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pb-baker
Reviews
Enemy Lines (2020)
A Curate's Egg
Parts of this low budget movie are good value: reasonably exciting action scenes, realistic language details (Germans speaking German, Poles speaking Polish, etc., rather than everyone speaking English with dodgy accents), historically accurate weaponry, good sets.
But the script is a bit clumsy, and there are too many gauche attempts to throw in war movie cliches for no particular good reason. Poor quality CDG with the boats and planes looking like a Gerry Anderson puppet show. The lazy wardrobe is irritating: it's a war movie, so at least do the research and get the uniform details right! And what's a can of Spam doing in a Polish cottage in occupied Europe?
The plot was promising, but it needed taking up by a bigger production company, with bigger names and a bigger budget. If this was taken up and remade properly I would watch it again.
Ya uchitel (2016)
A symbolic tale of conflict
A much better film than I was expecting, one of the better efforts from modern Russian cinema relating experience of the war. It's not an action movie, so people who enjoy lots of shooting, explosions and battle scenes will be disappointed. It is a strongly symbolic film, with the key character being a village teacher under Nazi occupation. As a key cog in the machinery of re-education, he is torn between his love of Pushkin, the poetic soul of Russia, and the new National Socialist curriculum that he is required to deliver. An excellent acting performance portraying a man who is physically, morally and emotionally not your classic hero, and who is a realistically complex character faced with conflicting issues of loyalty, survival, patriotism and love. The photography is very good, with key scenes relying on lots of light and shadow to symbolise the opposing forces within. As a portrayal of life under occupation, it works as well as some of the better Western European films that deal with the subject, and does not rely on cardboard cut out characters who have to make the simple choice of collaboration or resistance. As the film shows, it's a lot more difficult than that.