(no subject)
So, today I watched Soviet film Igla ("Needle") by the Kazakh director Rashid Nugmanov. The plot is about a young man named Moro who returns to the Kazakh city of Almaty after an abscence in Moscow and tries to save his old girlfriend, Dina, who was manipulated by an evil doctor into becoming a morphine addict.
Or actually, it's a star vehicle. You might know about the group Kino which was extremely popular in Russia in the late eighties. The lead singer Viktor Tsoi, who was half-Korean (and playing probably an ethnic Kazakh in this film), died in the early nineties in a car crash and is remembered as the John Lennon of Russia. So in reality this movie is about Viktor Tsoi trying his very hardest to look disaffected and cool. And for some reason he seems to know martial arts in the final scenes? ( ... ) Also, much-beloved nutcase Pyotr Mamonov from the rock band Zvuki Mu has a minor role as aforementioned evil guy.
The whole film lasts only about an hour, but it was a drag to get through. There are lots of long, lingering landscape shots and musical montages, many of them featuring songs from Kino. The movie would have been half an hour shorter if not for all of the tracking shots and montages. Especially when Moro hauls Dina off to a shack in the middle of nowhere in the desert to overcome her addiction. There's a montage of them hanging around the desert, there's a montage of Moro looking for Dina when she disappears (presumably to buy drugs), there's a withdrawal montage featuring a lot of weird closeups of trapped scorpions ... But the directing is pretty awkward. First in general, and then because Nugmanov can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to make a gritty, serious movie or a stylised, trendy action film. And so the movie wound up half-baked and surreal. I got bored with it pretty quickly.
It's not at all interesting for the plot, directing, or acting - which are more or less awful when you get right down to it. Well, YMMV. I wasn't alive when this movie came out, and it was probably made to appeal to some sensibility I'm too young to have myself. But if you like/remember Soviet kitsch or 80s kitsch it's worth a look just for the nostalgia factor. A few of the comments on reviews of this film seem to go along the lines of - haha, it's not great, but I remember when I was a kid ... The appeal of it is that it's a perfect time capsule of the Soviet Union and Soviet pop culture in the 1980s, especially that of Almaty. If any of you didn't understand the scope of Goodbye, Lenin! you should see only the first ten minutes of this film. 1988 in the Soviet Union looks like another planet.
Or actually, it's a star vehicle. You might know about the group Kino which was extremely popular in Russia in the late eighties. The lead singer Viktor Tsoi, who was half-Korean (and playing probably an ethnic Kazakh in this film), died in the early nineties in a car crash and is remembered as the John Lennon of Russia. So in reality this movie is about Viktor Tsoi trying his very hardest to look disaffected and cool. And for some reason he seems to know martial arts in the final scenes? ( ... ) Also, much-beloved nutcase Pyotr Mamonov from the rock band Zvuki Mu has a minor role as aforementioned evil guy.
The whole film lasts only about an hour, but it was a drag to get through. There are lots of long, lingering landscape shots and musical montages, many of them featuring songs from Kino. The movie would have been half an hour shorter if not for all of the tracking shots and montages. Especially when Moro hauls Dina off to a shack in the middle of nowhere in the desert to overcome her addiction. There's a montage of them hanging around the desert, there's a montage of Moro looking for Dina when she disappears (presumably to buy drugs), there's a withdrawal montage featuring a lot of weird closeups of trapped scorpions ... But the directing is pretty awkward. First in general, and then because Nugmanov can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to make a gritty, serious movie or a stylised, trendy action film. And so the movie wound up half-baked and surreal. I got bored with it pretty quickly.
It's not at all interesting for the plot, directing, or acting - which are more or less awful when you get right down to it. Well, YMMV. I wasn't alive when this movie came out, and it was probably made to appeal to some sensibility I'm too young to have myself. But if you like/remember Soviet kitsch or 80s kitsch it's worth a look just for the nostalgia factor. A few of the comments on reviews of this film seem to go along the lines of - haha, it's not great, but I remember when I was a kid ... The appeal of it is that it's a perfect time capsule of the Soviet Union and Soviet pop culture in the 1980s, especially that of Almaty. If any of you didn't understand the scope of Goodbye, Lenin! you should see only the first ten minutes of this film. 1988 in the Soviet Union looks like another planet.