Reviews

Like the other review said, this is a movie about nothing. Movies about nothing are a romanian specialty, we are very good at this. Loooong booooring scenes about mundane things, trying so hard to be "artsy" and failing every single time. Let me give you a few examples... I would give you a heads up by saying "Warning. Spoilers ahead!", but a spoiler means revealing something about the story, which isn't the case here simply because there is no story. Ok so the examples: him cleaning his shotgun, him cleaning the windshield from something that looks like pigeon poo, him folding a milk carton, him waiting for the coffee machine to finish pouring a cup of coffee and so on. These scenes are long and there are many scenes like these... I mean if one would add up the scenes that are actually meaningful (and I'm very generous by using this word), you would end up with a 15 minute short movie. A bad short movie, but at least it would be honest. So to sum it up there is no story, no character development, no drama whatsoever, there's basically nothing, which is quite fitting for a movie about nothing.

You know those ultra-dramatic indian movies where something mundane happens and it triggers the most over the top reactions ever? Well this movie is exactly the opposite: something REALLY dramatic is about to happen and the protagonist is treating it like it's nothing. He prepares for his death like some random dude would prepare for yet another day at a boring job. I mean maybe this was the ideea, in which case is a bad ideea... or maybe there's a different ideea which fails to show itself. In either case this so called movie is pointless. It is one thing that it does point to though, that being that the protagonist resembles the current romanian (mainly rural) society: dumbed out by what is "right" from the perspective of a set of obsolete moral values of christian origin. This guy is the archetypal "sheep", he did the right things all his life and he will do the same right things in the face of certain death... which is very boring to be honest.

It's over! Thank God (or Allah, Buddha, whoever)! I was very reluctant watching another movie directed by the overrated Cristi Puiu because, let's face it, he makes awful movies. For those who don't know, this movie was inspired by the commemoration of the death of Cristi's father; he says this in an interview. In the same interview he says that one of his other garbage movies, the acclaimed "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu", was partially inspired by a personal experience. So basically this so-called artist makes movies inspired by what happens in his life... which seems to be very morbid. You see, ironically, that's the only good part about failed directors like Cristi, more exactly the fact that it makes you feel like anyone could do a movie. Like another reviewer said, a child with a webcam can do better. I'm not going to dwell on the technical aspects like what was this movie actually about or on what did they managed to spent over 1 millions euros... it's a Cristi Puiu movie, he creates garbage using someone else's money. The thing that somehow bothers me is that there's no connection between Sierra Nevada, which is a Spanish term meaning "snow-covered mountain range", and the movie. Well anyway, my advice is to not watch this movie or any other ones directed by Cristi.

A bad romanian movie, nothing new about that. But to be one of the worst among all the other bad movies... well that's something to go for. If that was the idea, congratulations mister Achim, you nailed it! Some would think that in a movie you would find some kind of a story or some character development or maybe the presentation of an idea or something that would catch the attention of the viewer. It's not the case here, this movie is special, it's about nothing. On top of the fact that the entire movie is just about 4 guys chatting about nothing in particular, the way they are doing this is totally unconvincing, boring and pointless. Really, I produce more interesting topics of discussion in 5 minutes than that obnoxious fat guy in the entire movie. Well anyway to wrap it up, please don't watch this movie if you don't have a masochistic pleasure of being bored to death.

First of all the main actor can't act... you know actors ACT, that's what they do. Well this guy doesn't, he doesn't even speak that much, he has like 10 lines in the entire movie. He's just there, doing pretty much nothing. Second what's up with all those semi-nude scenes? I mean yes, Ada has a sexy body and, unlike that boring guy, she can actually act... but what's the point with all those scenes? This question can be extended to the whole movie... what was the point?! It's a metaphor for the tormented mind of a troubled young boy who can't get over the death of his father and creates a world of his own? It's a metaphor for some repressed (and weird) sexual desires? It's a requiem for a suicide? I guess we will never know because this movie IS A MESS!

One man can't choose between two women. Dear Anca Damian, this is NOT a story in itself... you don't just go and film 1 hour and a half of this non-story without creating some background for the characters so we can empathize with them, without creating some sort of tension or at least some interesting scenes or conversations. I mean come on, you had a budget of almost 1 million euros... what have you done with all that money? There are 4 characters and almost all the so-called action happens indoor! This movie should be a model for how to NOT make movies. Oh and the way it tries to be "artsy" is just hilarious: we have the writer who sits alone, trying way to hard to be some kind of tormented Baudelaire and there's the main guy with lines spitted from the corner of his mouth... it's so cliche to the point of becoming disgusting. At least we got to see Ana Ularu's breasts (more than once), which was nice.

Dear mister Porumboiu, I will start this review with a request: please stop making movies. I have seen all your movies and ALL are bad, including those two that somehow got some awards (how that happened will remain a mystery). Anyway, returning to this so-called movie: 0 story, 0 character development, 0 emotion, 0 action, 0 everything. Were you trying to say something, to transmit a message, to somehow serve a greater purpose by all those interminable conversations and boring scenes? Were you trying to make art?! I think I knew how this went: "Hm this movie would make a bad short (let's say 9 minutes), so why don't we add 80 more minutes and make a VERY bad feature film?" Well awesome idea, please don't do that ever again! At least you had the decency to allow us to see the girl's breasts... by far the best 3 seconds of the entire movie.

