Крымский мост. Сделано с любовью! (2018, Tigran Keosayan)

The Crimean Bridge. Made with Love!
Tigran Keosayan is in certain terms quite critical about Russian cinema. He likes good old Soviet-styles comedies and he hates masterpieces like Leviathan.With considerable public funding he made a feel-good film which the Russian state supported as socially useful goals and ensuring public interests and interests of the state. On the other hand the makers declared that this was an unpolitical. Now what? An unpolitical comedy in the interest of the state? Can we really have it both ways?

The film starts in 1945 at the temporary Soviet bridge on the Crimea. Damir and Raya are separated, but they promise each other to see each other at the bridge every year. Leap to present day Crimea. Russia is building the permanent bridge. Tikhon, a journalist and intellectual, as identified by his spectacles is writing an article about the project. He is confused, but also gullible. He thinks there is resistance against the Russian occupation, but this is a misinterpretation. Actually he is denounced as a Ukrainian spy.
The main heroes of this film are "bedhoppers". There goal is to score te hottest chick and never to sleep twice with the same girl. The girls on the side are dreaming of Prince Charming with or without white horse. So an out-worn cliché. It is somewhat chocking that this soup of old vegetables was cooked together by a woman, Margarita Simonyan, the wife of the director. This is her first attempt to write a film script. Small episodes replace a plot. At last all heroes and heroins find their new home. Even Damir finds Raya again. As they embrace on the bridge, we pan out to see the construction.

Even Russian reviews were very negative. Tigran Keosayan called them "sick". He can call me sick, too. The Crimean Bridge appeals to macho humour and in this world are men the only ones who matter. Even worse the glorification of the Stalin era. A film nobody needs.
1/10

Hotel Dallas (2016, Livia Ungur / Huang Sherng-Lee)

At last I have a new computer. This one is not making noise like a lawn-mower, so I might at last be able and in the mood to update my miserable blog more often. I am in the last month of a MUBI promotion-offer and this has had a big influence on my choice of films. Otherwise I might never have seen Hotel Dallas.
This film is a blend of documentary, fairy-tale and drama, all at a time and maybe nothing.
Under the dictatorship of the Ceaucescu's Romanian TV showed mainly programs about the great leader - and at times also Dallas. This long-running series were like a fairy-tale. It was supposed to show how corrupt the capitalist system was. Romanians, however, saw it as a fairy-tale. Yes, corruption existed in Romania, but America could do it on large scale. It is also suggested that Romanian business people after the revolution of 1989 took the JR as the role model for their business practises.
One of these fraudsters rebuilt the Southfork Farm as a hotel and because he could, he also remodeled the Eiffel Tower. He is granted a song to tell his story.
Children, dressed as communist pioneers re-enact key scenes from Dallas. Later they become the Ceauxescu's and are shot.
An American, Mr. Here, visits Hotel Dallas. He is looking for an Endless Column. Livia Ungur is receptionist at this hotel. First they visit her mother, then they travel in a cake box to Bukarest, where they attend a Christmas party with a talk about philosophy, circular time and history.
And so on. There is little coherence. It seems that the film makers already had problems to fill the rather short running length of 74 minutes.
There are probably many allusions. The tunes may be known to Romanian viewers,  more allusions might be known to the fans of Dallas. If you are neither, you see a lot of good beginnings, but a messy outcome.
2/10