RealLeo
Joined May 2005
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Reviews15
RealLeo's rating
This short animated film is a stylish, yet distorted presentation of what happened at the infamous "24 Hours of Le Mans" race of 1955.
The film starts well enough, but what threw my suspension of disbelief off was that in the film it had been dark for quite a while before The Thing That Makes This Race Infamous happens. Which in real life happened on 11th June 1955 at 6:26pm, three and a half hours before sunset, in full daylight. After this intentional distortion it was unfortunately impossible for me to concentrate on the actual story anymore. If they intentionally distort this simple fact, why would I care of the rest of it?
Could be worse, of course. At least they didn't add sad rain.
As it is, I'm still giving the film an average grade, a 5 that is. Without the distortion, it could easily have earned a 7 or 8 from me. Difficult to tell exactly after the magic was broken.
The film starts well enough, but what threw my suspension of disbelief off was that in the film it had been dark for quite a while before The Thing That Makes This Race Infamous happens. Which in real life happened on 11th June 1955 at 6:26pm, three and a half hours before sunset, in full daylight. After this intentional distortion it was unfortunately impossible for me to concentrate on the actual story anymore. If they intentionally distort this simple fact, why would I care of the rest of it?
Could be worse, of course. At least they didn't add sad rain.
As it is, I'm still giving the film an average grade, a 5 that is. Without the distortion, it could easily have earned a 7 or 8 from me. Difficult to tell exactly after the magic was broken.
Ikitie (The Eternal Road) is a morbid film of a man's attempts to get back home, set against the backdrop of the untold story about 10,000 people who voluntarily moved from North America to the Soviet Union to build a worker's paradise, but who eventually learned the true face of Stalin's U.S.S.R.
It is 1931, and the Great Depression is on. Jussi Ketola has recently moved back to Finland from the United States with his family. He has bought a farm, and tends pretty much to himself. All is good and well until right wing extremists, who claim Jussi to be a communist, decide to practice their favourite pastime, namely kidnapping Jussi, driving him a few hundred kilometers to the Soviet border zone, then shooting him (though it might sound odd, these things actually happened in Finland during that tumultuous time). Except that they botch the shooting part and Jussi, heavily wounded, barely escapes across the border to the U.S.S.R.
When Jussi wakes up in a hospital in the Soviet Union, he is greeted by a Finnish police working for the Soviets who, instead of letting Jussi go home, summarily accuse him of being a spy. Unable to escape, Jussi is sent out to a collective farm. This kolkhoz has been built by Americans and Canadians, but mostly by Finnish immigrants who had first moved to North America, but then moved to the U.S.S.R. Their common goal is to build A Worker's Paradise. Jussi's task, on the other hand, is to inform on any suspicious activity. And it is here where the story really begins.
Ikitie tells its disturbing story at a laid-back pace. It is not boring by any means, but the scenes, particularly during the first half of the film, are given plenty time to breath. The same goes for the actors. They have both the space and time to act with nuances. Helped by this, acting flows naturally. People speak their native or common languages (Finnish, English, Russian) with appropriate dialects. Cinematography is lovely, particularly when playing with darkness of the night without crushing everything to black. Colours are perhaps ever-so-slightly muted but still realistic, and - thankfully - there are no teal-and-orange scenes to be seen.
As time goes by in the film, tension slowly but surely rises, right until the dramatic ending. Adding to the tension and pain is the knowledge that things that we see in Ikitie actually did take place on a large scale in Stalin's U.S.S.R. during the purges of the 1930's.
What can I say? I saw Ikitie today at our local theater with my mother and son, and it left us discussing for hours, about local and international history, the Great Depression, the Finnish right-wing extremist movement, Stalin's purges, all of it. If that is not a sign of an exceptionally impressive film, I don't know what is.
Judgment: Highly recommended, just don't expect a light-hearted comedy!
It is 1931, and the Great Depression is on. Jussi Ketola has recently moved back to Finland from the United States with his family. He has bought a farm, and tends pretty much to himself. All is good and well until right wing extremists, who claim Jussi to be a communist, decide to practice their favourite pastime, namely kidnapping Jussi, driving him a few hundred kilometers to the Soviet border zone, then shooting him (though it might sound odd, these things actually happened in Finland during that tumultuous time). Except that they botch the shooting part and Jussi, heavily wounded, barely escapes across the border to the U.S.S.R.
When Jussi wakes up in a hospital in the Soviet Union, he is greeted by a Finnish police working for the Soviets who, instead of letting Jussi go home, summarily accuse him of being a spy. Unable to escape, Jussi is sent out to a collective farm. This kolkhoz has been built by Americans and Canadians, but mostly by Finnish immigrants who had first moved to North America, but then moved to the U.S.S.R. Their common goal is to build A Worker's Paradise. Jussi's task, on the other hand, is to inform on any suspicious activity. And it is here where the story really begins.
