30 Day Movie Meme, Day 5

( Day 1-3 )

Day 04 - A movie that makes you sad -- Now it's time to revisit something from my days at DLI, because there aren't many movies that make me sad and leave me that way.  Plenty of Disney movies have those moments, but generally they have happy endings.  This one doesn't have a happy ending, but that's because it's about Russian history under Stalin.

The movie is Nikita Mikhailov's Burnt by the Sun, a story about 1936 Russia.  It has pretty much everything - moments of drama, comedy, passion, tragedy, Stalinist repression, and the general sense of dread that seems to be in a lot of Russian history.  It also takes a couple go-rounds to really get it, but when we finished it,the class was quiet enough that you could have heard a pin drop in our class.  There's a love triangle, between Mikhailov's Colonel Kotov, his younger wife Marusia, and Mitya (now an NKVD man).  There's a lot of symbolism in the movie, and a lot of confusion, and one brief moment of uplift at the very end, but not enough to lift the depression that comes from knowing these characters were fictional, but that they were based on so many that were not.

Of course, the second runner up for Day 4 is Old Yeller.  I think that one's pretty self-explanatory... 

Day 05 - Favorite love story in a movie --  I actually gave this one some serious thought while studying my DVD collection.  There's a couple of contenders, but I have to go with one of the ones that isn't actually in a romantic movie - Rick and Evie in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.  They have chemistry and tension, and "smart girl gets the guy" makes me happy (bonus points for "I... am a Librarian").  Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz play off each other well, especially since he's at the height of what I think of as his Ivan Vorpatril period.  The end also has a great romantic punch, especially for an adventure with a romance.  Not to mention their library in the second movie...

( 30 Day Movie Meme )