gaborovicmario

"National Class" is about a guy whose auto-racing career is much more important to him than any other life issue. The movie follows his attempts to avoid both the army and marriage in a matter of week, eventually failing in both. He usually drives around in his Zastava 750, sits at caffe's and takes no significant responsibilities. With a synopsis like this, the first film that comes to my mind is "Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird", but this has much more comic input than Iosseliani's movie. Goran Markovic's masterpiece is one of the most beloved Serbian films of all time. It's more than a successful comedy. The highest points are magnificent and clever dialogue, as well as the elaboration and variety of characters, one funnier after another. If you're looking for an empty eye-candy that is likely to win any of the festival nowadays, skip this.

Surprisingly fresh even today, "There Are No Small Gods" is the best film of the so-called populist light comedy oeuvre, a trend in Serbian film that lasted between 1960-1962. The other films of this type ("Love and Fashion", "The Common Apartment", "The Bag of Luck", as well as disastrous two of "Whistle at Eight" and "Seki Is Rolling, Watch Out!") were usually filled with folksy, but not vulgar humor; they necessarily had the two or three evergreens written by Darko Kraljic; the acting was amazingly performed by first-class comedians like Ckalja, Mija Aleksic or Pavle Vujisic, with the supporting cast regulars like Zarko Mitrovic and Mica Tatic. However, Djukic's comedy is better than those other films primarily because of its humor, which has not run over by time, but also because of the metaphor that criticize a system in which a semi-literate people become senior and change their behavior towards their former cooperatives. Despite this, "There Are No Small Gods" is endlessly optimistic, cheerful, funny, witty, and above all, a positive film throughout whose humor doesn't get old even 50 years after.

"Crows" are largely forgotten 'black wave' movie mostly because of its lack of proper domestic distribution, but it had more than an enviable theatrical run abroad - the movie was screened at eleven film festivals across the world. It is a pretty depressing flick when you look at its story, since the vanishing world that "Crows" live in has everything but disappeared today, and lives in other form. The main character, Djuka, is an aging boxer who does some crime activities in order to make his ends meet, since his club has no money for the roof alone. His mischievous mother wants to visit Russia, without knowing any of his son's sources of income. Djuka teams up with his cousin and two ballerinas he met by accident, and the crew roams around suburbia together with their "employer" Violeta, a woman who organizes their thefts and robberies. The characters' giggling refers to the title birds and the sounds these small vultures make. The funny music score fits nice into the whole story. However, the direction is both amazingly good and bad at the various points, but the viewer will not be disappointed in overall.