mravsky-2

A rather bad attempt at matching Shawshank Redemption. Very naive plot. The main character is hardly a character, as if an extra. The film is lacking a lot to even be watchable for an hour plus, and lacks any greatness. Perhaps the only noteworthy thing is the gathering of a set of really good actors, who regrettably have to embarrass themselves with participating in this weak (at best) project. At one moment some two thirds through, there appears a glimpse in the plot which promised a savings grace, but it ended in an even larger disappointment. Simply silly and naive. The appearance of Rade Serbedzija at the end, with his few sentences spoken without real mental involvement, only add to the clumsiness of the whole construction. Essentially a thumb down.

Though good actors in general, Nebojsa and Emir turned to be poor choices to play two brothers from an old Herzegovinian village. For a foreign audience, that might be no problem, as the actors' talk would be dubbed or translated anyway. But for anyone local, it borders with ridiculous to listen to two most implausible pronunciations that the two fellows are putting in, supposedly being born and having spent their childhoods in that little Croatian village. No time in Zagreb or in Sarajevo can change a kid's accent so badly that when they come home years later, they speak as if from another planet. There was a certain amount of effort on their parts to mimic the local dialect, but vastly insufficient, and it beats the mind that the director did not warn the actors, or didn't at least cut-out and redo the parts when they use the most inappropriate words and accents in their speech. Given that the whole movie is based on a rather simple point (the old father never loved his wife, and behaved accordingly), and that the artsie-fartsie aspect was to provide the completion, the failure to make the language element (much) more realistic is a real drawback here. It feels as if they just filmed whatever came out of actors' mouths first, without any retrying or correcting.

The film is too weak and doesn't deliver for what its purported purpose is. It stops at just noticing that somethin''s wrong and asks the poo' folks to turn one lightbulb off each... It totally fails to even attempt to go into the reasons why the situation is the way it is, and why there is resistance to what appears to be both evident and truly dangerous. Al Gore uses this movie more to display the Apple logo wherever and whenever possible (he's on Apple's board!), to lament about his friggin farm which once produced tobacco, drags his unbelievably long and monotonous monologues, and does more service to the Chaneys of the world by failing to go to the root of the problem, than to the idiot audience the movie supposedly is geared for and who are supposed, for the first time I guess, to learn about pollution and global warming. For those who started suspecting that the environmentalist movement itself has been hijacked by the elites and used with a spin, this movie is yet another hint. Ain't it too suspicious that Gore fails to raise some real questions? How come he CAN have this movie shown all across the country theaters with all 4 or 5 folks in the audience as was the case when I saw it? Much better documentaries, with much more to say, can't. How come? Who's AG really working for here, eh?