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Cargo 200 (2007)
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All reviews for Cargo 200
CARGO 200 a film review
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KevynKnox
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KevynKnox Blog
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"(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 01/06/09) Positioned somewhere between the dank environs of Tarkovsky and Michael Haneke and the torture cinema of Eli Roth and his "Splat Pack" brethren, this based-on-real-events political allegory-cum-horror story of 1984 USSR, replete with Huxley's squat gray buildings and a properly proportional festooning of decaying landscapes and milky omnipresent clouds, Aleksei Balabanov's Cargo 200 is at heart, an anti-communist era diatribe, showing with a matter-of-fact realism the ugly corrupt nightmare world that was the Soviet Union (Balabanov said in a 2007 Wall Street Journal interview, "I show what filth we live in. Society was sick from 1917 onwards.") but can also feel right at home, thanks to its severing second half, as some sort of Soviet Chainsaw Massacre. Not to give away to much of the plot - the gradual build-up to the terrifying final act is part of the fun (though fun is hardly the appropriate word when de ... "
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CARGO 200 Review
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Karina
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Karina on SpoutBlog
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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"In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy, but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order. It’s 1984, and a professor of Scientific Atheism (academic backup for the Communist state’s embargo on religion) leaves the home of his Army colonel brother to visit their mother in fictional Russian broken-down factory town Leninsk. Along the way, his car breaks down, and he seeks refuge in the dismal, nowheresville shack of a bootlegger. The professor and the bootlegger get into a heated, vodka-fueled argument about faith and the possibility of utopia while the bootlegger’s Vietnamese handyman fixes the car. Th ... "
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CARGO 200 Review
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SpoutBlog
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"In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy, but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order. It’s 1984, and a professor of Scientific Atheism (academic backup for the Communist state’s embargo on religion) leaves the home of his Army colonel brother to visit their mother in fictional Russian broken-down factory town Leninsk. Along the way, his car breaks down, and he seeks refuge in the dismal, nowheresville shack of a bootlegger. The professor and the bootlegger get into a heated, vodka-fueled argument about faith and the possibility of utopia while the bootlegger’s Vietnamese handyman fixes the car. Th ... "
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CARGO 200 Director Alexei Balab ...
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"Upon its Russian release in 2007, Cargo 200 immediately provoked a national furor. Alexei Balabanov’s grim little movie centers around one Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan), a police officer in 1984’s Soviet Russia who uses his position of authority to essentially institutionalize rape, prisoner beatings and all-round mayhem. In a typical scene, he tosses the corpse of a girl’s soldier-fiance next to her while she’s chained to a bed and proceeds to read the dead man’s love letters. When I first saw Cargo 200, I thought it was supposed to be black comedy, but it isn’t; its pitch-perfect production design is part of a whole package designed to check any nostalgia for the departed Soviet era, even if it summons up long-gone discotheques and hairstyles effortlessly. Cargo 200 itself is the code word for the boxes in which dead soldiers "
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Cargo 200 on YouTube
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Karina
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Karina on SpoutBlog
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"This might be the least safe-for-work thing I’ve ever blogged. Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s gruesome indictment of Russian devolution circa 1984 which was one of my favorite films from this year’s Fantastic Fest (it also played Telluride and Toronto in 2007), is available for viewing in nine parts on YouTube. This is either the best way to watch this film or the worst. As I noted in my review, one of the best things about Cargo is its slow build –– it takes forever for anything actually disturbing to happen, but then once shit goes bad, it just gets worse and worse and worse –– and the power of the mounting revulsion might get lost if you’re watching it in chunks. That said, you also have the option to either skip, or skip directly towards, the really, really sick stuff. F "
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Cargo 200 Review, Fantastic Fes ...
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SpoutBlog
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SpoutBlog on spout.com
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"In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy (and even a couple of others at this festival), but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order. It’s 1984. A professor of Scientific Atheism (academic backup for the Communist state’s embargo on religion) leaves the home of his Army colonel brother to visit their mother in fictional Russian broken-down factory town Leninsk. Along the way, his car breaks down, and he seeks refuge in the dismal, nowheresville shack of a bootlegger. The professor and the bootlegger get into a heated, vodka-fueled argument about faith and the possibility of utopia while the bootleg ... "
[More]
Cargo 200 on YouTube
by
SpoutBlog
in
SpoutBlog on spout.com
hasn't rated it.
Was this review helpful?
[Be the first to tell us!]
"This might be the least safe-for-work thing I’ve ever blogged. Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s gruesome indictment of Russian devolution circa 1984 which was one of my favorite films from this year’s Fantastic Fest (it also played Telluride and Toronto in 2007), is available for viewing in nine parts on YouTube. This is either the best way to watch this film or the worst. As I noted in my review, one of the best things about Cargo is its slow build –– it takes forever for anything actually disturbing to happen, but then once shit goes bad, it just gets worse and worse and worse –– and the power of the mounting revulsion might get lost if you’re watching it in chunks. That said, you also have the option to either skip, or skip directly towards, the really, really sick stuff. F "
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Fantastic Fest Announces 2008 W ...
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SpoutBlog
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"Fantastic Fest announced their film awards late last night, even through we’ve still got three more days of movie watching and alcohol drinking to go. As expected, The Good, The Bad and The Weird took the Audience Award, although JCVD took third place in that category, which continues to baffle me. The much buzzed about Let The Right One In was named best horror film over Donkey Punch and Acolytes, and the Danish film How To Get Rid Of The Others took top award in the Fantastic Features category with Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer in second and third place. Thankfully they gave the wacky and fun
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Cargo 200 Review, Fantastic Fes ...
by
Karina
in
Karina on SpoutBlog
hasn't rated it.
Was this review helpful?
[Be the first to tell us!]
"In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy (and even a couple of others at this festival), but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order. It’s 1984. A professor of Scientific Atheism (academic backup for the Communist state’s embargo on religion) leaves the home of his Army colonel brother to visit their mother in fictional Russian broken-down factory town Leninsk. Along the way, his car breaks down, and he seeks refuge in the dismal, nowheresville shack of a bootlegger. The professor and the bootlegger get into a heated, vodka-fueled argument about faith and the possibility of utopia while the bootleg ... "
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