Author: Jim McLennan

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver

  By

★★
“The law of diminishing returns.”

And that rating is from someone who, unlike most critics, really didn’t mind the first part. I’m a fan of big, bombastic science-fiction, best exemplified by The Chronicles of Riddick. [Why nobody has ever thrown $150 million at Michael Bay for that kind of thing, I don’t know. And, no, the Transformers franchise does not count. And neither does Armageddon] I want to see square-jawed heroes or heroines, going toe-to-toe with irredeemably unpleasant villains, as burning spaceships fall from the sky behind them, onto the surface of an exotic planet. While Part One of this was heavy on the world-building and character development, at least we got all that out of the way, and could look forward to a second half of non-stop action.

Couldn’t we?

Um. Well. About that… All I can say is, combine the two, give them to a enthusiastic editor, who can merge them into a single, coherent movie of round about two hours, and you could well be onto something. Now, I like Snyder: or, rather, I used to. 300 is great, and I will honestly defend Sucker Punch as a genuinely good movie, especially in the director’s cut. But since then? Nothing has come up to the early work. You eventually reach this, the poster child for what happens when you give someone $166 million, and let them do whatever they want creatively, without apparent significant oversight. A visually impressive, but bloated and self-indulgent mess, lacking any significant heart. 

Things follow quickly on from its predecessor, Kota (Boutella) returning to Veldt with the warriors accumulated in Part One, who will protect her settlement from the evil Admiral Noble (Skrein) and his forces. For Noble is not as dead as Kota hoped at the end of the first half, which is a nasty surprise to her. Inevitably, we get the “training the locals for battle” sequence, but we also get an extended “bringing in the harvest” sequence, and a very extended “why don’t we all sit around and reveal secrets about our dark past and what the hell is Snyder doing, can’t he hurry up and get to the fighting” sequence. My attention and interest dwindled steadily throughout the first hour and more.

Eventually – and I stress that, eventually – we get to the cool stuff, and it’s not bad. Snyder does undeniably retain an eye for spectacle, and this does deliver eye-candy for those fond of giant fireballs (hey, sue me). However, it’s all empty: sound and fury, signifying nothing, and you’re left to try and work around wonky plotting which has a few farmers taking down the galactic rulers after a couple of lessons, going little further than “Stick ’em with the pointy end.” It helps, I suppose that Noble’s craft have a tendency to explode so easily, I suspect a recall from the manufacturer’s is in order. I imagine this may end up taking Snyder’s plans for a Rebel Moon Universe with it.

Dir: Zack Snyder
Star: Sofia Boutella, Ed Skrein, Charlie Hunnam, Michiel Huisman

Shadows in the Water, by Kory M. Shrum

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

DEA agent Jack Thorne and his wife are killed, and his reputation shredded after his death. His 12-year-old daughter Lou only escapes courtesy of her father’s sacrifice, and an unwanted innate talent, which she shares with her aunt, Lucy. Lou has the ability – sometimes without her choice – to transport herself through the shadows or through water to another, similar location. After the loss of her parents, Lou goes to live with her aunt and learns to control and use her skill. Fourteen years later, and now a grown woman, she is on a crusade of vengeance, to seek out and destroy every member of the Martinelli crime family responsible for her parents’ deaths. 

Of course, that’s the thing about revenge: it’s messy. It’s at least somewhat fine when it’s just Lou who is put at risk. But those around her are not immune from being sucked in to her deadly mission. For instance Lucy calls on the help of a former DEA agent, now a private eye, Robert King to give Lou a purpose beyond multiple murder. Except, the case on which they work together ends up bringing heat on everyone, and is related to Lou’s personal vendetta. The truth about who was behind it is also revealed: it wasn’t just the Martinellis acting on their own, which Lou finds out, as she hunts the last surviving member of the family, Konstantine.

I like the concept here, and the way Lou’s power used is well-handled by Shrum. It obviously acts as a force multiplier for the heroine, especially at the end when she has to go up against the man at the top and his men. It also provides an effective, if grisly, way to cover her tracks. There is another world she visits, called La Loon (quite why she slides into this extraterrestrial location is unclear), with its vicious predator, whom she calls Jabbers. Yet it is not an unlimited power-up, and Lou’s reluctance to ask for or accept help in her mission, stops her from feeling overpowered. She has a lot of bottled-up issues, hidden behind what can sometimes feel like an emotionless facade.

