Much of the humor comes from the passengers’ po-faced narration to disorder just outside their window, or casual asides right before an accident, such as when a driver remarks, “Man, it’s not even stylish … to wear a sombrero in the car” just before another car crashes inches away from them. Maybe it goes without saying, but “The Road Movie” is very funny, albeit in the pitch-black sense. Each “scene” has its own identity, but when juxtaposed against similar events, they become a tapestry of the absurd. However, some of the highlights from the film include a drunken joy ride that lands a car in a river (“We are sailing,” one passenger calmly states as the vehicle floats downstream), a humorous yet mundane conversation between a taxi driver and prostitute about fee structure, and a car chase in which the police are downright incapable of quartering their suspect. It may be an anthology of bedlam, but it eventually settles into a calming mode that derives from a director providing his audience exactly what they signed up to watch.ĭescribing any of the clips in “The Road Movie” at length will inevitably do a great disservice to the experience of actually watching them, especially since they’re predicated upon shock and awe. “The Road Movie” operates on a unique tonal wavelength, one that’s both manic and oddly comforting. Kalashnikov, who serves as the film’s editor, selects videos that have their own internal rhythm, yet they all follow a familiar structure: a calm, then a storm, and then the aftermath. These videos run the gamut from manic car accidents to utterly surreal encounters. That might be a protracted justification for entertainment that’s in the same ballpark as, say, Roadrunner cartoons, but it goes a long way of explaining the base appeal of “The Road Movie.” Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s debut feature is a 70-minute compilation of these dashcam videos uploaded to the Internet by Russian citizens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |