NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

Tweekums When three bodies, two men and a woman, are discovered in Moscow's Gorky Park with their faces and other identifying features removed the case is given to Militia inspector Arkady Renko. He is immediately concerned as the KGB have taken an interest in the case but declined his suggestion that they should take over the investigation. The only clues Renko has are the fact that one of the dead had dental work done in the United States, strongly suggesting he was a foreigner, and the woman was wearing ice-skates that had been reported stolen Irina Asanova, a worker on a film set. Hoping to identify the bodies Renko takes two of the heads to Professor Andreev so that he can reconstruct their faces. Fairly early on Renko is introduced to American Furrier Jack Osbourne; a name that keeps cropping up but what could he have to do with the dead bodies? He also crosses paths with another American; William Kirwill, an NYPD detective, who is looking for his missing brother and doesn't trust any agents of the Soviet state.When this film was made the idea of setting a film in Moscow with characters, including the protagonist, who were primarily Russian was almost unthinkable even if it was to feature Western actors and be filmed in Finland. Even though Russia isn't seen as an exotic location these days the film is as good as ever. There is an intriguing central mystery as who the people were killed is as important as who did it. There is also a good sense of paranoia, possibly well founded, as it appears that the KGB are taking a very close interest in Renko. The cast does a really impressive job; William Hurt is great as Renko and Lee Marvin manages to be both menacing and jovial as Osbourne. Brian Dennehy and Joanna Pacula also impress as William Kirwill and Irena. The rest of the cast is made up of familiar British actors including Michael Elphick, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid and Alexei Sayle to name just a few. While this is very much a drama there are some moments of humour; I particularly laughed at Alexei Sayle's used car salesman/KGB informer. Director Michael Apted nicely captured the sense of paranoia and desire to escape a closed society as well as creating a cold atmosphere of the Russian winter. Overall I'd certainly recommend this to fans of detective dramas looking for something a bit different.

Brundlefly I've always wanted to see this film but didn't until I watched it on NetFlix in 2010.The main problem with this film is the screenplay - I didn't read the book, but I am guessing the screenplay is very faithful, because it plays like Masterpiece Theatre with a budget.As a result, its a long movie, but I suspect it was much longer as their are some situations and scenes which seem to have had supporting scenes which were cut.There is just no interesting flow to this movie at all, the characters and relationships are very poorly developed, and the actors don't seem to have any significant investment in their characters or motivations either. Its almost like watching a long screen test.Which is too bad - WIlliam Hurt and Brian Denehy are great actors, but could have both been replaced with competent unknowns - it probably would have been a better film, actually, as the viewer wouldn't keep asking themselves 'Why is Hurt acting like a limp noodle?' or 'Was Brian Denehy attached to this project late?'There is no voice coaching in this movie - everyone speaks English - which is fine, since its an American movie - but the actor's individual accents are not coached out - the Russians in this movie mostly speak with British accents, but they vary into other accents as well. No Russian is fine, but at least keep the accents consistent.There are some weird moments in the movie also - like 'how do the police come to know this pristine snow blanket is covering a murder scene"? Or 'Why did William Hurt just profess love to someone he barely knows?' or 'Why is William Hurt completely unconcerned that the man he has come to kill just pulled a pistol out of a drawer and loaded it?' or 'Why did Lee Marvin take that pistol out of the drawer in the first place'?Its obvious stuff like this was taken out of the book, which had explanatory non-dialog text which put it into context, but when transferred to the screen, they forgot that the audience does not have access to that text.An occasional musical interlude of 80's synth pad and drum machine also painfully dates the movie at certain points.Anyways, a real yawner that seemed to try to capitalize on a bestselling book by throwing some budget and talent into a big vat with a book and stirring - but no one really bothered to make a movie here.

