Brat (1997) aka Brother

IMDB

If you're fed up with the loud, flashy and routine Hollywood action flicks, Brat aka Brother is the perfect cure for you. Very enjoyable movie from Russia, starring the charismatic, talented and unfortunately late Sergei Bodrov Jr.

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New York Times review:

If you believe the portrait of St. Petersburg presented by Aleksei Balabanov's terrifically stylish gangster film "Brother," the former Leningrad has become a lawless, shoot-'em-up frontier town in the post-Soviet era. While the city's rootless youths clutch voraciously at the cheesiest elements of Western pop culture, warring outlaw factions have turned the city into an Eastern European version of 1930s Chicago.

The film's central character, Danila (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), is a baby-faced young hoodlum who arrives in town fresh out of the army and goes to work for his brother Viktor (Viktor Suhorukov), who runs a murder-for-hire business connected to the feuding Russian mafia.

By the end of the film, Danila, a sleepy-eyed dolt obsessed with a mediocre Russian rock band named Nautilus, has cut a lethal swath through the city's underworld and is ready to move on to greener pastures, namely Moscow.

During his stay in St. Petersburg, Danila meets Kat (Mariya Zhukova), a Russian version of a New York club kid who hangs out at McDonald's and will do anything for dollars to subsidize her passions for drugs and disco. He lives briefly with a hard-boiled trolley car driver and part-time prostitute named Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko) whose husband is in prison.

From the movie's opening scene, in which Danila lands in trouble after interrupting the filming of a music video and tussling with a security guard, "Brother" suggests that St. Petersburg is a Darwinian battleground where everything is up for grabs.

The center of warfare is a sprawling outdoor market where rival gangs are struggling for the power to extort protection money from the hundreds of intimidated vendors. Ethnic and regional rivalries abound. Danila befriends a German who maintains that "what's good for the Russian is bad for the German." Viktor is contemptuously referred to by his rivals as "the Tatar."

Hooking up with Viktor, whom he has idolized since childhood, Danila is assigned to do his dirtiest work, and he brings a strong, primitive sense of right and wrong to his murderous duties. He also quickly becomes addicted to the instant power he commands when he flashes a gun. When a couple of dhugs refuse to pay their fare on a streetcar, he relishes playing the hero by pulling out his weapon and sending them scurrying.

"Brother," which opens Wednesday at the Film Forum, has a thread of cynical humor that connects it to the American gangster movies of the 1930s as well as to more recent films like "Goodfellas" that examine the flashier trappings of macho gangster culture with a satirical eye. Glamour and power in Danila's world are defined by the wad of cash he carries around and from which he casually peels off $100 bills and dispenses as gifts when the spirit moves him.

More than his gun, Danila's most precious possessions are his CD player and his growing collection of Nautilus albums. The shortsightedness of his morality is evidenced in a scene where he puts on a videotape of his beloved Nautilus and is outraged to discover it is an inferior pirated copy.

Bodrov's Danila is queasily sympathetic as a killer whose touching familial loyalty turns out to be sadly misplaced. In the movie's most cynical joke, he emerges as both the most deadly and the most morally consistent character in a world where loyalty counts for little and brute force rules.

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http://tinypaste.com/c1e9c
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File : 1.35 GB, duration: 1:35:23, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
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Jedné noci v jednom meste (2007) Stop-Motion Animation

IMDB

Jedné noci v jednom meste (2007)

Language: No dialogue
Subtitles: none
DIRECTOR: Jan Balej

Surrealism and black humor are sacrosanct in the Czech artistic tradition, be it literary – think Kafka and Hrabal – or cinematic, as in the works of Jan Svankmajer and Karel Zeman. Often utilizing puppetry, claymation and stop-motion technology to construct a world in which the naïve, the comic-grotesque and the sinister meld, Czech animators in particular have influenced filmmakers worldwide.

Working in the hallucinatory mode of his countrymen, Jan Balej brings us his now whimsical, now deep-dark One Night in the City. Set in and around a dimly street-lit apartment building, the animated feature strings together a series of beautifully bizarre episodes that merge phobias with -philias, fantasies with fears. A lonely old man entertains himself by building an insect circus, disregarding the fact that his miniature performers are all dead. His next-door neighbors, a fish and a tree, play cards, exchange Christmas gifts and occasionally head down to the corner bar for a drink. Two regulars uncork a genie and waste their first two wishes on pints of beer. A frustrated accordion player finds a severed ear in the gutter, stitches it to his own head and is suddenly able to paint like van Gogh.

One Night in the City – which took top prize at the Czech Republic's Anifest in 2006 – is a rare treat not only for animation buffs but for anyone who discerns the shimmer and glimmer of the dark side. --Source

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http://tinypaste.com/3c69b
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Seven Times Lucky (2004)

Seven Times Lucky (2004)
Directed by
Gary Yates

IMDB

A good film-noir that is sadly underrated and overlooked. I love it.

You only con the ones you love.

When a veteran grifter loses ten grand of the boss' money on a bad horse tip, his talented young
protégé devises a risky scheme to get the money back... Film Noir with a yuletide twist, Seven Times
Lucky spins a twisting yarn in which three generations of crooks vie for a coveted prize on Christmas
Eve.

Toronto International Film Festival®
Programmers’ Notes

Harlan (Kevin Pollak), the hero of Gary Yates's sly, smart and seriously entertaining first feature
Seven Times Lucy, is the last in the line of scammers, hustlers and black market bottom-feeders. He's a bag man for Eddi (Babz Chula), one of Winnipeg's most prominent fences, and also runs his own sketchy crew including punkish pickpocket Fiona (Liane Balaban) and Sonny (Jonas Chernick), a
local dimwit Harlan keeps around primarily out of pity.
But then Harlan is the kind of mug who's easily put upon. As the film opens, he gets a hot tip on a horse race and has a whack of cash - the undelivered weekly droop - beckoning from the top of his dresser. Not surprisingly, the bet fails to pay off, sparking a series of cons that (given those involved)
invariably go down twisted.

Part thriller, part caper flick, but primarily a character study, Seven Times Lucky is reminiscent of
under appreciated seventies classics like Robert Benton's The Late Show or Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. Its characters are anachronisms, still living and dressing as if it were the forties or pretending to lead normal lives. (The first time we see the ruthless local kingpin, Mr. Five Wounds
(Fordon Tootoosis), he's making Christmas decorations.) Of course, these fillips give events a comic feel, but they also underline the central split between those whose affiliations extend beyond the cash nexus - and those who only care about money. Here, affectation is a mark of sincerity.

Exquisitely shot by Steve Cosens, Seven Times Lucky oozes a scuzzy yet sophisticated beauty. A shot of Harlan nursing a twisted ankle in the ice machine at his flophouse recalls Edward Hopper, while the motel where Harlan's gang plans its big con suggests a pink neon Lee Friedlander. The milieu
inverts the usual assumptions of hard-boiled detective stories: instead of the charismatic gumshoe, we follow a low-rent hoodlum (the type Marlowe would regularly beat up) anxious to escape his dead-end existence, but not desperate enough to screw just anyone. Expertly directed, Seven Times
Lucky features a stellar cast, led by Pollak, who delivers what could only be described as a real star turn - one Bogart might have admired.

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http://tinypaste.com/754c1
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Specs:
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Language: English
Subs: English