Salon.com > Our Picks http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 06:12:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Blockbuster fatigue? A summer alt-movie guide http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/blockbuster_fatigue_a_summer_alt_movie_guide/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/blockbuster_fatigue_a_summer_alt_movie_guide/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 20:50:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12929104 It may feel to you as if the summer moviegoing season has only just begun and many months of popcorn-munching delight lie ahead. That's both true and not true. There's a degree of pseudo-Calvinist predestination about the whole thing this year that's unusual even by the standards of Hollywood, where conventional wisdom and guesswork-in-advance count for actual knowledge.

I mean, nobody knows for sure how much money the 1980s big-hair musical "Rock of Ages" will gross or whether "The Dark Knight Rises" will beat out "The Avengers" as the top box-office hit of the year. (My answers: Not enough to be a huge hit, and no.) But pretty much any idiot with a computer -- me, for instance -- can look at the calendar and figure out what the biggest hits of the summer will be. As I just mentioned, the summer's No. 1 movie, in all probability, has already been released. (I'll save the trollery about how it wasn't really all that great for some other time.) After we get through "Prometheus" and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" in June, followed by "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "The Dark Knight Rises" in July, well, that's pretty much it. I exaggerate, but only a little -- these days, blockbuster season commences in early May and is over by the end of July, with August reserved as usual for offbeat genre movies, the fourth chapters of trilogies, and the continuing careers of Sylvester Stallone and Jackie Chan. (In other words, the good stuff.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/blockbuster_fatigue_a_summer_alt_movie_guide/feed/ 6 Pick of the week: Haunting, gorgeous “Oslo, August 31st” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/25/pick_of_the_week_haunting_gorgeous_oslo_august_31st/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/25/pick_of_the_week_haunting_gorgeous_oslo_august_31st/#comments Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12926333 "Oslo, August 31st" is, as the title suggests, an evocation of one day in the Norwegian capital, as experienced by a troubled young man who's facing the end of summer and the end of his youth. It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward. While much of international art cinema can seem overly talky or conceptually alien to American viewers, this second feature film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is a dynamic, even breathtaking visual experience without much dialogue or any philosophical heavy lifting, following the bony, handsome, exceedingly vulnerable Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) through coffee shops, nightclubs and bodies of water, en route to an ambiguous final destination.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/25/pick_of_the_week_haunting_gorgeous_oslo_august_31st/feed/ 5 “Moonrise Kingdom”: Wes Anderson’s mid-’60s love story http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/moonrise_kingdom_wes_andersons_mid_60s_love_story/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/moonrise_kingdom_wes_andersons_mid_60s_love_story/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 19:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12926159 All the details of Wes Anderson's rapturous and hilarious mid-1960s New England summer romance "Moonrise Kingdom," taken one at a time, are plausible. Indeed they are more than plausible; they're perfect, from the fitted uniforms and yellow canvas tents of the troop of "Khaki Scouts" headed by cigarette-smoking Edward Norton to the achingly picturesque island home where the brood of children belonging to Bill Murray and Frances McDormand sit around listening to the Leonard Bernstein recording of "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra." (I'm not going to bother questioning whether that record existed in 1965; some production intern probably spent half a day tracking down its history.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/moonrise_kingdom_wes_andersons_mid_60s_love_story/feed/ 11 Pick of the week: A class-war thriller from Putin’s Russia http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/pick_of_the_week_a_class_war_thriller_from_putins_russia/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/pick_of_the_week_a_class_war_thriller_from_putins_russia/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12922332 As readers of Chekhov and Gogol and Dostoyevsky are well aware, the pervasive melancholy of Russian culture long predates the Soviet era, and there was no reason to believe that the end of communism would lift the gloom. Some Western reviewers have described "Elena," the mesmerizing new family drama from the brilliant Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev, as an updated film noir. That may be a workable shorthand, in that "Elena" is about an ordinary person who persuades herself to commit a terrible crime, with uncertain consequences. But it attaches the movie to the wrong heritage and the wrong set of expectations. "Elena" is a moral drama, all right, but one pitched in a dark and ambiguous Russian register reminiscent of a 19th-century short story or a fairy tale, with no clear lesson delivered at the end.