Reviews

This is an absolute Russian national prize Nika winner with the best leading actor and best supporting actor. Also the music is superb (Eduard Nikolayevich Artemyev's, as in "Burnt by the Sun", "Barber of Siberia", "Mama", etc, etc; if anyone here hasn't heard of the great Russian composer - folks, you haven't heard Godlike music in your life!), the camera-work is delicious (Nikita Mikhalkov's constant partner Nikolay Lebeshev, who passed away in 1999, which is still a great loss for our national cinematography), and just check out the actors - Yevgeny Mironov (Nika Winner), Vladimir Mashkov (Nika Winner), Maxim Soukhanov, Kristina Orbakaite, Yrina Apeksimova (playing a bitch as always), SergeyGazarov... The plot is simple and it was in the air at the time. There is one talented guy Ivan who is unlocking other people's program, so he is a Russian hacker of the first wave. He is alone, besides his whores and accident drinking party buddies who are modern gangsters and businessmen in the first (they had never existed here before!) Moscow night clubs. And there is his friend working in a bank having a secret program. So their ways are to cross. So what will the Mashkov's character Ivan choose - to get $30,000 to open his friend's program with the bank accounts or to remain his only friend? And there is a funny girl whom Ivan (V.I.P.) met the other day when he f*cked her in a park bench one night which turned out to be his beloved woman later (a good sex scene for post-Soviet movies)! So we, watchers, laugh all the movie at Ivan and Petya watching their funny experiences and fights... And we cannot help but cry in the end.

Those were the middle 1990s with scores of organized killings, an era of crimson jackets and criminal showdowns. Who is Limita, you may ask. Limita were young people who came to Moscow to find success... Some found death... Watch this atmospheric movie with beautiful Mosccow sights, Fellini-like seemingly unreasonable activities and romance. The script's authors (great Pyotr Lutsyk and Alexey Samoryadov) are accidentally dead now as well as the producer Sergey Majarov killed by a gangster. We are alive...

It is a really funny name Andrey E. He chose his Manchu mane. And it is his first, University time, movie which attracted attention right away, especially in the country of dying social realism. Firstly, it is a story of a real medical surgery operation on separating the Siamese twins Masha and Sasha. (Later they would live long enough to learn they are nobodies, to become alcoholic's and die). secondly, a girl is quoting some lines from Tomas Mann "The Magic Mountain" with description of the gore scenes of Wolrd War I. Then there is some info about horrific efforts to produce a super man in Soviet Russia. All those plots may make you really disturbed and puzzled. You are sure it is a talented job deserved to be awarded. But... what did the director wanted to say by his work? He is in a cozy position: like, this is, folks, what I tell you and, well, you...ah... watch it and... I don't know what. Later Mr. E made another interesting (not documentary) movie called "Scientific Section of Pilots" (Nauchnaya sektsiya pilotov (1996) here in IMDb.COM) about strange, fake and real, dead bodies in Moscow metro (which is funny too, for we are ready to see something like this in American movies, and, thank God, not here in Moscow) with a slogan like "7 millions go underground and some never get out!" Now he has done a TV-series about mysterious places (like abandoned KGB bunkers) located in all over Russia. So Mr. E seems to have only one track: mystification. So when you are in the right mood, you may watch it but it is just Russia movie past, as it is already outmoded now.

First of all, I personally adore Demons and Demons 2, I saw them although it was hard to find good horrors without good official movie distributing here in Russia when I was a kid, and that is an unchangeable part of my boyhood. Then I heard nothing about Mr Bava. Then I saw his Ghost Son. Well, it is certainly not a good coming back! Why was the leading character, whom we never really knew to at least like him, in accident in the middle of an empty road? Why do African servants say so dumb and stupid things about human soul? Why is the plot so primitive? Haven't we seen enough ghosts for 100 years of movie production? It is clear that Lamberto Bava has nothing to show us so far. It is a shame.