There are moments in the film of sheer visual brilliance and even a fantastic narrative, though I doubt anyone could ever deny Atom Egoyan is a visually haunting artist. Between the various ruins and moments of real time captured on the trip making the film you see a true landscape, not only of the area, but of its people and what makes them who and what they are.
The problem is that with all that greatness are long moments of unneeded scenes or derivative exposition that remove the warm touching moments and at times just bore the ever loving crap out of you. Mind you I'm not anti art or art-esque films, it's just that these didn't really add a magical moment or create an air of mystery to the overall story or film.
I feel like the best part of the film was the Armenian man's story. The added problem here is that you only ever hear his stories second hand via the female translator, and they lack the dramatic impact he has when telling them, only you can't understand his words because there are no subtitles.
The 5 rating was mainly I just felt like everything good he captured he lost in being a tad pretentious.
The problem is that with all that greatness are long moments of unneeded scenes or derivative exposition that remove the warm touching moments and at times just bore the ever loving crap out of you. Mind you I'm not anti art or art-esque films, it's just that these didn't really add a magical moment or create an air of mystery to the overall story or film.
I feel like the best part of the film was the Armenian man's story. The added problem here is that you only ever hear his stories second hand via the female translator, and they lack the dramatic impact he has when telling them, only you can't understand his words because there are no subtitles.
The 5 rating was mainly I just felt like everything good he captured he lost in being a tad pretentious.