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/18/pick_of_the_week_a_class_war_thriller_from_putins_russia/feed/ 0 Pick of the week: Childhood adventure from a Japanese master http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/pick_of_the_week_childhood_adventure_from_a_japanese_master/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/pick_of_the_week_childhood_adventure_from_a_japanese_master/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12918567 "I Wish" is an old-fashioned kind of movie about a subject that might sound, at first, both worn-out and a little retrograde: the dislocating and disorienting effects of a family breakup. It's also a movie whose principal actors and characters are children, that tries to view the world from a child's point of view -- and that's an enterprise so perilous, so prone to easy gags, cheap tears and nauseating sentimentality, that hardly anyone ever gets it right. But "I Wish" is a wonderful adventure film that's no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and intelligence sneak up on you. Thoroughly accessible and rewarding, it might finally mark the mainstream breakthrough (relatively speaking) of Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of the finest living Japanese directors. I should add that "I Wish" is that rarest of fauna in the international art-house market, a genuine family movie that will charm both adults and children, albeit for somewhat different reasons. If your kids have the patience for a picture with subtitles where nothing explodes, don't hesitate to bring them. (There's no sex or violence.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/11/pick_of_the_week_childhood_adventure_from_a_japanese_master/feed/ 6 Johnny Depp’s delirious “Dark Shadows” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/johnny_depps_delirious_dark_shadows/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/johnny_depps_delirious_dark_shadows/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12917547 Early in Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows," Victoria Winters, the proper-looking aspiring governess played by lovely young Australian actress Bella Heathcote, arrives at the gates of Collinwood, a decaying family mansion in rural Maine. (She's gotten there by riding Amtrak, while we listen to "Nights in White Satin," which is somehow exactly right.) Vicky, whose real name is something else entirely, has always been a strange girl who sees things, and who is dramatically out of step with the pot-smoking, rock 'n' roll youth culture of today (and by today I mean 1972). A strange force has drawn her hither! Could it be the bizarre charisma of the undead monstrosity who (as we already know) lies entombed and enchained, almost beneath her feet? As the door to Collinwood creaks open revealing the idiot caretaker (Jackie Earle Haley, who is priceless), we glimpse a powerful, almost Proustian totem leaning against the front porch: A Schwinn kids' bicycle, with a banana seat. I had already suspected I was going to love "Dark Shadows," even before that moment. But that's when I knew it for sure.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/johnny_depps_delirious_dark_shadows/feed/ 40 Bobcat Goldthwait: Let’s kill all the mean people! http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/bobcat_goldthwait_lets_kill_all_the_mean_people/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/bobcat_goldthwait_lets_kill_all_the_mean_people/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 23:40:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12916971 Bobcat Goldthwait is something like the id underbelly of Michael Moore, with every pretense of journalistic objectivity and reasonableness stripped away. While Moore has a background as a reporter and editor, Goldthwait has always been an entertainer, who began doing stand-up comedy as a teenager in the late 1970s. Both guys present as rumpled, middle-aged heartland Americans with blue-collar roots -- Goldthwait is from Syracuse, N.Y., where his dad was a sheet-metal worker -- who are angry about the debasement of political life and public dialogue in their beloved country.

But I feel pretty confident that even Moore would not make a movie about a laid-off worker who hits the road with a runaway teenage girl and goes on a killing spree aimed at right-wing talk-show hosts, obnoxious reality-TV subjects and people who talk on the phone in movie theaters. "God Bless America" is Goldthwait's fourth film as a writer-director -- I'm going clear back to "Shakes the Clown" in 1991, often described as the "'Citizen Kane' of alcoholic-clown movies" -- and it's definitely his most coherent and most consistently hilarious, perhaps because its canvas is so large and the world it depicts so insane. It plays a little like "Network" mixed with Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" mixed with "Natural Born Killers," and in the very first scene its main character, the depressed, divorced and soon-to-be unemployed Frank (Joel Murray), does something completely unforgivable.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/bobcat_goldthwait_lets_kill_all_the_mean_people/feed/ 22 Gorgeous saga, global crisis http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/gorgeous_saga_global_crisis/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/gorgeous_saga_global_crisis/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12915326 Here's the short version of humanity's relationship with water, as delivered by hydrologist Jay Famiglietti in Jessica Yu's compelling and often gorgeous documentary "Last Call at the Oasis": "We're screwed." Yes, we should all install low-flush toilets and plant gardens that require less watering, but conservation is simply insufficient to cope with a global fresh-water crisis that involves many interlocking factors: overpopulation and overdevelopment, depletion of groundwater, climate change, and widespread contamination.

