Reviews

This is the first Nicolas Cage movie that I've managed to watch till the end. The beard really helps.

Early on the film brings up the theme of plagiarism, which is very appropriate as the basic plot is borrowed from the short film «Sequence» (Carles Torrens, 2013), without ever mentioning it, of course. In other words, the main asset of the film - the striking originality of the plot - does not really belong to it.

As usual when turning a short into a feature-length film, the latter turned out to be more naturalistic, stylistically diluted - and in a way less interesting, but the sheer volume allowed to elaborate on the plot and saturate it with details, deepen the characters and motivations. The way that the authors chose was to (somewhat satirically) show the effect that the unexpected fame has on a person, and then how the cancel culture works. These themes are not new and are explored without brilliance - which is the main weakness of the film. It just doesn't deliver much.

The editing choices are sometimes interesting, sometimes sloppy, otherwise the film was shot and acted out at an average level at best. Cage has created an expressive and memorable character, but he speaks in an unpleasant artificial tone, he and other actors constantly shake their heads like pigeons, repeat words - a prime example of bad naturalism in acting.

The ending, which reveals the mechanisms and explores the social implications of what happened, in my opinion, adds a lot, but it cannot turn this very average film into something more.

Noble attempt, but ultimately not an accomplished artistic achievement.

These dolls would be appropriate for a children's film, which this is most certainly not. Sloppy, jerky animation and awkward character movements once again remind us of cute stop motion shorts from around 1960s, but in an adult feature from 2000s it doesn't work and is simply unpleasant to look at. In short, aesthetically this film is for kindergarteners, while the story is obviously not. The direction is more or less adequate although not particularly inventive, the action is somewhat slow, not everything onscreen is interesting or necessary. For this reason, and also because the story is not really developed into much detail, the film seems somewhat overlong.

Take for comparison Jim Henson's «The Dark Crystal» (1982) to see a well-developed story of the same kind or Tim Burton's and Henry Selick's films to see good stop motion animation.

The overall impression: not bad, but not good enough.

Essentially a home video. No acting, no lighting, no cinematography. Not to say about special effects. Editing is the only thing that looks professional, that is - traditional for today's mainstream cinema, which is not in itself an achievement. And there's no real story to tell, just the basic time loop scheme. Nothing to talk about.

The film does well what it sets out to do, but its goals are so ordinary that there isn't much to say about the result. The film being silent at least relieves us from empty chatter - but alas, not from the annoying background music that never ceases. The undemanding children's humor rules here, frequently descending to pre-chaplin slapstic (crowd in front of the bathroom at the beginning of the film, the killer's endeavours in the second half, etc.), with a puzzling and unhealthy inclination to the toilet theme. There are good scenes, but you can count them with the fingers of one hand (a girl trying on the earings at the store; curing insomnia with a tape recorder; puntomime of the killer telling about his failures to his boss). The actions of the ever-grinning killer are ridiculous to the point of absolute implausibility. Background laugh track (rare thing fortunately) is beyond good and evil. It is pointless to talk about the camera work and other artistic issues here: the technical level is moderate, but sufficient. The ending slightly improves the impression, despite its blunt moralizing. The film should please the children and the village folk, and it doesn't strive for more anyway.

I don't know why the child couldn't fall asleep, I could hardly keep my eyes open. From start to finish. Looks as though the authors had a free winter day, the camera and an awkward silent boy whom they were asked to babysit. We don't have a script, but what the hell, we'll make it up along the way, the authors said. Release the boy! Camera! Action! And here's the result. It's not entirely bad, but extremely boring. Because not only there is no plot, but also not a single character. The boy moves and behaves like a somnambula and by the end of the film falls into utter catalepsy, his household is hardly in a better state. It is not until the 50th minute, when the boy is looking through the photos, that sort of an explosion happens. Explosion of meaning. At this moment you see what the film could've been if the authors had something to say. But the explosion turns out to be weak and quiet, the dust settles and everything returns to sleepy wandering.

My rating: 5.5.

Great singing but other than that... The film as a whole, in my opinion, is ruined by sloppy and unimaginative use of computer animation in some of the shorts and especially in the narrator sequences. Perhaps in 1993 it was an interesting experiment in CGI, but today we are interested in the end result, which, alas, is far from being impressive. Some of the fragments made in more traditional animation techniques are not bad, but "not bad" is hardly enough, and very few of the shorts pretend to be more than that. Number 11 (Lakmé), directed by Pascal Roulin and done in clay animation, is one of the more interesting pieces.

The film is rather uneven and in the end unsatisfactory as a whole, although it has some interesting and valuable footage.

The first part of the film - the only part that Romm was able to complete before his death - is, unfortunately, the least interesting, being a brief overview of history of the first half of the 20th century. It's hard to tell what the film would've been like had Romm enough time to finish it, but Elem Klimov and Marlen Khutsiev were obviously not able to find an apt form for remaining footage. Intertitles that they chose to resort to give the effect very different from Romm's narration. The rendering of material in the second part of the film is not only predictably biased and one-sided, which by itself is not a crime, but too often, instead of giving a subjective view, leans towards plain and boring propaganda.

What is truly valuable is the footage in the second part of the film that shows people of the early 1970s from all over Europe: interviews with children and young people, a rock concert, people in the streets - walking, kissing, reading... Sketches for a portrait of the age.