It might have been better to have focused on Lou, and her journey from troubled pre-teen through to avenging angel. Instead, it’s very much joining her vengeance well in progress, and we get more about King and his relationship with Lucy, which is considerably less interesting. Despite being the first in a lengthy series, it feels satisfactorily self-contained. Indeed, perhaps a little too much so, since I wasn’t left with particular interest in seeing where Lou’s story went after achieving closure. I’m sure there’s potential there. I mean, if she became an UberEats delivery agent, you’d never have to worry about your food arriving cold. I suspect this is probably not the direction in which the series goes…

Author: Kory M. Shrum
Publisher: Timberlane Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 11 in the Shadows in the Water series.

Calamity Jane

  By

★★★
“Calamity Plain.”

Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok are two of the most well-known names in the culture of the Wild West, though the reality of both individuals is almost impossible to separate from the myths which surround them. So it’s kinda pointless to complain about historical accuracy in films which focus on them. Better just accept them as effectively being fictional entities, which can be used for whatever purpose a filmmaker desires. Here, it’s the death of Wild Bill (Stephen Amell, best known as TV’s Arrow) in a poker game, which sets his girlfriend Jane (Rickards, also from the same series) off. She goes on the trail of Jack McCall (Allon), the scumbag responsible, who has understandably opted to depart Deadwood. 

Complicating matters is that Jane is in custody herself, having been brought to the frontier town by Sheriff Mason (Rozen), to stand trial for murder. She escapes his custody – as Chris pointed out, Mason is a bit crap at the whole law enforcement thing – and heads off after McCall and his equally scummy brother. Mason assembles a (again, rather feeble and unimpressive) posse to go after the two suspected killers. Most of the second half is an extended pursuit through some very scenic landscapes, it must be said. There are a fair number of moderate diversions before the inevitable and entirely expected confrontation between Jane and Jack, as she seeks to get vengeance, or perhaps justice, for her murdered lover.

I think I like the characters here most. Rickards gives a winning portrayal as Jane, despite an unnerving similarity to one of the members of Bananarama (perhaps that’s just me though), and the supporting cast also do a good job of inhabiting their roles. It is fairly straightforward: black hats and white hats, with not much grey in terms of morality. In this way, it feels like a throwback to an earlier time. Along similar lines, while the language is fairly ripe, with a good number of F-bombs, the violence is very restrained by comparison. I feel if a film is going to have an R-rating, the makers need to embrace that artistic freedom fully, yet outside of the cursing, this would likely merit only a PG. 

Among the supporting cast, the best is Abigail (Faia), who is entirely mad, and all the more entertaining for it. She boasts of the multiple people she’s killed, keeping a count with scars on her arms – I’d love to see a film of her back-story. She and Jane end up in a very nasty brawl, likely the action highlight of the film, with everything else being gunfights of the “Bang-bang, you’re dead” variety. While it’s all well enough assembled, there isn’t much indication of ambition or desire to tell a new story, or even an old one from an interesting direction. As a result, this only intermittently catches fire, preferring mostly to meander along safely, well within the speed limit and with its seat-belt securely fastened.

Dir: Terry Miles
Star: Emily Bett Rickards, Tim Rozon, Primo Allon, Priscilla Faia

Furies: Season one

  By

★★★½
“Hell hath no Furies…”

Not to be mixed up with Furie, The Furies or even Furies – the last of which also showed up on Netflix recently. Confusion seems almost inevitable (and I’m not helping, by largely recycling the tagline for Furie). However, those three are all films – two Vietnamese, one Australian – while this is an eight episode TV series from France. It begins with Lyna Guerrab (El Arabi) living a fairly idyllic, and certainly well-heeled life, with no bigger issue than whether or not to marry her cop boyfriend Elie (Nadeau). Things get upended in no uncertain fashion, when her accountant father is assassinated. Turns out, he kept the books for certain criminal organizations, and someone wanted him very dead.

Lyna vows to find whoever was responsible for her father’s demise, and make them responsible. That opens up a whole can of worms, as she has to venture into the domain of the Parisian criminal underworld, which is far more expansive and influential than expected. To a degree, it feels like the system shown in the John Wick franchise, with six crime families, working in different areas, e.g. prostitution, robbery, etc. who govern things and make sure nobody does anything that would upset their highly lucrative apple-cart. As their collective enforcer is a woman, Selma (Fois), known as the Fury, a hereditary position, passed down the matriarchal line, and she has the skills to keep everyone else in line.

