Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


October 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 46

Total Comments: 12


Full Archive



4 / Chetyre / Russia / 2006

Normally, this is the kind of film I would leap to praise—for its near poetic treatment of imagery, its wavering use and disuse of dialogue, its unabashed fixation on everything unstructured and symbolic. And there’s a grating thought existing somewhere in my mind that says, yes, this is a great film, a work of borderline brilliance. But I want to know why everything looks the way it does, and if everything I think about this film is true. Ilya Khrjanovsky’s 126-minute film is a puzzle without any matching pieces; the “round piglets,” the story of Russian “doubles” numbering in the tens of thousands, the blond twins, the Cold War-era meat-freezer, the millennial setting, the drunken old women, the dogs—I feel the need to assign meaning and purpose, simply because the director’s use of “4” drives me to. And yet Khrjanovsky dangles the entire plotline above my head like a teasing adult. A lot of critics have denounces his film as boring and indulgent and, in one oddly complementary instance, a “bad cheese dream”; I think it’s just right, and that thought drives me nuts.

Rumsey’s Review

by Adam Balz | Source: Red Envelope Entertainment DVD
15 Oct 2007 1:01 PM | Submit Comment


Submit Comment

Please note that your email address will never be displayed on this page.

HTML is enabled; line breaks (<br />) and paragraphs (<p>) are automatically converted. Apostrophes, ellipses, em- and en-dashes, and quotes are also automatically formatted.