Change Your Image
vadimkhar
Reviews
Educazione siberiana (2013)
Fantasy urkas from fantasy world
The movie is based on the bestselling book by Nicolai Lilin, who claims Russian Mafia is after him for exposing them. If they are going to whack him, it's on him because he wrote such a complete and shameful nonsense. About every five minutes into the movie anyone familiar with life in Russia/USSR would put his palm on the face and exclaim "Seriously?". Nonsense runs through every dialogue, almost every scene, it spills so abundantly the movie got 3 out of 10 stars in Russian analogue of IMDb called Kinopoisk. If you're looking for the true image of Russian urka, read Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov. This flick has nothing to do with real Russian old school criminals.
The Brave (2017)
Looks real, but really far from it and full of clichés.
As I watched few episodes, I was quite astonished by episode two. It was about one of the main protagonists hiding in Ukraine. The problem was with the atmosphere and caricaturе Rambo-style portrayal of rebels and Russians. To begin with, people don't look there as they are from 1950s. The area doesn't look like poor version of Ukranian portion of Brighton Beach. They don't say "Russians take things without paying" because most of them are Russians in that region. The whole set up is completely unrealistic. Russian say what no Russian would ever say, they act totally fake. Good screenplays should be close to reality, but this one creates its own. It's OK when it does not correspond with real geographic location. But if it does and it's not true, then it's propaganda or dissemation of ignorance.