Metastaze

The quality of the writing, the dialogues, the overall acting, it all adds to the gritty picture of Zagreb and its people in the late nineties.

Watching it for the first time, it's a pretty good comedy. But when you watch it a few more times, some important questions we should all ask ourselves start to pop out.

Find it and watch it. It's worth it.

"Metastaze" is a story of four deeply troubled friends. Through them this movie explicitly shows some of the biggest problems in modern day society. Domestic violence, drug abuse and trafficking, ethnocentrism, and so on.

The film is beautiful in its brutality. The scenes are raw and the screenplay is simple. There is no knowitall badass character, no philosophy and no bulls*it. It's the world as it is. People thoroughly perplexed. Incurable.

After the war everyone is still fully focused on the conflicts that did not resolve and oblivious towards other aspects of life. Everyone is determined to keep hate alive. The seed of violence is sown. Deeprooted within.

Some see refuge in drugs and alcohol while others in beating the crap out of their wife. Each his own, right?

The characters are tragic. The point? Futility. Everyone f*cks up. You can only rely on yourself and even then you f*ck up even more. The second law of thermodynamics holds true. Ultimately everything really does go from bad to worse.

This is a movie about 4 guys without job, future or any kind of perspective. They spend their time on drinking, fighting, fanatically cheering for their local soccer club, lift shopping, stealing, drug smuggling, etc. So this movie shows how modern Croatian life becomes a copy of Western European countries. I like to say: That's what we fought for! For not having a jobs, not having any security, not having a lot of things that generation before us has had. Well, I don't want to sound nostalgic, but this movie shows to those who remember that we could do better (characters in the movie are too young to remember), much better. Now about movie itself.

I am amazed by realism, good dialogs, correct acting (at last realistic fight scenes), perfect camera, sound (the only real Croatian rock'n'roll band Majke). Not that I haven't seen those things in other movies, but not in Croatian (with few exceptions!). There is no real plot, things are just happening like any given day, and they are very well described.

All those things made me to give 9/10, as a support to Croatian movie makers to go where our neighbors (Bosina, Serbia, Romania) already came some time ago.

As far as known, the Croatian film budgets go below tolerable. Likewise, if staying in Croatia, they can hardly produce anything other than war and drama movies in old fashion. Now comes Metastasis in form of believable drama script with modern elements, modern directing and great cast. In short, Metastasis can be described as Croatian "Generation X" or "Trainspotting". Should you acknowledge that, this movie gains impressive amount of depth.

The book-based plot follows four younger middle-aged men in a somewhat shorter period of time - putting you in the middle of their lives near their personal peak, but teaches you about their past through conversations. The massive plus is an incredible amount of realism, or better say - it is 100% realistic. Those who live in Croatia, specially Zagreb, and experience harder life can truly identify completely with the movie, but even those who don't can recognize the problem this movie grapples with power and offers to the viewer.

There are three major successful factors that bring this movie above average - the acting performance led by ingenious presentation from Rene Bitorajac playing Krpa (a mop), one of four main characters (out of whom all four design rich but realistic company pretty much exactly like those in real life), the brutally real, dynamic and creative dialogs that can be without single doubt literally copy-pasted into life and in no way polished or "movie-like" (note that it's impossible to properly translate them into English, for example, although it's possible to get pretty close), and the selected number of social problems in Croatia all vividly presented as they are and familiar to majority. In some way, by going international the movie might not get as much applause as it should, but among those who can relate to the content, it truly is a masterpiece.

The leading of scenario is in range of modern storytelling and grants familiar but effective feeling of going the right direction. A number of twists, neither unreal, push the movie going, and execution of several scenes leaves powerful mental imprint.

To put it simple, if Croatia was USA, this movie would go into Oscar selection. A must see.

Metastaze is a well made movie.I am from Split,Croatia and since our cinematography isn't very good in the last twenty year's i can honestly say that this is one of the better movies coming from Croatia since 90's.Not the best,but still among the better ones.I'm not saying that it couldn't be better because it could be a lot better,but what i'm saying is that it's a decent movie to see.

I was very surprised by Rene Bitorajac who gave his best performance,so far,in this film.The screenplay was OK but nothing more.It had a few minor holes and it was very simple.Well,maybe not in Croatian cinematography.The direction was good except that shaky camera technique was a bit overused.

Too short the story,it's a good movie with a few flaws that can be overlooked if you consider that Croatia had maybe twenty good movies the most,in the last twenty year's.