Posts
The Matrix, so complex but basic. My 18 year old son gets in many discussions with our priest about the seies, which our priest has seen. My son states it is biblical , but the our pries and I are still not convienced.
Good entertainment though!
www.kinorus.ru
Pyotr Mamonov and Viktor Sukhorukov play monks at a remote monastery in \"The Island.\"
Salvation in the Snow
Pavel Lungin\'s \"The Island\" tells the story of a veteran who tries to soothe his troubled conscience by taking refuge in a remote northern monastery.
By Tom Birchenough
Published: December 1, 2006
You could call it a \"sea change.\" Pavel Lungin\'s new film \"The Island\" is as different as can be imagined from anything the French-Russian director has made before, as he moves from the comic, realistic human world he\'s charted previously into an austere Orthodox religious environment.
The Paris-based director has been prominent in Moscow in recent years, what with last year\'s innovative television adaptation of Nikolai Gogol\'s \"Dead Souls,\" as well as the Kinotavr prizewinner \"Roots,\" also rather Gogolian in its theme. Before that was \"Tycoon,\" the so-called \"Berezovsky movie\" from 2002, and \"The Wedding\" from 2000, an ensemble comedy with deeper roots set in the Russian provinces. And it all started, of course, with \"Taxi Blues,\" a prizewinner at Cannes in 1990.
\"The Island\" reunites Lungin with the star of \"Taxi Blues,\" Pyotr Mamonov, a figure who has undergone his own sea change over the past decade. Apart from his early film roles, Mamonov was best known in the 1990s as the lead singer of the provocative rock group Zvuki-Mu. But in recent years he apparently disappeared from the scene, adopting a more traditional Orthodox lifestyle.
Lungin managed to draw him back to the screen -- according to rumors, with some difficulty -- and in \"The Island\" he plays the central role of Father Anatoly, a figure whose expiation and atonement for his past sins provide the central element of the film. We see him first in 1942, when he\'s forced by occupying German troops to shoot at his commanding officer, who we believe is killed. Later, washed up on a remote beach in Russia\'s far north, he is saved by monks from the island\'s monastery.
The movie then cuts forward to 1976, where life in the religious retreat continues (apparently with no regard to the surrounding Soviet regime) and Anatoly has become something of a healer to those who brave their way to the remote monastery -- even if he himself seems somewhat schizophrenic about his abilities.
He spends most of his time fueling the fire that heats the monastery buildings and receiving supplicants, somewhat reluctantly, it seems. Until the closing episode that, as the plot reveals, absolves him of his initial guilt.
The atmosphere in the religious community isn\'t easy, with church hierarchies playing their role. The other two main players in the film are Viktor Sukhorukov as Father Filaret and Dmitry Dyuzhev as Father Iov, both of whom have something of their own agenda in ongoing developments.
At this point, comment on the casting can\'t be avoided. Sukhorukov is an outstanding actor, best known as an absurdist baddie from most of the films he\'s made over the last decade, while Dyuzhev has played more than his fair share of gangster roles, too. Here, both men are heavily bearded up in Orthodox fashion. They play convincingly, but sometimes it\'s hard not to associate them with their earlier film parts.
In the end, neither can match Mamonov in terms of sheer screen presence, with his craggy facial features arguably speaking more than his few words. The only competition for visual effect comes from the film\'s landscapes, which are brilliantly caught in cinematography by Andrei Zhegalov (from Alexander Rogozhkin\'s \"The Cuckoo\" -- he certainly knows how to catch the open frozen spaces of the north).
It\'s a world of slow movement, icy seas and snowy landscapes, where all the colors seem reduced to shades of dark and gray, occasionally almost approaching black and white. A lonely, empty world, one in which the viewer can really feel the cold -- not least through the noise of characters coughing, which resounds throughout, or the sight of Anatoly going through his daily rituals of fetching coal, stoking the fire and attending to his daily tasks. Religious rites mix with ice, leading to a final scene of both forgiveness and departure, which almost evokes an atmosphere of Calvary.
None of this, of course, would have been possible without the script by Dmitry Sobolev, a former pupil of screenwriter Yury Arabov, with whom Lungin worked on last year\'s \"Dead Souls\" adaptation. It\'s a sea change, indeed, for Lungin as a director -- and into something rich and strange.
\"The Island\" (Ostrov) is playing in Russian at theaters citywide.
Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
URL of this page: http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/172826/
Heath Ledger seriously screwed himself up over the role, though. He spent, like, 6 months in a cheap hotel room alone just to get into the role, and he died from an overdose (or conflict?) of depression pills and anti-anxiety pills. While I haven\'t seen the movie yet, I think Jack Nicholson\'s Joker in the Tim Burton movie embodies the Joker the way he should be: a slightly bitter gangster-gone-bad with something to prove and a very weird sense of humor. While he wasn\'t as dark and demented as Ledger\'s Joker, what made him dark and evil in my mind was how he was so light and cavalier about his evil deeds. That said, there\'s no way you can top Ledger\'s acting. It actually has not made the most money of any movie ever, since Titanic is ahead by about $80 million.
Pirates 3 was long and had a bad ending. It would have been better if they just wrapped everything up and it had a happy end and that was the end. But they have left HUGE openings for a fourth movie and frankly i think they have pushed this to the limits. Also there are no pretty period dresses*pouts*