Come and See (1985)

The Inner Demon is real!

The ending is very clever. Innocence is always fleeting. All lives indelibly shaped by their circumstances. Cause and effect. Like Hitler, like Koyla. The final cruel irony. July 8, 2008

Faces! Late masterpiece of Soviet cinema

Brilliant! Grotesque, nightmarish, hypnotic. Russian artists have been possessed of a genius for this sort of Grand Guignol. And the close-ups of the faces ...! The expressions of the young male and female leads are unforgettable. Portraits of grief, madness, disbelief, shattered psyches. War. Gotta love it. July 6, 2008

USA NEEDS TO SEE THIS MOVIE: WHAT IS WAR, WHY WAR IS ALWAYS IMMORAL, WAR IS HELL

War harms children and other living things.

This is the most honest and exacting movie about war and its direct effects on civilians ever made.

Forget Saving Private Ryan. This movie shows war. Period.

This movie shows why Pope John Paul II declared modern warfare always immoral and unjustifiable and evil. This is why we must stop now in Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia and everywhere else we wage our dirty wars.

The USA has never experienced warfare. The people of the USA have never been under attack; we have no idea. And so we merrily go attacking other peoples and making life hell for them. We do not know. Father, forgive us the evil we do. We do not know.

See this film. Come and See. And so we will know. And so we will pray we can stop ourselves before we kill some more. Stop our unending, persistent war against other lands.

Never more war. Beat our swords into plows. Feed the hungry refugees our wars create, the orphans we leave without hope.

See this film and know, and act for A Persistent Peace: One Man's Struggle for a Nonviolent World.

Come and see. June 25, 2008

raw power

This is one of the most wild piece of film making you're likely to see on the subject of WWII. Imagine Schindlers List, Fellini's Roma and GUMMO, yes GUMMO tossed in a cinematic blender with David Lynch in command of the soundtrack. The film follows two traumatic life changing days in the life of a young boy eager to join the army and shoot some Nazis. Leaving his crying mother he quickly gets lost in the woods and a shell hits near him leaving him deaf cuing in a high pitched whine (voices are faint echoes) and some creepy ominous music that doesn't let up. From here on out the movie is one never ending nightmare of surreal imagery that is not for one second unbelievable. Paratroopers tangled in the tops of trees, women and children riddled with bullet holes stacked in a high neat pile like firewood, a Hitler scarecrow, the closeup eye of a dying cow, a barn packed full of people burning to the ground, Nazis drunk and having the time of their life raping and pillaging, the movie rarely lets up. There is one scene of sheer reckless endangerment as a heavy caliber machine gun fires real bullets across a field pumping bullets into a cow with an actor standing a couple of inches from the entry wounds!

Elem Klimov who lived in Russia during the war knowing this was his final cinematic statement has not made a traditional war movie, its an imprint of images that have long haunted his mind. A smiling Nazi looking back as a corpse lays on a motorcycle spinning in endless circles, an old woman laying on a bed in the smoldering ruins of a town, a pretty woman eating a lobster while slaughter goes on all around, and anything else I mentioned in this review. There are times remembering back on the film it feels as if you've stepped inside the skull of a ghost. There really is no other way to review this other than repeat what you saw, there was no other way to make a movie like this unless the director repeated what he has seen.

This really is one of the most criminally underrated war films of all time and was certainly ripped off/copied more than once. Luckily through word of mouth and a few write ups this movie has went from a small VHS run to two on DVD. It certainly deserves a place beside the other war classics, which are mostly artfully disguised action flicks. Give it a go and force everyone you know to watch it.


March 10, 2008

Different but good.

Russian film making is a study unto it's self. This movie deals with a time period in which the German Army controls a large part of the Ukraine. The hero, a young boy, so wants to take bart in the fight against the Hitlerites he digs in a old battlefield to get a rifle. When his partizan band leaves him and a young girl behind they are cut off by a German attack and they flee, first to the boys old village. We see the whole village lying dead behind a hut, not seen by the boy.

The rest of the story plays out in a fashion that will puzzle western veiwers, but is typical of the Soviet Film industry.

An excellent story, great filmwork, and beautiful images. For a student of history or of film making I would highly reccomend this film. If you are new to the Russian view of WWII, you are in for something completely different. You may enjoy it, you may hate it, but you won't look at WWII movies ever the same again. March 5, 2008

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