Roads to Koktebel (2003)

The greatest movie ever made..!

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

This film is slow, but slow like Herzog: each scene is visually fascinating and punctuated by a sense of dread that leads to real narrative suspense. I could not keep my eyes off the screen. The sense of reality in the rural Russian small towns is matched by a fresh magic realism that seems plausible while at the same time, as it should be, magical. Figures appear as if from fairy tales: a good witch, an ogre who turns out to be a benevolent troll. The film also captures the perspective of a child who insists on promises kept regardless of their impossibility and who takes refuge in self-created ritual. I will watch this many times.

Mild spoilers.Two figures, Dad and son, wending their way across the vast Russian hinterland is a powerful metaphor for the journey one makes during one's lifetime. The characters like the landscape, are simple, unpolished and real. Even the most exacting of directors would find little to complain of from the efforts of the uniformly able cast; unforced and memorable. The assortment of folk they meet along the way (eccentrics of one kind or another), do enough to nudge the film on; the batty, vodka-sodden character in need of a new roof offering the best contribution in my view (and effects the biggest impact of all upon their journey).I would single out for special praise, the young lad (played by Gleb Puskepalis). For me, he succeeds in showing the premature transition his circumstances force him to make, from youthful innocence to adulthood; struggling with all that is brutal in our world: bereavement, betrayal, uncertainty, violence, isolation, hunger, poverty... The film offers us no reassurance that he has succeeded in coming to terms with or overcoming any of the above. Instead we learn that he is no longer the same boy; the boy obediently walking with a rucksack-eye-view behind his father, or the boy who earlier trustingly sat, accepting good humoured fatherly assistance in dealing with a worm in an apple.The film, for me, can best be summed up by one of the simple meals partaken of by father and son: crude, straightforward and honest.

This is doing the Russian Tourist Board no favors at all, portraying as it does a seemingly endless drab landscape punctuated by decaying buildings both domestic and commercial and populated by equally drab eccentrics. To call it slow-paced would be to call sloths sprinters but that is not necessarily a deficit. 90 per cent of the shots begin as Extra Wide taking in all the colorless terrain and occasionally introducing movement via people and, even more occasionally, traffic. Although shot in color the landscape remains resolutely grey. There's also a penchant for holding a shot for long moments after the characters have exited and in this it resembles Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Nevertheless we find ourselves watching the father and son as they make their very slow way to the Crimea having, we are told, started from Moscow. Along the way we learn, or discover, that the father is a recovering alcoholic and that the Koktebel to which he is taking his son no longer exists, at least not under that name, a metaphor for lives that must change or disappear. The film has to be carried by the two principals but there is decent support from a railway worker, a teenage girl, a householder and a doctor with no patients. It's not going to make a fortune but films like this deserve to be seen as a counterpoint to the formulaic.

Good cinematography will only take you so far. However, amazing cinematography will carry your film by itself. And that's just the start...Acting is well above average, and the writing, although somewhat resembling the "Russian soul" in its mystique and lack of structure, nevertheless fulfills its duty: to get to the hearts of those who for some unknown reason would not find themselves enchanted by the visuals alone...