adnatan Reviews

Cashback (2006)

The current rating of the film (7.4) made me stop trusting IMDb

[1/10 · 20 January 2012]

The film is an utter waste of time, shallower than graphene. One of the many problems of this film is the gap between what it pretends to be, and what you actually get. There's an inconsistency in the flow, sometimes the film tries to be poetic (and fails), and a minute later it'll be a crude sex comedy similar to American pie. As a result, the two styles destructively interfere and you can't help but feel cheated. The script is just horrific. Uninteresting scenes get a lot of screen time, the level of depth is as mentioned before: shallower than the thinnest material known to mankind. If you are a teenager, you may not mind because of the multitude of silent beautiful nudes that appear there (with questionable justification). It made me feel that a random guy with a camera shot some nude models just because he could, and then he called it "art" to get away with it. I'd expect a rating below 6 for this one. The current rating of the film (7.4) made me stop trusting IMDb ratings...

Walk on Water (2004)

Unfulfilled promise

[6/10 · 5 April 2004]

Walk on water has all the ingredients to make a good film but one, script. The film looks promising in its first half. However, the low credibility of the script in supporting the main characters causes the ending of the film look somewhat phony. The main flaw is failing to build up the emotional process that the leading character, Eyal (played by the talented Lior Ashkenazi), is going through after the death of his wife. It seems that the writer preferred discussing different aspects of male persona (primarily straight vs gay), was on the expense of managing the complex relations between the interesting characters he invented. In my view: 6 out of 10.

Gift from Above (2003)

Extreme, funny and quite bizarre for western values. Kosashvili is the local Kusturica.

[10/10 · 17 January 2004]

A colorful extreme display of the Israeli director. Matana MiShamayim (gift from heaven) is quite different from Kosashvili's "Late Marriage". The primitive traditional family values (Georgian in this case) are brought here some steps beyond to present a comic macabre reality. Women, for example, are portrayed in the film as objects to be used in the patriarchal chauvinistic society they live in. They are kidnapped, threatened, locked in a closet and often molested in order to channel shame on their husbands (countless knickers are pulled down revealing genitalia in public). On the other hand, they are always the center of attention, encompassing every aspect of desire men have, thus they can control and manipulated men, but only to a certain extent - the head of the family (played by the amazing actor Mony Moshonov). Actors are doing a great job under Kosashvili's direction, and one can find similarities between him and Kusturica. The weakest part of the film is in the script, which fluctuates from brilliance to embarrassment. The bottom line, I warmly recommend.