8.2 ?
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combatreview — 14 years ago(October 02, 2011 01:40 AM)
i am not insinuating that i am incapable of not comprehending. i am saying i never had the problems i had with this movie.
Of course you're not insinuating that - we are unlikely to insinuate something that makes us look foolish, no? Insinuations are generally in our favour.
But - you really need to look at the implications left hanging by your posts on this thread.
you're saying i regarded the movie as bad because i didn't understand it at times. that's not correct.
No, I'm saying that is the sum of what you keep saying.
i regard the movie as bad because it didn't have a good narrative
What are you talking about? How do you know it doesn't have a good narrative? Because it didn't make sense to you, surely.
and wasn't adequate enough
How? In what way? The only basis for this criticism that you have thus far made is that you didn't find the narrative coherent - and since you are pretty much alone in this, it does point to a fairly simple conclusion, that the problems you are finding are subjective not objective.
which you say is just another unique way of writing
Of storytelling. Which it is. And by saying that I mean that this film is PERFECTLY ORDINARY AND CONTAINS ABSOLUTELY NO GRIEVIOUS OMMISSIONS. Which is why I sat and watched it and never had a single question - everything was answered for me by watching the film. I certainly never had any of the basic questions that you put forward in your initial post. I've tried to be nice about this, but your original post is basically just a declaration of your lack of comprehension, not of the film's incomprehensibility. I'll review it in a moment to point this out.
its different yes but i don't think it's that different that it can be regarded as completely unique compared to other movies i've seen so far.
Okay. 'movies i've seen so far'. Are you particularly versed in cinema? What would you say was the most obscure and arty film you've ever seen? I know somebody who flippantly observes that the world is full of people who claim to be cinephiles, but you can't really claim to love or know about film unless you've seen at least one film about a mongolian goatherd (I've not seen any, incidentally). The point he's making is that it's very easy to say 'I've watched a lot of movies', but that means nothing if you've never watched any good movies in your life. Reading a million airport bestsellers doesn't entitle a person to claim that the work of Dostoevsky make no sense simply because it doesn't conform to the poor standards to which they're acclimated.
My point being: are you REALLY that well-versed in cinema? I am actually staggered that you have difficulties with this film, because it really ISN'T that hard to understand. Your response to this is to criticise the film and by implication people like me who found no difficulty with it - and I can't help but find that insulting, because by implication you're cleverer than me and everybody else. I know this is not your intention, but if you stick to the idea that you're right and this film is bad, then people like me are wrong and therefore unintelligent. You really need to consider the implications of your contention - because I promise you, while I'm no genius, I'm certainly no fool either.
it mainly lacked story detail for me.
Do you not see what a death-sentence this is for your entire argument?
There is an entire universe of narrative, of which you are apparently unaware, where this sort of thing is not only standard, but at the simple end of things.
You know, there are people in this world who complain that a film like 'Highlander' makes no sense or is confusing, simply because they're not good with flashbacks. How sympathetic would you be to an opinion like that? Wouldn't it be obvious to you that a viewer was criticising the film because they didn't get it? If so, why do you discount the possibility that you might be just as fallible as everybody else, given that you are standing quite alone in your critique of this film.
i don't understand why you say that there's isn't anyone experiencing the same difficulties as i do. if you read the negative reviews of this movie on this board you probably find someone that does.
PROBABLY!
Find them, quote them to me. Now, there may indeed be somebody as you say - but you can't just say they're PROBABLY there if you want to be taken seriously, you have to show me they're there. Go on, have a look. If you can refer me to them, then your point is sustained - if you can't, your point is empty. At present you're just saying things without substantiating them, and that has no value whatever.
it's highly unlikely that i am the only one. that's a better assumption than the one you made.
That would actually be true - except I didn't make that 'assumption'. I was talking about the message board, which I've followed for about five years. Plenty of people have similar questions to yours - but I've only ever seen YOU decid -
fatpie42 — 11 years ago(June 30, 2014 12:53 PM)
I didn't feel this film contained any narrative gaps for an audience that were paying attention
How about realistic characters? I couldn't relate to anybody after he is picked up by the partisans. The female character is a pixie dream girl. -
Razzbar — 11 years ago(June 23, 2014 05:08 PM)
If you didn't like it, nobody can argue with it. You know what you like and don't like. However, your liking the movie has nothing to do with other people liking it.
The fact that you didn't understand the significance of the "Hitler doll" indicates that you have very little understanding or empathy with the people in the movie.
The confusion was intentional. That's what war is like! I thought it was brilliant how all the chaos was depicted, and the way the village was being raped by the Nazis, and then somehow, at some point, it falls into partisan hands.
There WAS a story.
