’
There are those who complain that Russian cinema has abandoned its distinctive identity in favor of Hollywood conventions in recent years, and justifiably so. Ever since Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch, a surprise success in the United States and elsewhere in 2004, there has been a perplexing, sometimes even disturbing trend to move away from the […]
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Family Affair: Elena as a Thought-Provoking Character Study and Portrait of Life in Contemporary Russia
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Leo Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of his famous novel Anna Karenina. This was true for the aristocratic clans in the tsardom of the 19th century and it is still valid for many societies, especially contemporary Russia with its glaring social […]
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Hollywood gearing up for this year’s Academy Awards
This year’s Academy Awards will be presented by two of American cinema’s biggestpranksters, Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis who just recently finished shooting for the film The Campaign. Ferrell and Galifianakis are just two joining many big names hosting this year, to include Halle Berry, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Tom Hanks, Milla Jovovich, Chris Rock, […]
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The Housemaid lacks originality, reinforces stereotypes of Korean society
A shy young woman gets hired to become a wealthy Korean family’s maid. Very quickly Eun-yi (the maid played by Do-yeon Jeon) finds her way into the good graces of the head of the household. The man’s wife is pregnant with twins, and is unable to please him sexually. The man begins to get ideas […]
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Sympathy for the Devils: The World as a Rotten Place in Petr Zelenka’s The Karamazovs
Fyodor Dostoevsky is arguably one of the greatest novelists of all time. The interest of filmmakers in his work has remained alive, and even seems to have increased in recent years. Martin Scorsese, of all people, has signaled interest in creating another version of The Gambler with Leonardo DiCaprio and The Departed screenwriter William Monahan. […]
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The Grey: a story about the inevitability of death, and the importance of self reliance
Liam Neeson’s performance in The Grey was unparalleled. Though the story starts out somewhat like a would-be typical Hollywood flick following the done-to-death ‘great adventure’ scenario; the film actually incorporates many elements that would be more typical in an art house film, than in a Hollywood blockbuster. Furthermore, the film leaves the viewer with a […]
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Bridges to Babylen: Generation P as a Cyberpunk Satire of Russian Consumerism in the 1990s
“We’re waiting for changes,” Victor Tsoy, arguably the biggest rock star of the Soviet Union, exclaimed in the late 1980s. They would come only a few years later. The 1990s were a decade of transformations on both sides of the formerly bipolar world order, and the cultural climate was largely represented by their teens and […]