Or does she? Because as Lyna enters the game, it becomes apparent that someone is out to disturb the balance of the system. Coming under the Fury’s patronage, as a possible successor, may not be enough to save her from the war which is becoming increasingly inevitable. As well as John Wick, there are quite a few elements here which feel inspired by Luc Besson in one way or another: the world-weary assassin who takes on a feisty young apprentice, for example, could be straight out of Leon. The fight scenes are well-crafted, slick and hard-hitting: I vaguely recall action director Jude Poyer as part of the Eastern Heroes crew in London, back in the nineties, so nice to see him kicking professional ass.

It does sometimes feel too over-stuffed, trying to juggle too many threads and characters. The script solution to any problem seems to be, throw in another subplot. The makers also deserve a demerit for ending on a horrendous cliffhanger. The streaming service have made no announcement regarding a second series: the show seems to have done reasonably well, but Netflix gonna Netflix. If that doesn’t happen, you should whack off a full star, since the way it ends is definitely not satisfying. But there does remain a good deal here to admire. I particularly liked the performance of Foïs, who brings a lot of nuance to a character that initially seems one-dimensional. The extended duration allows her to develop, though all told, it might have been better as a two-hour self-contained Besson flick.

Creators: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Jean-Yves Arnaud, Yoann Legave
Star: Lina El Arabi, Marina Foïs, Mathieu Kassovitz, Jeremy Nadeau

The Swimmers

  By

★★
“Sink or swim.”

This is the story of Syrian sisters Yusra Mardini and her sister Sarah, played by real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa. Growing up, they were trained by their father, a professional swimmer himself, and had the goal of reaching the Olympics for their country. The (still ongoing) Syrian Civil War led to the sisters leaving their homeland, and this is mostly the story of their journey, through Turkey, across the Mediterranean in a very flimsy dinghy to Greece, then across Europe to Germany. It’s a journey fraught with peril, on which predators looking to scam migrants (or worse), lurk at every turn. However…

I don’t typically like to get political here, but when a film explicitly does, I will go there. I have every sympathy for refugees, who want safety. But once you leave your home country and reach a safe destination, that’s it. If you then decide to move on – making a beeline for a country where lax immigration laws let you pull the rest of your family with you – you’re not a refugee, you’re an economic migrant. My sympathy for you drops a whole order of magnitude. It’s like if your house burns down, I feel sorry for you. It doesn’t give you the right to move into the neighbourhood’s swankiest residence. Most of the film’s attempts to pull on my heartstrings failed due to this. As soon as the sisters left the Turkish beach, they were 100% responsible for putting themselves back in danger.

Rant over. What about the film? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Having sisters playing sisters definitely works. Especially at that age, this is the kind of relationship which is hard to simulate for teenage actors. There’s a genuineness here, for obvious reasons, which makes the family devotion at the film’s core, easy to see and appreciate. Less successful is the apparent random switching between languages. Many conversations occur in a hodge-podge of English and Arabic. While I can’t speak to the authenticity of it, as a viewer, it was jarring to switch repeatedly from listening to reading subtitles. I ended up basically tuning out the dialogue and sticking with the subs.

I appreciate the necessity of bending the facts to fit a cinematic narrative, but this probably goes too far. It’s one thing to have Yusra overhear snark from other competitors about how she doesn’t deserve to be there. But maybe avoid this when the movie then omits to mention the only swimmers she beat were, basically, other charity cases? The Olympic Selection Time was 60.80 seconds. Mardini finished in 69.21, and even her personal best is more than five seconds off the OST. The awkward truth is, she really did not deserve to be there, but few are greater at virtue-signalling than the IOC. It all feels like there are probably better refugee stories which could have been told. All the gloss this applies to its tale. can’t disguise that it is uncomfortably close to well-made propaganda.

Dir: Sally El-Hosaini
Star: Nathalie Issa, Manal Issa, Ahmed Malek, Matthias Schweighöfer

No Way to Escape

  By

★★★
“Just deserts.”

