Khoroshiy malchik (2016) Reviews

• Boring teen movie

  RareMovieCritic2017-02-06

  I'm not sure who liked this film other than teenagers in Russia. It does not deserve a 6/10 rating it currently has here, but considering that I'm the first (and only) reviewer of this film a year after it came out, it shows you how limited the interest for this film is. I won't spoil the film, but let's say that it has a lot of dancing. A lot of it. Dance rehearsals, dance-offs, dance lessons. It's not really a dance film, it's more of a love story, a highly contrived, highly improbable one at that. The acting is okay for a teen film, but it's on the level of TV shows where actors speak to the camera than one where you really believe these people exist. The film has a fluffy, TV show-like quality to it. It doesn't feel cinematic. It is a popsa film for teens. Calling this pop culture is a compliment. It's more like bubble-gum pop culture. The story is not really interesting or deep in any way. The scenes have too much lighting that it's insane. You can see heavy shadows everywhere. As much as I hate this Hollywood obsession with making everything dark that you could barely see (Game of Thrones), Russian TV and cinema go the other way. Actors cannot have 3 or 4 shadows in different directions. People don't have floodlights at home. Most homes are quite dark. Some scenes do the opposite, where everything is so lit that there are no shadows anywhere. Houses that just have light coming from every direction. The lighting does not make or break this film. It's just an objective thing I could demonstrate to tell you what kind of film this is. It is not a great story marred by poor production values, it is a 4/10 script with 4/10 production. If you are Russian, you probably already know of this film. If you are not, well, don't expect one of those masterpieces of Russian cinema. It's the Russian equivalent of Can't Hardly Wait (1998) but less entertaining and with more dancing.

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