Benoit Vanhees To my amazement, several IMDb reviewers seem to have problems with trivial issues such as Russians speaking British-English, or Finland being used as a location in stead of Russia. What is the point of discussing something that was politically unavoidable at the time ? Which western spy movie actually took place in Russia before the Wall came down ? Generally, Finland or Austria provided very good alternatives. This is true for Billion dollar brain or Enigma (1983) Wouldn't it be silly to write off every SF movie that is supposed to take place on Mars, simply because it was actually filmed on Planet Earth ? Frankly, the accent-issue too is absurd and irrelevant. I have a feeling some reviewers just want to show the world how observant they are. Whatever the Russians might have spoken, they would have found a reason to complain about it. If they would have used NY slang or English with a ridiculous Russian accent, they would have made fun of it. And if the Russians actually would have spoken Russian, probably the same people would be the first ones to have complained about the color of the subtitles on the snowy landscape, or the simplified translations.SPOILER ALERT: Curiously enough, none of these observant observers seem to have been intrigued by some weak points in Gorky Park's plot. For those who already have seen the movie, let's name a few ones: 1) The corrupt American fur importer Osborne is supposed to have excellent connections with KGB and the brass of the Militia. So why didn't he ask them to take care of his little problem ? He might even have earned some extra praise by his KGB buddies, for having been a finger man for such "dangerously deviant" individuals, as they surely would have been called in those Cold War days. In stead, he's doing the bloody work all by himself, in a happy-happy-Helloweenish way. 2) Osborne goes to great lengths to make identification of the bodies "impossible". How he managed to do so, without turning the white snow carpet in this remote spot of Gorky Park into a slaughterhouse scene remains a mystery. But OK, let's accept he's some kind of artist in this kind of work: all his prudence seems to have been superfluous, as within a few days, the 3 bodies are discovered. 3) Furthermore,quite ironically, this unusual way of skinning heads and fingers was like a "Killroy was here"-signature for Renko...4) To make matters even worse, Osborne's KGB and militia friends seem to be completely unaware of Renko's stubbornness. They don't make him stop in time his inquiry. This at a time when numerous jokes were told about how tight KGB-control were. Or don't you know why the KGB always operated in teams of 3 agents: one who could write, one who could read and one to keep an eye on those two dangerous intellectuals… Still, hold on... This is a movie after all… And as all reviewers know, the rules of the game of watching movies is to be able to not analyze everything so rationally, and to allow some part of silliness to pop up now and then. And if you're able to do this in Gorky Park, you'll really enjoy this movie. marvelous ! Hurt did a top notch job as the stubborn and honest police man, deliberately taking great risks to uncover the truth. Some people found his acting work quite "wooden" in this movie. Again, I'm sure that would he have been more exuberant, showing more emotions, the same people would have wondered why he was clowning his way through this movie, a la Robin Williams. Is it so difficult to understand that he's just portraying a very professional cop, the only one with a 100 % rate of resolving crimes he has been investigating. He's the son of an even more famous and respected Militia man, who could afford frivolities as being not well shaved, as Renko's superior complains. If he seems a somewhat 1-dimensional character, it is just because he's obsessed to do his job as good as his father would have done it. He's probably also very well aware that he's walking on eggs with his investigation. He's not at all sure his superiors will back him all the time, and he's understandably tense. I don't know, one could go on debating about it, and still not convince everyone. To me, Hurt found the right balance in playing his role of obstinate but also careful cop. Lee Marvin too was an excellent catch, giving Osborne all the arrogance and self-confidence he needed. The whole support cast too was fine, nobody over-acting in an irritant way, nor anyone lacking flair or talent. The specific angle of the storyline too is special. Not the triple murder part, but the fact that this is a US movie about an efficient Russian militia man, hunting down a corrupt US business man and killer. (See Telefon from 1977 for a similarly surprising plot). If you take into account that Gorky Park was filmed in the era of Reagan's "Evil empire" rhetoric, one will understand how surprising this movie must have been at the time. Finally: I was very pleased with the reviews on this movie, pointing out to some special cosmetics aspects (the special use of make up) of it, and the one making a link between the social status of the "Russians", and the different British accents they were using. The top brass indeed sounded somewhat snobbish, as they probably would have too if they would have spoken Russian. Once more, this underlines how efficient this movie uses whatever it can to lift the quality of it. 3 ½ stars out of 4.

writers_reign I saw this film on a US army base in West Germany about a year after its release. I didn't have enough German to go to a commercial movie theatre and this was the only game in town. I knew nothing about it, hadn't even heard of the book let alone read it; I did know both William Hurt and Lee Marvin and, as I said, it was the only game in town. I thought it was dire. A few years later someone lent me the book which I enjoyed so much that I went on to read the subsequent Martin Cruz Smith novels featuring Arkady Renko. Now, some 26 years later the film has re-surfaced. I checked it out in case my first impression was wrong. It wasn't. This is STILL dire. It's a thriller without any thrills, a who-done-it entirely lacking suspense, set in a Moscow that's about as Russian as Upper Sandusky. The leading lady has no charisma, sensuality, or even bread-and-butter attractiveness that I was able to detect and there's more chemistry between a moth and an icicle than between her and leading man Hurt. For reasons best known to themselves the producers have seen fit to dispense with Renko's wife and the killer is known too us far too soon. All in all a joke.