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Reviews
Zavet (2007)
Awful
After Life is a Miracle, I did not expect much. It's hard to believe that these films were made by the same man as Do You Remember Dolly Bell, for instance. Zavet is two hours of silly antics with no story. The wild and unbridled humor of Underground seems to have degenerated into pathetic buffoonery here. It appears that Kusturica has been going steadily downhill since he started making life-affirming comedies, beginning with Black Cat, White Cat, which I think was great, but already had some disturbing signs of dementia. I liked his early films so much, and this is why it's especially disappointing to see something like this. Let's hope his next one will be great.
Ilya Muromets (1956)
So bad it's good
I just watched it for the first time, the original Russian-language version restored in 2001. I really enjoyed it. It definitely belonged on MST3K. I grew up in USSR but somehow never saw it as a child. Maybe it was not broadcast because it needed restoration, maybe because it's pretty ridiculous. Probably the former.
As somebody noted, the make-up job on Solovey-razboynik (wind devil?) is pretty impressive. He shows up about 10-15 mins into the film.
Note a repeating theme on the soundtrack, an interesting rip-off of Ravel's Bolero.
This film would definitely suffer a lot from bad dubbing. The original dialogue really suits the acting. It is a pastiche of Russian epic tales, and half of it is written in blank verse in a certain meter: two anapests, one trochee, one dactyl.
Tamara Nosova played a maid at Vladimir's palace and is not credited on IMDb. You just get a few glimpses of her.