journal features

movie review - Taxi Blues

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 1997.03.16

This is a depressing Russian film which won raves at the Cannes film festival, but is just to grim and pointless to get into. The main character is a solid working man hero who drives a cab. His friend and project is an alcoholic Jewish saxaphone player. The cab driver first takes an interest in the musician when the latter ducks his fare. RThey become friends. Later, after having been straightened out by the cabbie, the musician finds himself in a world well beyond the cabbie, and they part.

The most interesting part of this movie is the backdrop, which is Moscow during the early years of the Soviet breakup. Things are violent and discordant, with corruption, poverty, and despair everywhere.

Recommended. For those with a strong constitution.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)