Solving the human race's worsening water problem requires overcoming what Yu's film terms the "Hydro-Illogical Cycle," which is defined by the belief that because most of the Earth's surface is covered in wet stuff, there's no problem. As one horrified woman proclaims in a hilarious segment that explores the possibility of marketing recycled and purified sewage water (to be sold under the brand name Porcelain Springs), "This says to me that there's some shortage I don't know about. When they show those photographs from space, there's a lot of water!"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/gorgeous_saga_global_crisis/feed/ 32 Pick of the week: An early-’60s hipster time capsule http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/pick_of_the_week_an_early_60s_hipster_time_capsule/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/pick_of_the_week_an_early_60s_hipster_time_capsule/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12914461 A time capsule loaded with smack from the bohemian underbelly of JFK-era America, Shirley Clarke's 1961 film "The Connection" is an illustration of how much things change, and how much they stay the same. I'd be stretching to call "The Connection" a great film -- it's mannered and edgy, in a way that's partly deliberate but also distinctive to its period -- but it's an important one in cultural and historic terms, despite being largely unknown. Watching this ensemble drama about a multiracial group of New York jazz musicians and beat philosophers in a run-down apartment, waiting for their drug dealer to show up, is like traveling back 50 years in time, only to encounter the same people you might meet on the street today (at least, in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, San Francisco, Austin and so on). At one point, the characters even debate the illusory distinctions between "hipsters" and "squares."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/04/pick_of_the_week_an_early_60s_hipster_time_capsule/feed/ 4 “Sound of My Voice”: A tense sci-fi puzzler http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/sound_of_my_voice_a_tense_sci_fi_puzzler/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/sound_of_my_voice_a_tense_sci_fi_puzzler/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911337 David Lynch likes to talk about "movies that make you dream," and he's made his share of them. (Whether any sane people wanted to share the dream that was "Inland Empire" is another question.) I've always preferred a more prosaic phrase: Movies that mess with your mind, using another verb in place of "mess." My personal view is that even when cinema apparently depicts the most quotidian reality, it poses a sort of epistemological challenge: How do we tell the difference between image and narrative and reality, when all we ever have to work with are mental constructions of those things anyway? There are the crowds who (supposedly) ducked in terror while watching the Lumière brothers' 1895 film of a train arriving at La Ciotat, and there are people who have Internet arguments about what "really happened" in "Memento" or "Mulholland Drive." Both are caught on the horns of the same dilemma.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/sound_of_my_voice_a_tense_sci_fi_puzzler/feed/ 22 “Whores’ Glory”: A riveting, humane prostitution documentary http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/whores_glory_a_riveting_humane_prostitution_documentary/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/whores_glory_a_riveting_humane_prostitution_documentary/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:42:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12910555 Prostitution isn't just the world's oldest profession. It's also a longtime focus of cultural obsession, across many historical periods and on every continent, from the poetry of Catullus to the woodblock prints of 19th-century Japan. There's such a long history of male artists, writers and filmmakers who depict prostitution in erotic, romantic and sentimental terms that it's only natural to approach Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger's "Whores' Glory" with suspicion. Indeed, in the film's opening scene, Glawogger's camera directly engages the lurid allure of sex work, showing a group of scantily clad young women in a Bangkok brothel called the Fish Tank as they try to attract clients: Pretending to make out with each other, pressing their breasts and buttocks against the window, using a laser pointer to pick out likely-looking men on the street. But those are just the opening moments of a long journey, a daring, novelistic and unforgettable account of the real lives of female prostitutes in three very different countries and social contexts.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/whores_glory_a_riveting_humane_prostitution_documentary/feed/ 39 Pick of the week: The glorious pain of young love http://www.salon.com/2012/04/20/pick_of_the_week_the_glorious_pain_of_young_love/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/20/pick_of_the_week_the_glorious_pain_of_young_love/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12893121 Language is very little help in describing "Goodbye First Love," the third feature from 31-year-old Mia Hansen-Løve (who is a Parisian born and raised, despite the Scandinavian name). This is a rigorously crafted film steeped in the French tradition, but it's meant to be a sensual and emotional experience, not a verbal or analytical one. Most of all, it’s a spectacular eyeful, that makes wonderful use of locations in Paris and the French countryside, and even better uses of the faces and bodies of its youthful and beautiful leads, Lola Créton and Sebastian Urzendowsky, who seem to have leapt straight to the screen from the verses of Rimbaud, loins and minds aflame.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/20/pick_of_the_week_the_glorious_pain_of_young_love/feed/ 3 “Late Bloomers”: Can 60-plus sex work on-screen? http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/late_bloomers_can_60_plus_sex_work_on_screen/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/late_bloomers_can_60_plus_sex_work_on_screen/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:10:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12865491 One of the oldest and most reliable truisms in show business holds that older people -- or people of any age -- will watch a love story about young people, but younger people will rarely or never watch a love story about old people. In other words, Shakespeare knew what he was doing in making Romeo and Juliet teenagers. (Among other things, he was accessing a tradition of doomed youthful romance that goes back at least as far as the Greeks.) I imagine this still holds true as a general rule. Certainly the principal audience for Julie Gavras' comedy "Late Bloomers," which stars Isabella Rossellini and William Hurt as a 60-ish London couple facing a series of marital and personal crises, is not going to overlap much with that of "The Hunger Games."