This is a sprightly and energetic Chinese knock-off, borrowing heavily from Resident Evil and Aliens in particular. There’s a research lab deep underground, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, which has suddenly gone radio silent. The research they were doing there was… well, I’m not 100% certain quite what it involved. While a lot of the dialogue in this is in “English”, I’m using quotes advisedly. Especially on the scientific front, it seems to be more of an enthusiastic word-salad, like “by chance, precise data from the gamma variable appear,” throwing jargon about radiation and DNA splicing into the mix, in lieu of anything coherent. Anyway, it seems Ohm Technology are into some fairly shady shit, to nobody’s surprise.

A group is sent out to find out what happened, and more importantly, bring everything back on line. The only man who can do it, apparently, is Doctor Haven, a kinda autistic super-scientist, who’d like to get his hands on the data. To protect him, three Lara Croft-alikes are assigned: leader Bai Zhi (Yu), the flirty Bi Jiao (Wu); and veteran Gui Che (Xu). Also coming along are a bunch of cannon fodder, and leader of the mission, Principal Gabon (Ger), who is clearly evil because he’s played by a Westerner. They haven’t even reached the base before they encounter the local fauna: scorpions that can swim through human flesh like water. So if you stand on one, it’ll pop out the top of your head.

These are, at least, only normal sized. But when the expeditions enters into the base, the women are appalled to discover this isn’t the rescue mission intended, with any survivors being ruthlessly gunned-down by Gabon’s men. [Those foreign devils…] Turns out he intends to seize the technology and use it for nefarious purposes, but not everyone is in favor of this. The heroic trio rebel, Dr. Haven refuses to get the systems running again, and even some of his own men decide they can’t in good conscience take part in Gabon’s plan. All of which would be merely morally interesting, if it weren’t for the F-sized version of the scorpions roaming the facility due to leakage of gamma rays. Or something.

You’d be hard-pushed to identify anything new or particularly innovative here. But it keeps moving, without significant downtime, and there’s enough background to make it feel more than you’re just watching a video-game. For instance, Bai Zhi is there partly to look for her fiance, who worked at the base before he suddenly vanished. There’s also a lot more interaction between the characters and the monsters than we usually see in this kind of thing. Though the quality of the combination FX is uneven, and the editing of the action is sometimes choppily incoherent. No great matter. This is a film pitting soldiers against freakin’ giant scorpions, and firmly checks the boxes of what you would want and expect from such a production. 

Dir: Yun-Fei Lu
Star: Sai-Chu Yu, You-Xuan Wu, Dong-Mei Xu, Dieter Ger

This review originally appeared on Film Blitz.

Hunt Club

  By

★½
“Stupid hunts.”

Oh, dear. I appreciate that actors have to work, like everyone else. Van Dien, in particular, has a reputation in our house as someone whose name is not typically a badge of quality. But it’s sad to see Suvari is now apparently in the same career boat. I can only presume the offers aren’t exactly flooding in, if this is the work she has to take on. It’s another variant on the old Most Dangerous Game story-line. Here, it sees redneck entrepreneur Carter (Van Dien) luring in women with the promise of $100,000, while remaining vague on the details. Turns out the victims then are pursued through the forest and have to survive for 24 hours. Spoiler: they don’t.

Their latest prey is Cassandra (Suvari), who joins up after having a fight with her girlfriend, Tessa (Stojan), in the cafe where Carter and his teenage son Jackson (Peltz) are eating. This is going to be Jackson’s first hunt, though he’s… not exactly as enthusiastic about it as his father. I should not need to describe any plot elements further. If you’ve seen as many as one (1) of this kind of thing before, you’ll be able to predict almost every story beat to perfection. There is a twist, in regard to Cassandra and the motivation for her actions, which does at least explain some of the idiocy present. Otherwise, this is painfully predictable, and executed in a manner which is equally tedious, almost as if intended to suck away any tension.

It doesn’t help that none of the characters here rise about the most basic and banal of cliches, with the hunters the worst. Obviously, this kind of plot has an inevitable gender political subtext. That’s fine, except when, as here, the makers decide that’s insufficient, eschewing all subtlety to rub the audience’s face in it. Hence we get an extended sequence of Carter and the other hunters sitting around, spouting fringe subReddit BS, which could only be written by a true believer in toxic masculinity. For instance, someone actually wrote this: “We are men. We are primal, strong, sexual beings. We used to be the stronger sex.” I can state, with 100% certainty, I’ve never heard anyone speaking like that. Ever.

