writeagain

Ridiculous story line, ridiculous casting. All cops are big black guys. Blonde redneck- maniac-brothers kidnap and rape blonde chicks. Of course the maniacs are super-religious Christians. The dialogues they have with their mom are on kindergarten level. I guess reverse racism is the safest way for bad movies in US nowadays. But is way too blatant in this case. Having read the screenwriter Jeff Rosenberg's twitter I am not at all surprised he wrote up this mess. And the director seems to be fixated on rape stories. His previous movie didn't even get a single review on IMDb. At least this one had a few viewers who liked it, that's success, bro.

I was shocked with the "crap" review here. I wish you guys learned French and read a bit about this film on allocine.fr for example. It's not a rip-off from Woody Allen, the director admits that he loves Woody Allen, Eric Rohmer et al. And yes, "L'art d'aimer" was influenced by those masters. Be warned, if you prefer r'n'b over Mozart and Schubert you will have hard time watching this. And maybe that guy is right, the director doesn't know "the life". Because that Frenchie is not from Pittsburgh after all. The film is based on Emmanuel Mouret personal notes about love and life, each story is like a visual illustration to another thought. So just relax and watch, it's all about love, nothing else.

This film has a very patriotic purpose, that is to teach the Lithuanians the importance of the book and the written language. They show how hard it was back in 1869 to spread the Lithuanian books under the tsarist regime. That is well documented, so the film team had lots of sources to work on. And so this is supposed to be a "costume drama". But aside from the Russian gendarmerie what kind of costumes do we see? Those Lithuanian guys look rather like "forest brothers" from the 1950's. And the Russian gendarmes talk like the modern "gopniki", the low-class youth. Especially their "captain" is so recognizable as one of the junkies in another Lithuanin film hit, "Zero 1, alyvine Lietuva" with all those "scary" intonations and slang. But this is 1869! Well, I guess the Lithuanian viewers just don't concentrate on details like that, judging by the high score.