But Hollywood's ingrained tendency to ignore people over 50 or so -- with occasional, ultra-weepy exceptions, in the vein of "Cocoon" or "On Golden Pond" -- runs counter to various cultural and demographic realities, both absolute and relative. On one hand, the population is growing older, on average, in the United States and most other Western countries. On the other hand, accepted modes of behavior for older people are shifting. "Late Bloomers" is an entertaining diversion, mostly because Rossellini and Hurt are a pair of seasoned and graceful pros who know how to work every line and every gesture, and it's great to see them playing characters who are exactly their age. (In real life, Hurt is 62 and Rossellini 59.) But in a certain way the movie feels pretty old-fashioned: I'm not sure the social prejudices Gavras tries to mine for laughs here quite exist anymore.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/late_bloomers_can_60_plus_sex_work_on_screen/feed/ 39 Pick of the week: Delirious college comedy “Damsels in Distress” http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/pick_of_the_week_delirious_college_comedy_damsels_in_distress/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/pick_of_the_week_delirious_college_comedy_damsels_in_distress/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12801791 Violet Wister, the would-be campus reformer played by Greta Gerwig in Whit Stillman's weird, wacky and mostly wonderful college comedy "Damsels in Distress," arguably doesn't make much of a heroine. She's a veritable font of wisdom, which would be great except that nearly all of it is either factually wrong or extremely dubious. She heads a clique of undergraduate girls who seem alternately cruel and clueless. Her vaunted fashion sense mostly results in a fussy, awkward, ladylike demeanor that's something like a fifth-grader playing dress-up. But Violet has principles and lives by them, and for Stillman -- the chronicler of the Northeastern WASP elite's youthful eccentricities, who hasn't released a film since "The Last Days of Disco" in 1998 -- that matters more than anything else.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/06/pick_of_the_week_delirious_college_comedy_damsels_in_distress/feed/ 7 Pick of the week: A horny teen-girl manifesto http://www.salon.com/2012/03/30/pick_of_the_week_a_horny_teen_girl_manifesto/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/30/pick_of_the_week_a_horny_teen_girl_manifesto/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12758171 When we first meet Alma (Helene Bergsholm), the blond, almost angelic-looking teenage protagonist of the Norwegian comedy "Turn Me On, Dammit!," she's sprawled out on the kitchen floor of her mom's house with her hand down her pants, eagerly following the instructions of some phone-sex dude named Stig. You'll have to trust me that this is the setup for a memorably awkward sight gag and not a creepazoid NC-17 fantasy -- or, to put it another way, if Alma definitely has a dirty mind, the movie doesn't.