The women fare little better: the apparently “feminist” intent severely undermined by a relentless focus on having the women humiliated while scantily-clad. Five minutes of role-reversal at the end, accompanied – and I wish I were joking here – by a lesson in Greek mythology, does not cut it. The action is equally implausible, both in concept and execution, such as knives being thrown incredible distances into people’s foreheads, and any impact is nullified by the fact you have been given no reason to care about anyone involved. For much of the movie, Cassandra’s entire persona is “woman threatened by men”. That’s it. Don’t know about you, I need a little more depth of character – and  that turns out to be largely false. Even by the low standards of Van Dien’s filmography, give this one a wide berth.

Dir: Elizabeth Blake-Thomas
Star: Mena Suvari, Casper Van Dien, Will Peltz, Maya Stojan

When the World has Ended, by Rick Wood

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

“It just seemed as if Hell opened up one day and that was that. Instant carnage, liberated monsters, death for all. They rose from somewhere beneath the ground, attacking for no clear reason and killing until God knows when.” That’s how this starts, so there’s no hanging around. Cia Rose is one of the few survivors, for whom every day survival is a perilous endeavour. She’s seventeen, and the daughter of a scientist. When the monsterpocalypse took place, the rich, influential and powerful – who, it appears, knew this was coming – headed for their shelters. Her father was allowed in, to research the invaders. Cia was not.

Four years later, she’s barely scraping by, running from the creatures or their mindless human slaves, known as Wasters. She still holds a grudge, albeit an understandable one, at being abandoned. But Cia is devoted to “Boy”, an autistic child whom she saved after his parents were torn apart by Masketes, a vicious flying species with lethal fangs and claws. The two are separated when Cia is captured by a pack of Wasters, and most of the book is concerned with her attempts to re-unite with Boy. During the process, she discovers that regular humans can be as much a threat as any monster, and finds out the truth about what happened to her father, both back in the early days of the invasion, and since then.

Wood certainly doesn’t stint on the horror, with much rending of flesh by the monsters, though I never really got much of an idea of what they looked like. For example, a Thoral has four legs and is “about the size of the average bungalow.” More than that, I’d be hard-pushed to say. Regardless, life is now nasty and brutal, not least when Cia is captured and made to become part of a repopulation program. The resulting sex scene is, perhaps intentionally, borderline creepy given the heroine’s age. Though it’s worth noting the story is set in Britain where the age of consent is 16 – not that “consent” is much of a factor here.

I think the biggest misstep is at the end, where Cia takes action which results in the immediate deaths of hundreds of people, destroying what had been a safe haven. No matter how bad your Daddy issues, and regardless of the reason, it’s hard to come to terms with the vast carnage for which she is directly responsible, willfully and very much with malice aforethought, while still empathizing with the character. Even though nobody we particularly care about is lost – only bad people, judged by Cia’s severely questionable moral code – it yanked away almost all desire to follow her progress through this post-apocalyptic landscape. It was basically a teenage temper tantrum. Having raised two teenagers, my tolerance for those is slim, especially with the lethal consequences they have here.

Author: Rick Wood
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Cia Rose series.

Call Her King

  By

★★½
“Tries hard to be Trial Hard“

After the impressive surprise which was Jericho Ridge, I figured I should try out another BET Original movie and see how it fared. As the grade above should tell you, the answer is comparatively poorly. While technically adequate in most departments, it’s one of the more implausible Die Hard knockoffs I’ve seen. In a world where No Contest exists, that takes some doing. The high concept here is “Die Hard in a court-house” with Judge Jaeda King (Naughton) about to pronounce sentence in the trial of convicted murderer Sean Samuels (Mitchell). Barely has she said “death”, when the court is stormed by a force led by Sean’s brother Gabriel (Gross), a.k.a. “Black Caesar”.

King escapes the initial onslaught, along with Sean, his defense attorney, and Stryker (Messner), one of the courthouse guards. Gabriel, however, is not just interested in freeing his brother. He also puts the prosecuting attorney on trial in a kangaroo court, designed to prove the flaws and biases inherent in the system. Much of the film is therefore split between King and her group trying to figure out how to survive, as well as escape, and the courtroom side of things, where nasty little secrets are revealed, such as the prosecutor’s relationship to King having been more than professional. I will say, Miller does a good job of keeping both sides of the story moving forward. It would have been easy for the chattier portions to bring things to a halt: that doesn’t happen.

