Archives for posts with tag: foreign film
The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:
30 Reviews in 30 Days
DAY SIX
Writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan tells the story of Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov), a rustic mechanic whose family property has been seized through eminent domain so that crooked town boss Vadim (Roman Madyanov) can use it to build a “palace”. Coming from Moscow to help Kolya is lawyer and old army buddy Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), who, in addition to offering counsel, also happens to be screwing his friend’s wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) on the side. Dmitriy’s idea is to blackmail the mayor, but Vadim, prepared to use violence to have his way, proves to be more than a worthy adversary. Meanwhile, Kolya’s son Romka (Sergey Pokhodaev) bears a bitter grudge against stepmother Lilya, so that the household seems doomed to unhappiness even if the family home is saved. Leviathan is a somewhat exotic treat in its portrait of rural Russian life – an experience seldom offered to American filmgoers – but audiences accustomed to the breakneck pacing and flash of Hollywood might be frustrated by this import’s deliberate lurch and its unresolved ambiguity.
4.5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Leviathan is:
5. Anti-police. Officers are assumed to be on the take.
4. Drug-ambivalent. Characters casually smoke and drink. Fellows come together in commiseration, celebration, or any occasion over vodka. It leads to poorly considered behavior, however, and Kolya warns his son against drinking beer with friends.
3. Anti-marriage. Matrimony, it would seem, makes Russian women miserable. Lilya is driven into another man’s arms, while her friend Anzhela (Anna Ukolova) fantasizes about leaving her husband and running away to America. Marriage, furthermore, shortens a woman’s lifespan. Stepanych (Sergey Bachurskiy), for instance, is said to have outlived two wives.
2. Anti-Christian. “I am a Christian, that’s my culture and my belief,” Zvyagintsev has said. His film, however, gives little evidence of this in its parallel characterization of a corrupt politician and an Orthodox priest. Religious platitudes are juxtaposed with slop being fed to swine.
1. Anti-Putin. Zvyagintsev has acknowledged that Leviathan was inspired by the story of a Colorado man, Marvin John Heemeyer. Not being informed of this fact, however, western media-brainwashed art house audiences are left to assume that Leviathan’s tale of a sleazy Christian bureaucrat’s oppression of an everyman is representative of Vladimir Putin’s theocratic heterofascist neo-Soviet Russia. A portrait of Putin hangs on the wall behind Vadim’s desk just to make the insinuation of microcosm explicit. In another scene, buddies peruse a collection of framed pictures of Soviet leaders they intend to use for target practice, with one of them suggesting that he would like to have a shot at the current crop of elected officials. The implication is an unflattering continuity between the dehumanization of the U.S.S.R. and Putin’s Russia.
With Zvyagintsev having made a name for himself with 2011’s Elena as a rising figure in international cinema, Russia’s Ministry of Culture put up more than a third of the money to make Leviathan; but Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky was understandably scandalized by the finished product, incensed that Zvyagintsev would dare to “spit on” the Putin government with his “anti-Russian” film, which also had to be censored in its home country due to the profane screenplay. “An Incisive Take on Russia Even Putin Couldn’t Ignore,” proclaims a useful idiot writing for The Atlantic, further describing the film as “a rare example of a director’s prestige prevailing over a fiercely controlling propaganda machine.”
One hardly needs wonder why Leviathan was picked up for theatrical and home video distribution in the United States and so enthusiastically touted by Sony Pictures Classics (and, in Spain, by the aptly monikered Golem Distribucion). Sony Pictures Entertainment is headed by Michael Lynton, who, in addition to being a Jew, is a member of the Zio-globalist-warpigging Council on Foreign Relations. Sony Pictures Classics DVDs and Blu-ray discs have frequently paired the trailers for Leviathan and Red Army, another Sony product serving Zionist aims with regard to Russia, before the feature presentations.
This writer’s father took him to see the Japanese import Twilight of the Cockroaches (1987) during its 1989 American theatrical run – at the now-defunct Fine Arts Theatre in Mission, Kansas, if memory serves. Directed by Hiroaki Yoshida, whose only other credit at the helm of a film is the Jeff Fahey thriller Iron Maze (1991), Twilight of the Cockroaches is but one of unnumbered oddities spawned by the Japanese cinema during the 1980s; and one suspects that the principal reason it got picked up for stateside distribution was its combination of live action and animation, a pairing that had demonstrated its power to charm audiences with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988).
The plot concerns a colony of pampered cockroaches who are permitted to live and thrive in the apartment of the dissipated and enigmatic Mr. Saito (Kaoru Kobayashi), who seems to spend most of his time in a stupor. The roaches’ peaceful existence is upset, however, when Saito gets a girlfriend (Setsuko Karasuma) who understandably insists on ridding his place of its swarms of invertebrate squatters. Not too many movies muster the gumption to cast six-legged vermin as sympathetic protagonists in such a situation, but Twilight of the Cockroaches does exactly that and succeeds largely by anthropomorphizing the animated pests, complete with human faces, facial hair on the men, and even cleavage on the females of the species.
What makes the film doubly strange and noteworthy is that the roaches apparently represent Jews, much of the story suggesting a “Holocaust” allegory. The English-language script, credited to a Steve Kramer, even uses the term “genocide” to describe humanity’s treatment of its innocent, toilet-tripping neighbors of order Blattodea. “With its subtle allusions to Hiroshima and Dachau,” the VHS box quotes The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carrie Rickey, “this comedy has unexpected resonance. You will think twice before getting out that can of Blockade.” (Ms. Rickey is presumably unaware that even mainstream “historians” of the “Holocaust” no longer support the Nuremberg Tribunal lies about the Dachau facilities housing homicidal gas chambers disguised as showers.)
The cockroaches comprise a “tribe” suffered in the home of “host” Mr. Saito, who is described as being diverted or entertained by them, much as Jews in America distract the host with Hollywood. Then, too, they see themselves as having a special racial destiny, and they also worship a toy rabbit they know as “Torah”. Nothing in the English-dubbed soundtrack suggests Jewish vocal mannerisms, but some of the older and more important roaches do exhibit large and somewhat hook-shaped noses. The penchant of many of the roaches for spending their nights frolicking in the toilet could also suggest the subversive traits of Jews who specialize in pornography and the propagation of other degeneracies.
Seeing this movie as a child, this writer was wowed by the sheer weirdness of it, Europeans having been conditioned for decades to adore the foreign and the bizarre as a virtue. Revisited now, it is hardly a classic. Twilight of the Cockroaches does, however, furnish a useful illustration of how and why such infestation occurs. The “host”, Mr. Saito, the film eventually reveals, has been abandoned by his family, and only after the dissolution of this essential unit has he fallen into complacency and toleration of vermin and allowed them scavenge on his goods, the spoils of his own productivity. The destruction of the family is the crucial and most fundamental component of Jewish subversion of a nation; without that the Jewish cockroach is in peril, and it is only after another woman enters Mr. Saito’s life and inspires within him a yearning for new happiness in domesticity that he awakens to the filth and asserts his masculine sovereignty over his realm.
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