A dry, whimsical and finally sweet film that tries to turn the conventional teenage sex comedy inside out (at least in gender terms), this debut feature from writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen is one of those rare movies that gets better and more complicated the more you think about it. Watching the film is a thoroughly charming experience on its own terms, and then you're left puzzling over all kinds of thorny questions that fail to yield clear answers. Is female sexual desire fundamentally different from male desire? If so, why is that true? Is a teenage girl's sexuality, as one female friend put it, mainly a question of "playing around with her newfound power over the desires of others, rather than an expression of her own desire"?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/30/pick_of_the_week_a_horny_teen_girl_manifesto/feed/ 17 Why the MPAA doesn’t want your kid to see “Bully” http://www.salon.com/2012/03/28/why_the_mpaa_doesnt_want_your_kid_to_see_bully/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/28/why_the_mpaa_doesnt_want_your_kid_to_see_bully/#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12745311 With its unerring instinct for being on the wrong side of every major social and aesthetic issue, the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board has refused to budge off its R rating for "Bully," an earnest and moving documentary made for and about tormented preteens and teenagers. There's almost a perverse, Santorum-style integrity about the MPAA's staunch resistance. Its ratings board -- an anonymous group of Los Angeles-area parents -- stands tall for some unspecified and imaginary set of American values, in the face of a viral lobbying campaign that has enlisted Justin Bieber, Johnny Depp, Martha Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres and nearly 500,000 other people, and made an overnight media celebrity out of 17-year-old Katy Butler, a self-described victim of bullying who started the online petition.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/28/why_the_mpaa_doesnt_want_your_kid_to_see_bully/feed/ 85 Pick of the week: A dazzling martial-arts sensation http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/pick_of_the_week_a_dazzling_martial_arts_sensation/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/pick_of_the_week_a_dazzling_martial_arts_sensation/#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12723811 It probably isn't helpful for me to tell you that Gareth Evans' slam-bang Indonesian action flick "The Raid: Redemption" feels like a video game, because that's likely to inspire only two kinds of reactions. Either you'll roll your eyes and walk away in sadness and outrage at what our culture has become, or you'll sniff that no, it isn't anything like a video game, because it doesn't have multiple pathways and the viewer can't control the outcome or destination. Listen, just watch the doggone movie. "The Raid" is a witty, pulse-pounding instant midnight classic, an immediate sensation at the Sundance and Toronto festivals that should appeal to cinema buffs, action freaks and a pretty large mainstream audience besides. It offers some of the best Asian martial-arts choreography of recent years and an electric, claustrophobic puzzle-palace atmosphere that'll leave you wrung out and buzzed.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/pick_of_the_week_a_dazzling_martial_arts_sensation/feed/ 10 Pick of the week: The greatest French love story of all http://www.salon.com/2012/03/09/pick_of_the_week_the_greatest_french_love_story_of_all/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/09/pick_of_the_week_the_greatest_french_love_story_of_all/#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12654691 Until watching the magnificent new restoration of Marcel Carné's 1945 "Children of Paradise" a few days ago, I hadn't seen this legendary love story -- arguably the most famous and beloved film ever made in France -- in more than 20 years. I was a little apprehensive. "Children of Paradise" is a highly theatrical and conspicuously artificial production, a vibrant, teeming costume drama set on the "Boulevard of Crime" in early 19th-century Paris, and entirely shot on soundstages. It's exactly the kind of highfalutin, quasi-literary, star-centric, pseudo-Hollywood picture (often called the tradition de qualité) that Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and the rest of the French New Wave would so forcefully reject, 15 or 20 years later.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/09/pick_of_the_week_the_greatest_french_love_story_of_all/feed/ 32 Pick of the week: Another French film inspired by silent comedy http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/pick_of_the_week_another_french_film_inspired_by_silent_comedy/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/pick_of_the_week_another_french_film_inspired_by_silent_comedy/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12413221 Here's a question I've been asked several times during this Oscar season: Where in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks did "The Artist" come from? Whether people love it, like it or can barely tolerate it, the very existence of a French film made in half-loving, half-mocking tribute to the forgotten American dramas from the tail end of the silent era is distinctly puzzling. One answer to the question, of course, is to look at the previous work of soon-to-be-Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius and actor Jean Dujardin, who were well known in France for their tongue-in-cheek approach to classic cinema long before making "The Artist."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/pick_of_the_week_another_french_film_inspired_by_silent_comedy/feed/ 3 Pick of the week: Escape from Putin’s cult http://www.salon.com/2012/02/17/pick_of_the_week_escape_from_putins_cult/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/17/pick_of_the_week_escape_from_putins_cult/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12372901 Vladimir Putin, Russia's president turned prime minister (turned president again, probably) likes to say that his country has developed a "special democracy" or "sovereign democracy" in the 21st century. As an opposition politician observes in Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen's film "Putin's Kiss," that's a little like a store owner claiming to sell somewhat fresh fish. It either is or it isn't, and Russia's version of democracy doesn't pass the smell test. (Please note, foreign readers, that I'm not holding my own country's political system up as some shining example. But it's still true that I can write what I want to about Obama or Romney or anybody else without being beaten half to death.)

For anyone eager to understand Russia's depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, "Putin's Kiss" is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can't explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians -- pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin -- she captures some essential drama in the nation's recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin's site is here.)

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