This aspect is certainly helped by a strong performance from Gross, who manages to avoid the obvious tropes of such a situation, and comes over as smart, well-spoken and committed. He’s no Alan Rickman of course; then again, who is? I found myself, if not quite on Gabriel’s side, at least seeing his point of view and his grounds for extreme action. The main problem is a failure to set King up as credible opposition. Before things kick off, there’s no reason to view her as an action heroine: all we see is her being easily beaten by her martial-arts teacher. Then, suddenly, she – or, rather obviously, Naughton’s stunt double – is kicking butt and spraying bullets around like a grizzled Army Ranger.

Okay, Naughton is far better than Anna Nicole Smith, though that’s a low bar for anyone to clear. She does okay with the dramatic side of things, though the script occasionally gives her little to work with. The broken relationship with her spouse feels like another element poorly lifted from Die Hard, and things like her overhearing another judge go full racist were so obvious as to trigger an eye-roll. Miller does have a nice visual eye, e.g. the shot of the attackers marching towards their target was a genuine stand-out, and there’s enough competence to stop it from being actively annoying. However, its script needed more work, and perhaps a better central concept, to succeed in an over-crowded field.

Dir: Wes Miller
Star: Naturi Naughton, Lance Gross, Jason Mitchell, Johnny Messner

Hussar Ballad

  By

★★★
“Russian off to war…”

This is an adaptation of a Russian play A Long Time Ago by Alexander Gladkov, but was inspired by the real-life exploits of Nadezhda Durova. She was a woman who basically pulled a Mulan, concealing her gender in order to defend her homeland in the Napoleonic and other wars of the early 19th century. Durova joined the army on her 23rd birthday and served honourably for a decade, even after her true gender was discovered. Tsar Alexander I was impressed when he heard about Durova, giving her a promotion after summoning the soldier to his palace in St. Petersburg. Wounded by a cannonball at the Battle of Borodino, she eventually retired in 1816, with the rank equivalent to captain-lieutenant.

Somehow this became a light and fluffy slice of musical rom-com. 17-year-old Shura Azarova (Golubkina) is an accomplished rider and tomboy, who meets Hussar officer Dmitry Rzhevsky (Yakovlev), and is mistaken by him as a brother in arms. [As usual in these things, significant suspension of disbelief is required!] When war with France breaks out, Rzhevsky returns to his unit and Shura convinces faithful family retainer Ivan (Kryuchkov) to help her join the army in disguise. She makes a name for herself as a skilled and brave courier, though her relationship with Dmitry is more adversarial than romantic. There’s a French actress on whom he has designs, triggering her jealousy. Mistaken as rivalry, Dmitry and Shura end up having a duel, though the war keeps interfering in its execution. 

All is forgiven after Shura is captured on a spying mission, Dmitry leading his platoon to the rescue, and leading to a rather decent extended fight, running through a ransacked stately home. [While the actual swordplay is no great shakes in general, the other stunts aren’t bad, including Shura leaping down off a balcony, which looks to have been done by the actress herself] The sudden moments where people burst into song are a little jarring initially, yet I got used to them – probably, again, a point of comparison to Mulan. The production is quite large in scale: there’s an opening ball sequence that’s impressive, and the battle scenes aren’t bad, albeit not quite War and Peace [though some of the costumes from it were recycled here!]

There is the obvious, and given the era probably entirely expected, patriotic theme, with discussions about defending the motherland. The film’s premiere took place on the 150th anniversary, to the day, of the previously-mentioned Battle of Borodino, a famous and bloody encounter between Russia and Napoleon’s forces – best known for inspiring the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. However, it’s rarely heavy-handed, and for all its fluffiness, lack of substance and shortcomings in the motivation department, you do find yourself rooting for Shura. To be honest, perhaps to a greater degree than Dmitry, who comes off as a bit of an arrogant dick. Likely more genuinely progressive than anything coming out of Hollywood around the same time. 

Dir: Eldar Ryazanov
Star: Larisa Golubkina, Yuriy Yakovlev, Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolay Kryuchkov