To klama vgike ap' ton Paradeiso

It's a Scary-Movie-like parody of the old greek cinema. I can certainly name it as my favourite modern greek comedy. The cast is also great and direction is good for greek movies' standards. Besides being funny, it gave me some very nice vibes in general. The first time I watched it was when I was randomly zapping through TV channels and immediately something drew me to it.

Funny, genuine, amazing acting. I've watched it countless times and I'm sure I will never get tired of it. Mirkas Papakonstantinou and Anna Panagiotopoulou's performances are brilliant. The depiction of the culture during the different historical eras in Greece is fun and accurate. The humour and parody of the old Greek cinema is genuine and hilarious. Unfortunately in order to fully appreciate this movie someone must be familiar with the Greek cinema of the 60's 70's and also have a good knowledge of the Greek language as some the jokes are hard to grasp if you are not a native. Still anyone can have a fun time watching it and I highly recommend it!

10/10!

This thing is just OK only to watch it on a Friday night with your bored-to-death mates (that's what I did yesterday). I laughed to tears in some scenes taking the p*** of the 1950s-1970s Greek films but:

These laughs are not the effect of a genuine or sensitive humour but rather similar to a reaction when someone farts. This is not really cinema, just a sequence of TV-style gangs we watch every year in the Xmas programmes. My three (out of ten) is the mark that this "film" deserves ;-)

Two years ago I was bit harsh to all the good people of Greek TV-Washing Machine so I repeat it: this thing is easy to watch and you laugh with it but after you watch it you feel an emptiness, a gap; it's the intellectual deficit of modern Greece.

To klama vgike apo to Paradeiso is an amazing idea to do a satire on the legendary Greek movie's of the 60s and trust me there are so many things to make fun of those films. The cast of this movie is also kind of crazy, I have never seen so many famous Greek actors in a movie. The execution, however, is so and so. The start of the movie is really good but then it gets a bit repetitive. The musical scenes are a bit too many in my opinion, one or two good ones would have been enough. Finally, the humor in most parts of this movie is not really clever. It is not that I mind the cheap humor in a satirical film, on the contrary, it is required. But I would have liked to also see something more apart from cheap jokes. All in all, it is an enjoyable movie to kill some time but nothing more and it could have been so much better.

There was a time when Greek cinema was, as everywhere else, the main mean of everyday fun for the masses. From the early '50s until the coming of tv in late 60's an ever growing industry was producing an ever increasing number of films with ever bigger box office revenue. With Finos Films as flagship, this industry lasted until 1977 and then collapsed completely losing the battle to television. Until then they managed to build a Greek miniature facsimile of Hollywood, with Greek star system, famous directors and script writers, producing mainly comedies and dramas. Their artistic merit does not stand to serious criticism. They were almost all sub-par aimed to the average viewer, although quite a handful was quite adequate in terms of production.

Yes they were bad cinema, but with repeated showings in tv, they had a second career from mid 80's till today, transformed to a cult phenomenon to more than three generations of Greeks. Almost all of us have seen those innumerous times, and quotes of films has passed to everyday life.

To Klama Vgike Ap Ton Paradiso, meaning Crying Came Though Paradise (a satire of a famous film name of the 50's) it's a non stop satire of that era and cinema industry. Unrelentingly it parodies famous films, actors, writers, quotes and cliches of the era. And it does it in a lightweight manner, a little gross verbally, but in general quite good, if you are Greek and grew up with those films around. But it is a compete waste of time for a non Greek to try and watch this film. It is full of verbal inside jokes aimed only to us that have exposed ourselves to the original material to really be able to understand the pun. Stay away, you won't catch the joke.