A few days in the life of an old guy living in rural Romania. Not a clever idea for a movie... to say it gently. No matter how good of an actor Victor Rebengiuc is, he simply can't make a good movie all by himself. This movie was doomed to fail from the start, the screenplay being the main cause. Yes I get that the action isn't so important, the characters and the father-son relationship being the focus, but you can still make things a little more interesting. Truth be told, it does have a few nice scenes... when Costache and Koji look at the pictures and when Costache gets drunk for example. Sadly though, these scenes don't make up for an overall boring movie. At least it has a somewhat conclusive ending, which is more than enough for a romanian movie.

Remember Taken with Liam Neeson going on a killing spree, remember how entertaining that movie was? Well this movie is exactly the opposite of that! Actually this one ends where it should have started. It's like the director does it on purpose: "nope, no entertainment for you... you get realism because realism is cool". News flash: IT ISN'T! We really wanna see that boring guy stuck in all that bureaucratic mess or we wanna see him chasing the bad guys and making a blood bath in Cairo? We really wanna see a weak and lost (and of course realistic) Aurel or we wanna see a tough and determined Aurel? I rated 2 and not 1 because, believe it or not, there are actually worse movies than this one.

... but ultimately it fails to deliver. The screenplay is ok I guess; nothing original, but good enough to build a mildly entertaining movie. It doesn't reach this mediocre goal though because there's no intensity. The actors are just... doing their job I suppose. It's not like their acting is bad, but I can't feel any emotion, it's like their sole purpose is to cash the check and be done with it. As a first effort for director Anca Damian, it's not bad, but it could have been so much better.

I'm not gonna bother myself with giving a detailed argumentation of why this movie is such a mess. It simply doesn't worth anyone's attention because it really doesn't seem to try to capture it. It's just another realistic movie... because that's exactly what the romanian cinema was missing, realism! We don't get enough of that in our REAL lives, we need realism in cinema too. The more real, the better. Imagination? In a romanian movie? Blasphemy!!! I rated it 2 and not 1 because we get to see Monica's behind; and when someone's rear end is the highlight of the movie... well I think that pretty much sums it up.

I really don't understand how this movie won so many awards. It's below mediocre and when I'm saying this I'm considering the standards in romanian cinema, which are pretty low. I must say that I don't sympathize at all with Lazarescu, although the director almost forces this sympathy on the viewers, while accusing the medical system for... for what? From what I can tell everyone treated him fairly nice, given the context with that accident and the fact that he's just one among many others (and some of them with more urgent problems). And speaking about that accident... in the beginning of the movie, when Lazarescu is still at home, at tv the reporter mentions this accident telling there are 7 deaths and 29 injured. You know how much time passed since the reporter started this news until Lazarescu's neighbour turned off the tv? 20 seconds! People die every day all across the globe from a variety of reasons. Do we care? No we don't! So Lazarescu died... SO WHAT?!

Leaving the ugly topic aside, the movie is made in a very amateurish way. Yes, I understand that realism plays a big part, but why don't make a documentary, label it as a documentary so it can be viewed by the people who are really interested in the topic, and save us 2 and a half hours of waiting for that guy to finally die? An over-rated movie who suffers of the same curse which seems to be the plague of romanian cinema... realism. At least if it was some kind of artsy realism or if it had an important message to transmit, but it doesn't.

Given the previous movie directed by Constantin Popescu, the excellent "Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man", I confess I was expecting more from this movie. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad movie (given the standards in romanian cinema), but I don't see the point of making it. It's like... a movie about nothing. At least it doesn't have the audacity to call itself artsy, like many other romanian movies. It's below mediocre and it seems fine with it.

Movies generally tend to fall in 2 categories: entertainment and art. There are also a few select movies which manage to be both... and those are the great ones! This movie certainly isn't entertainment, it's actually so boring that it could be used as a definition for what entertainment is NOT. So it must be art, right? Wrong again! This isn't art, I wouldn't even call it a movie, but is listed here on IMDb, so it must be. Looong scenes, boring characters, pointless conversations... really, it was an ordeal to watch it.

This is just another of those movies where basically nothing happens. It's pretty much a monologue of Ioana Flora, an ok-ish actress, but here it simply doesn't work. So the guy has mixed feelings and the girl is very emotionally unstable... SO WHAT?! This ain't enough for a movie, this ain't enough not even for a play. Maybe would be enough as a premise for a story. You know, a story is something where things HAPPEN! They just keep talking and talking and talking about their feelings or stuff that somehow justifies those feelings... then some flash-backs used to give depth to those feelings bla bla bla. All the movie I was like "ok now is the phase of character development... soon something will happen". Nope, nothing happens, except in the last 10 minutes or so and by then is already too late. The ending is typical for a romanian movie, it ends abruptly with no conclusion, leaving you staring at the screen and cursing the heavens for the time you just wasted (at least it's not that long, maybe the only good part about it).