Review: "Zhest"
When the Sicilians warned us to never fight a land war in Asia, they might also have told us to avoid watching Russian movies. Napoleon AND Hitler met their respective dooms on their marches into the depths of Russia, and many brave souls have found naught but despair and madness in the world of Russian cinema. Unless they took in "Nightwatch". I'm told that's pretty awesome.
"Zhest" is a movie about...well, honestly, I don't have the foggiest notion. A crazy man declaims to a reporter about the ephemeral nature of love and then gets a round drilled through his head. This leaves the reporter with no choice but to drop out of society. But then she gets pulled back into the game to interview a psychotic butchering killing-machine of a school teacher at a nearby asylum. He immediately escapes, and our heroine is in hot pursuit with a Russian stand-in for Antonio Banderas. The intrepid duo follow the criminal into an "abandoned" "village" that's about the size of Manhattan and packed full of criminal scum, sociopaths, and idiots. It's like "Hell Comes To Frogtown" but with 100% less Roddy Piper.
At this point, the director loses interest in his original story and begins making up several new ones on the fly, possibly because he was drunk at the time and was letting his nerdy 12-year-old nephew take the helm, which would explain why a faceless horseman starts wandering about. Later, there's massive panic on the set when everyone realizes that no car chase has been filmed, so they set about rectifying that in short order, using the finest two-cylinder Volgas that the Russian automotive industry can muster. From that point, everyone involved decided to start doing their own thing, leading to total chaos and some unfortunate jazz improv and an interpretative dance, the whole soaked in fatalistic pseudo-philosophy and nowhere near enough nudity.
Look, the Russians do several things well. They have mad vodka drinking skillz. They have a halfway decent space program. They supply the world with comely underwear models. But movies? That's best left to Bollywood. So, hurray for Captain Spaulding, and on with the show.
"Zhest" is a movie about...well, honestly, I don't have the foggiest notion. A crazy man declaims to a reporter about the ephemeral nature of love and then gets a round drilled through his head. This leaves the reporter with no choice but to drop out of society. But then she gets pulled back into the game to interview a psychotic butchering killing-machine of a school teacher at a nearby asylum. He immediately escapes, and our heroine is in hot pursuit with a Russian stand-in for Antonio Banderas. The intrepid duo follow the criminal into an "abandoned" "village" that's about the size of Manhattan and packed full of criminal scum, sociopaths, and idiots. It's like "Hell Comes To Frogtown" but with 100% less Roddy Piper.
At this point, the director loses interest in his original story and begins making up several new ones on the fly, possibly because he was drunk at the time and was letting his nerdy 12-year-old nephew take the helm, which would explain why a faceless horseman starts wandering about. Later, there's massive panic on the set when everyone realizes that no car chase has been filmed, so they set about rectifying that in short order, using the finest two-cylinder Volgas that the Russian automotive industry can muster. From that point, everyone involved decided to start doing their own thing, leading to total chaos and some unfortunate jazz improv and an interpretative dance, the whole soaked in fatalistic pseudo-philosophy and nowhere near enough nudity.
Look, the Russians do several things well. They have mad vodka drinking skillz. They have a halfway decent space program. They supply the world with comely underwear models. But movies? That's best left to Bollywood. So, hurray for Captain Spaulding, and on with the show.
posted by Purukivel at 1:03 AM
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