I didn't like everything about it. The beginning was sluggish and some of the acting was forced. But the last 10 minutes (20 minutes? Hour?) was just mind blowing to me, with the chaos and insanity getting more and more intense until
And that photograph of the woman holding the baby Oh, my God. FYI, that was Hitler and his mother in that photograph. I still don't know what that's supposed to mean, but in a lot of art, "what does it mean" is entirely up to the viewer, and included possibly to help the writer himself try and understand. -
Elder_Yautija — 14 years ago(November 12, 2011 03:34 PM)
Sorry, I didn't know that a movie isn't allowed to be confusing otherwise it's a bad one. Also, if you got confused, then you should stick to Hollywood productions. "2001 - A Space Odyssey", now THAT'S CONFUSING. Wanna tell me it's a bad movie too? I heard there's a new Harry Potter movie coming out, I suggest you watch that and drop the russians.
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cozzix — 12 years ago(June 16, 2013 09:14 PM)
I think an 8.2 is a little absurd as well, but mainly due to the directing. though the reason why they never show the germans being captured is fairly obvious, because the story is revolving around the events of one boy; there's no second character they follow. If the boy wasn't there to see it, they can't show it, or else it will break the direction of how the film is suppose to progress.
Also, the dude never said you can only appreciate Hollywood movies, he just said the way movies are made in Russia go on a completely different level than the mainstream we are usually exposed to. How you came to that conclusion is on you -
fatpie42 — 11 years ago(June 30, 2014 12:52 PM)
The movie already has a story. It's just not very well told.
It's like saying "why does a car need wheels". Chances are that if the car is moving, it probably already has wheels. If it's moving erratically that's most likely because it has poor wheels or poor tyres, rather than because it's moving in a unique artistic way. -
krisdas1 — 13 years ago(January 08, 2013 11:01 AM)
Most stupidest WW2 movie i have ever seen. i give it a 2. Russia has lost more men than any other country and have won most imp battles in the ww2 and yet they depict themselves in a amateurish way in this movie.
Very poor performances by the lead characters.. -
caaalebbb — 14 years ago(January 07, 2012 08:28 AM)
The chaotic, disjointed, and nonsensical chain of events is far more representative to the realism of the way a young boy (and even people in general) experience war. A boy's plunge into the horrors of war makes no sense, is chaotic, cruel, confusing, and so on, and that should translate onto any great work of realism trying to portray that. To derive an organized and simple-to-understand, and to adapt a traditional format of a plot would be dishonest to the film's overwhelming sense of realism.
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caaalebbb — 13 years ago(May 01, 2012 01:42 PM)
I was not being sarcastic. I apologize if I came off that way!
My point was that the 'plot' is aimless only insofar as it is devoid of a defined telos. This is what I meant by 'disjointed' which in retrospect was a poor choice of word. This lack of telos is perceived by the critical commentators above (to whom I was originally writing) to be the absence of plot.
If a plot was merely a sequence of events, then it would always be untrue when someone would criticize a movie for it's so-called 'lack of any plot.' So then lets sophisticate what we mean by 'plot' and consider a plot as an interrelated sequence of events. Now, to a degree, one can justify any sequence of events as being related whereby one sees one event as being related to the preceding and succeeding events which again reduces the entire notion of a 'plot' to nothing. So then what gives a plot existence? It is not simply a sequence of events, nor is it simply an interrelated sequence of events, but it is the central singular theme or idea that interrelates the sequence of events. I think this is almost always a type of telos. So it is the telos which gives a plot existence.
Consider the movie "Memento", which, because of it's non-traditional sequencing, is the perfect example of the point I'm making. (If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend it, and I would urge you to stop reading this because it might not make any sense if you haven't seen the movie and it might spoil the movie. If you have seen it and thought it's plot to be poor, then my example falls flat and I can only throw up my arms and say "Oh well, I can't win them all!") While every sequence in the movie is logically justifiable (as is everything in 'Come and See'), each new scene was disjointed from the last scene because the movie worked backwards, and thus, the viewer is whirling along with the anterograde amnesiac, in the chaos of a past-less existence, clinging on to the present moment, with no concept of what has happened in the preceding moments, for the present moment is all that exists for our protagonist. Yet, although each scene is disjointed from the moment before it, although the viewer has no conception of the past, but only of the future, it would never be said of the movie that 'it has no plot', because (even if the viewer isn't fully aware of the reasoning of their intuition) it is not the sequence of events which gives existence to a plot, but it is the telos which unites the sequence of events. In Memento, the film's telos is the beginning of the story (which is tricky for me to cleanly express because the 'telos' would not normally be associated with the beginning, but this little catch is actually what ultimately makes the plot so unconventional).
Now in the case of "Come and See," the telos is precisely the lack of telos. While each event is connected to the preceding, the sequence of events and that which connects the respective events is disjointed in relation to the telos, precisely because a telos does not exist. For truly, what 'telos', what ultimate aim can a little boy caught in such a horrid war see? To a little boy, our protagonist, there is no sense in these horrid occurrences; what must drive him is his survival, his immediate conscious, that which is here and now. So, similar to the child's point of view, each event or scene is connected only to the last with no uniting or overarching telos. Thus the absence of any type of underlying telos is the telos, and a result, it is precisely what gives the plot it's existence.
I meant no sarcasm before.