What a waste of my time!!!

Overrated

Awesome Movie

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

To see this movie now you are probably going to have to get it on DVD. Too bad, because this is a case where it probably works a lot better in the theater than on your TV screen or laptop. Not for the usual reason - there is no "spectacle" that you will miss on the small screen. But in a movie theater you are stuck in your seat, it is dark, they make you turn off your phone, and you are required to watch the screen without distraction.The action of this film is .... slow. Yes, it is. There are long takes of nothing but what Cristi, the cop, sees as he is staking out a house that nobody is going in or out of, or shots of Cristi standing in front of some kind of little store with soccer graffiti on it, or of offices in the police station where everyone is waiting motionlessly for someone to get off the phone or come back from somewhere. All of the film's events, which would fit into 30 seconds of a "Law and Order" episode, are here uncompressed into their real tedious reality. So if you are watching it at home on the small screen, there will be temptations - to check your email, to switch over to Google to decipher the soccer graffiti, to make a pot of coffee, and then you find that you have paused it in the middle and you now have to get to work and come back to it later. I urge you to anticipate these temptations. Mark off the whole two hours on your calendar, turn off your phone, get all your snacks ready ahead of time, find a comfy chair, and just sit and watch it. And when you do, you won't - may not - find it boring at all. You may find it suspenseful. You may get into the mindset of the cop, who is under pressure from his bosses to wind up this routine "nothing" case by doing the routine thing that everyone expects him to do to a basically innocent kid, but who is willing to spend a lot of his time waiting - watching - hoping that something will come into the screen that will save him from having to do it. In this you will be aided by the fact that the utterly "non-cinematic" character of the acting, the locations, the sets, the pace of the direction promote the impression that you are actually watching a gritty sad reality through some fly-on-the-wall spycam. Even down to the "management-by-dictionary" scene. I am willing to bet that more than one lazy, uncaring, dunderhead boss conducts the affairs of his or her office in the real world using exactly this clumsy, patronizing and abusive technique. In your own life you may not ever have the opportunity to save the world from evil giant robots in the blink of an eye, but you may have to make a moral choice involving one person's future. This movie gives that kind of choice the time and attention it deserves.

As I can see, quite a few viewers made trite and deathly boring remarks about the worst movie ever( using that moronic phrase requires an IQ of a cucumber), or this is not entertainment. Well, duh...98% of American movies are just that, an attempt to amuse, entertain, induce a chuckle or such. It is mind boggling that all these idle people, go out of their way and seek this obscure Romanian art flick and than blame it for not being exciting enough. If thrill is all you want and expect from a movie it isn't that hard to find it. Most of the films are made for video game crowd anyway. So, I beg you people, stop watching films you don't like or understand, and afterwords torture us with dumb and badly written reviews.

A Wry Comedy – ***Warning: Spoilers*** The appropriate adjective is "absurd." This is an understated comedy about the absurdity of a government bureaucracy and legal system in which no one but the the clerical workers have anything to do. It is not so much a "police procedural" as a satire on how the procedures are employed by everyone throughout the chain of command to justify numbingly wasting hour after hour, day after day, doing essentially nothing. Unfortunately, for most of the film the audience may not be entirely in on the joke.We follow the main character, Cristi, as he engages in a meaningless investigation involving three high school students which should have ended on day one but drags on and on as nothing further happens. The plot device which successfully holds our interest is Cristi's supposed crisis of "conscience" over the possibility of ruining the life of the young suspected drug dealer among the three.However, in a pair of ending scenes which are truly funny and confirm that for the past two hours we have been watching a comedy, Cristi's crisis of conscience is challenged by his superior in an absurd dialogue involving the dictionary - and the following day Cristi outlines a plan to arrest the subjects which is so detailed you would think the targets are the heads of an international cartel. In the end, Cristi's moral dilemma appears to be as much related to his need to attach some meaning to his job as to any reservations over draconian Romanian drug laws.There are no villains here, with the possible exception of "the squealer," the young snitch who started the investigation apparently due to some fissure in his former friendship with the target of the investigation. Everyone including the bosses seem to be basically decent people trying to find some way to cope with the boredom of their jobs in the same way that Cristi uses his crisis of conscience to cope with his.As a viewer, this is what keeps you from feeling "punked" when you realize that what you have been watching was an exercise in coping with bureaucratic induced boredom. Just as the characters have to find a justification for the boredom and meaningless of their jobs, we have to find something, in this case Cristi's dilemma of conscience, to justify our watching their boredom for two hours – even though in the end this rationale is rendered effectively meaningless. It's human nature, shared by the characters and the viewers – if there is no real reason to justify how we are spending our time we will manufacture one.In the end, although I would hesitate to recommend this movie, I do find substantial things to admire about it. It is smart and has a clear purpose which the director adhered to without deviation despite the fact that it cannot be easy, and requires tremendous restraint, to make a movie about endless boredom – and I don't mean that facetiously. And, in retrospect, it is funnier and more focused than it appears as you are watching it, as well as provocative enough to stimulate discussion. I don't find it as compelling as other recent Romanian works such as "Four Months…etc." And I fall somewhere between those who effusively admire it and those who totally dismiss it – but I would definitely pay attention to this director's future efforts.

Really won't have too much to say about this one… it was voted best film of the year (2009) by Film Quarterly, something that stood out in a year that had quite a few films I enjoyed. I did have the impression that for most people, it probably was very slow-paced, although this was not a detriment to me, as more and more it hits me when I watch movies that they can parallel the cadence of reality without being dull.The idea behind the film is that we are trapped in a web of words, the cages that have been structured around us may seem somewhat lax when you look at specific portions of it, but the overall apparatus definitely is much more constraining than it seems, especially when one wants to take moral or spiritual liberties. The world has become bureaucratic and concrete, everything can be reduced to a verbal description (some would go as far as to say the unconscious is one big web of linguistic elements). This definitely transforms anything ethereal into an insipid, lifeless description. The main character (Christi, whose religious and sacrificial connotations never came to fruition) struggles to release himself from the death grip of conformity… he is rendered a slave to linguistics, something he has to question in a displaced manner when ranting to his wife about how the song she listens to makes no sense.Anyway, he fights the powers to be with his sense of "moral law", but after being beaten over the head with his own idiosyncratic definitions of morality, he is given the choice between the chaos of a structure-less and self-defining moral code and the concrete, oppressive, mind-shrinking world of the laws of the physical world, which carry the burdensome weight of their own absurdity, gift-wrapped with the guise of wisdom. He decision is the same one most people would make, it's very difficult to imagine any other outcome