Earth
1930
So it is getting really late and I have to get up at six tomorrow. I am yawning and pretty much unhinging my jaw like a snake trying to stay up to write this. This might not be thorough or well thought out but deal with it!
How many Soviet Union propaganda movies have we watched? I feel like I have seen too many. I watched half of this movie before watching Live Free or Die Hard and then I watched the second half. I have to say, this one wasn't as exciting. It felt like we went back a few years. It was silent and two hours long. It pretty much just recorded some shit happening to proletariats in Ukraine. Thrilling...
Maybe I shouldn't have watched this when I was so tired and my constant yawns were obscuring my vision. I definitely thought this was a major snore. I probably got spoiled from our brief talkie phase.
RATING: **---
Interesting Facts:
Film has been voted one of the ten greatest movies of all time at Brussels. And that, boys and girls, is the definition of the word pretentious.
Censored by Soviets.
Full movie is not available on YouTube. It is not worth a purchase. Here is a clip:
This movie is notable for one thing only. Never in the history of the moving picture has anybody been this excited about a tractor. That somehow says it all.
ReplyDeleteSo much negativity brings me in as a semi-reluctant defender.
ReplyDeleteSure this is far too long and simplified. Worse, it's an unashamedly apologist bit of propaganda for a policy that caused millions of deaths.
BUT .. for it's time .. and for what it wanted to do, it's not THAT bad. No, in fact bits are damn good. To people who have slaved by hand for generations, I'm sorry, but being excited by a tractor is something to celebrate. To those people it was something unimaginable, that had happened. OK, terribly overplayed, but we live in more cynical times, and getting a tractor is no big shakes.
Haha your comment made me laugh TSorensen. And hey Ray, I gave it two stars. So you know. It was practically a rave.
ReplyDeleteI'm fine with the propaganda (indeed, I've been reading a Trotsky biography recently so the subject matter is actually interesting to me) and I'm fully accepting to all my Lesbian / Gay / Bi-Sexual / Tractor friends, but I didn't like this. Maybe it doesn't help that the picture quality has suffered over the years, but it just seemed a bit vague and not really communicating emotion, to me.
ReplyDeleteEarly contender for worst picture of the thirties.
Definitely. I had forgotten how much propaganda we had to sit through early on The List.
Delete