Ikitie tells its disturbing story at a laid-back pace. It is not boring by any means, but the scenes, particularly during the first half of the film, are given plenty time to breath. The same goes for the actors. They have both the space and time to act with nuances. Helped by this, acting flows naturally. People speak their native or common languages (Finnish, English, Russian) with appropriate dialects. Cinematography is lovely, particularly when playing with darkness of the night without crushing everything to black. Colours are perhaps ever-so-slightly muted but still realistic, and - thankfully - there are no teal-and-orange scenes to be seen.
As time goes by in the film, tension slowly but surely rises, right until the dramatic ending. Adding to the tension and pain is the knowledge that things that we see in Ikitie actually did take place on a large scale in Stalin's U.S.S.R. during the purges of the 1930's.
What can I say? I saw Ikitie today at our local theater with my mother and son, and it left us discussing for hours, about local and international history, the Great Depression, the Finnish right-wing extremist movement, Stalin's purges, all of it. If that is not a sign of an exceptionally impressive film, I don't know what is.
Judgment: Highly recommended, just don't expect a light-hearted comedy!
Ski Patrol is a weird Hollywood B-film recently found by a Finnish film enthusiast and shown on Finnish national TV for the first time today (2013-12-08). This hastily made flick tells its own version of the Finnish Winter War just a few months after the fact.
Ski Patrol is a peculiar mix of right and hilariously wrong. It starts in a village in the Finnish Alps (good luck finding that on any map!) where everyone gathers together in the village inn fully dressed in Middle European national costumes to socialize, to smoke long pipes, and to listen to the village band playing the Finnish national traditional instrument, the kantele. As its inhabitants the village naturally has both an Olympic skier and a Nobel peace prize winner.
All of this, including names like Paavo Luuki and Gustaf Nerkuu, is wrong on so many levels. Still, the people are presented in an empathetic way, so I don't know what to think of it.
There is, though, one surprisingly historically correct piece of information in the film. One of the main female characters is a member of the Lotta Svärd voluntary auxiliary paramilitary organization for women. This is probably the earliest feature film in any country mentioning the organization. How could they get that right when everything else is a bit so-and-so? But I digress.
After the introduction, the war starts soon enough with the full-scale attack of the Soviets against Finland and we get to meet a lot of different basic war-type characters - including the obligatory heroic American volunteer. Actually, the number and qualities of different characters is surprisingly large and good for such a short film, so even though the snow fighting scenes are more for effect than for sense, you actually get to understand a little bit of how the different personalities work. For a film that is only four minutes over an hour long, that's not too bad.
At the end of the day, though, the film falls flat because its story isn't compelling enough and the end plot twist is more than a bit cheesy. Still, for a hastily made job (the premiere was just two months after the end of the Winter War), and considering fact checking was perhaps not too high on the makers' priority list (little-known country and no Wikipedia), Ski Patrol is an interesting bit of curiosity - if not for others, perhaps at least for Finns and people interested in Finland. Don't expect anything to match facts, though.
I'll give this film a solid 3 or 4 for effort. More than that would be stretching it, even though I enjoyed watching it with my 9-year old son.
Ski Patrol is a peculiar mix of right and hilariously wrong. It starts in a village in the Finnish Alps (good luck finding that on any map!) where everyone gathers together in the village inn fully dressed in Middle European national costumes to socialize, to smoke long pipes, and to listen to the village band playing the Finnish national traditional instrument, the kantele. As its inhabitants the village naturally has both an Olympic skier and a Nobel peace prize winner.
All of this, including names like Paavo Luuki and Gustaf Nerkuu, is wrong on so many levels. Still, the people are presented in an empathetic way, so I don't know what to think of it.
There is, though, one surprisingly historically correct piece of information in the film. One of the main female characters is a member of the Lotta Svärd voluntary auxiliary paramilitary organization for women. This is probably the earliest feature film in any country mentioning the organization. How could they get that right when everything else is a bit so-and-so? But I digress.
After the introduction, the war starts soon enough with the full-scale attack of the Soviets against Finland and we get to meet a lot of different basic war-type characters - including the obligatory heroic American volunteer. Actually, the number and qualities of different characters is surprisingly large and good for such a short film, so even though the snow fighting scenes are more for effect than for sense, you actually get to understand a little bit of how the different personalities work. For a film that is only four minutes over an hour long, that's not too bad.
At the end of the day, though, the film falls flat because its story isn't compelling enough and the end plot twist is more than a bit cheesy. Still, for a hastily made job (the premiere was just two months after the end of the Winter War), and considering fact checking was perhaps not too high on the makers' priority list (little-known country and no Wikipedia), Ski Patrol is an interesting bit of curiosity - if not for others, perhaps at least for Finns and people interested in Finland. Don't expect anything to match facts, though.
I'll give this film a solid 3 or 4 for effort. More than that would be stretching it, even though I enjoyed watching it with my 9-year old son.