Sorry, this movie sucks

i must have seen a different film!!

best movie i've ever seen.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

It was basically a movie about 1-cultural misunderstanding and how people can be cruel without really knowing it. 2-How important our past is and how it is responsible for our current situtaion/condition and how it effects our view-point. Jonathan safran was a curious and disciplined man who has an obsessive- compulsive nature.Through him and his journey to his past Movie tells us how our past effect our thoughts, our views.We are unaware about the reasons behind the happenings of everything in your life.Why certain things effects you but some not?Actually we all unknowingly carry our past somewhere inside us or within our memory all along with us in our journey of life and this inside phenmenon effects our outside world which is called "Inside-Out".Most of us simply says "Past is just Past".But actually Past is the base/responsible factor of our present.We should know our past and analyze it deeply becuz this'past/memory' is what we all achieves in our life.Whatever You gain, you gain Inside.Freedom is not an external thing, it's an internal thing.At last I can say it was a very delicate and deep movie,It touches your heart.The scene where they finally found Trachimbrod is painful and gravely affecting.Past has the power to make the world a better place as after knowing the past of jews. We all have different cultures but we all are one.We all love our birth place we all love our culture but if we don't respect other's culture then we do not deserves to be called as human.

This is the only film directed by Liev Schreiber, better known as an actor, and he also wrote the screenplay. The film is truly a work of genius, and no wonder he has not been able to direct again, as he is so superior to the competition that everyone must hate him. The film is hilariously funny, tragically sad, heart-rending, and inspirational. It is based upon a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, who also wrote the novel of EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE (2011, see my review), another overwhelmingly emotional movie about a child looking for meaning in the face of tragedy, just as the star of this film, Elijah Wood, is also doing. There is a concealed mystical undertone to this film. Wood dreams that he is standing beside a small river in the moonlight. Later, when he finds what he is looking for, he is standing looking at that same river in the moonlight as foreseen in his dream. A recurring theme of the film is 'illumination', represented by screen white-outs at crucial moments. In early Christianity, the sacrament of baptism was not called baptism, it was called 'illumination', the Greek word for that being phōtismos. And in one ancient manuscript of the gospel account of Jesus being baptized in the River Jordan we find this sentence, which does not appear in the New Testament as printed: 'When he was baptized, a vast light arose from the water and shone round him.' (translation by the famous Biblical scholar Gilles Quispel) That is certainly a more convincing account than the one of a dove descending from heaven, as it is a light-phenomenon rather than the miraculous intrusion of a bird in the story. And in Gnostic Christianity, Jesus was a 'son of Mary' (notice that Joseph is not mentioned) who was 'transformed by illumination', which made him a Son of God. Light imagery is thus fundamental to the origins of Christianity from Judaism, and 'illumination' is at the heart of it all. Also identified with 'illumination' was the process of anointing with sacred oil. The word 'Messiah' means 'anointed one' in Hebrew, and its direct Greek translation is Christos, so that 'Christ' means 'Messiah' in Greek, in other words, 'the anointed one' and is not a name, and is once again a signifier of 'illumination'. However, enough of these theological explications. The performances in this film are truly brilliant and extraordinary, the best of all being the Ukrainian grandfather, who despite barely speaking, gives a performance so moving in its pathos and intensity that he makes you want to weep. He is played by the elderly Russian actor Boris Leskin. His story, as eventually revealed, is intensely tragic. His grandson, the cheerful young Ukrainian tour guide, is played by Ukrainian actor and musician Eugene Hutz with such incredible comic bravura that there is barely any time between all the laugh-out-loud moments in the first half of the film. It is not enough to know Eastern European exiles, who have lost all their humour, one has to know contemporary Eastern Europeans to appreciate the utterly hilarious aspects of this film, as so spectacularly brought to the screen by the amazing Hutz. I fear the extraordinary humour of this film is so subtle and sophisticated that it may have gone way over the heads of many Americans, being so very European in nature that Americans would be uncertain as to whether they dare laugh in all the right places. The scene where Elijah Wood announces that he is a vegetarian is typical both of the Ukraine and of the clash of cultures, yielding belly laughs aplenty. The Czech author Karel Capek's gnomic humour in FAIRY TALES and WAR WITH THE NEWTS closely resembles the tone of this film's humour, which comes deep from the Eastern European psyche, and is a product of the wry witticisms needed to cope with living for decades under a succession of oppressive dictatorships. But there is nothing funny about the Nazi story which comes to light in the latter half of this film, as grim realizations come to the fore. The Polish actress Laryssa Lauret is magnificent as the surviving sister of the mysterious Augustina for whom Elijah Wood is searching, armed with an old photograph given to him by his grandmother on her deathbed in America. Wood himself is perfect for the lead part, with his weird appearance and eyes which look like those of an alien, greatly magnified with powerful spectacles, so that his every puzzlement becomes the size of the screen. He plays a frozen character who cannot show or display emotion but who is making a 'rigid search of the past' in order to comprehend the present. The film articulates its message by saying that the past lives in us, and we become illuminated by revealing, discovering, and understanding it. The editing of this film, which was shot entirely on location in the Ukraine, by Andrew Marcus and Craig McKay, is superb, and the intercutting of the expressions of the face of the dog who also stars in the film contribute greatly to the hilarity of the comedy. All the comic moments are cut perfectly to maximize the laughs. The 'deranged dog' of the story is an especially brilliant comic touch. And there is mystery too: where is the mysterious village of Trachimbrod? Why do none of the locals in the remote regions of the Ukraine know of it? What has happened to its inhabitants, which once included Elijah Wood's grandfather? Who, what, and where is or was Augustina? Illumination comes when all is revealed in this hysterically funny and pathetically tragic tale where the transcendent things are brought to light and the internal man 'turns inside out'. If only there were more films as profound, funny, and sad as this one. Let us hope that Liev Schreiber gets another chance to make one, bedazzling us again.

Everything is Illuminated is far better than I was expecting, it's nearly impeccable.The story is about a young man who pays for a guide to help him find the woman who saved his father from death during WWII. He embarks on a journey with a guy and his grandfather.Eugene Hutz is absolutely hilarious and his accent is amazing. He definitely was a great choice, not sure why they chose a musical artist, but he definitely was the best choice for all the right reasons. Elijah Wood does great portraying his character, the sophisticated young American.Although you will enjoy this film, it should be noted that the comedy is extremely apparent in the first half of the film, but it slowly dims down, then dies altogether as the film transitions into a more dramatic story. You should think of this film as a Comedy -> Comedy/Drama -> Drama, in that precise order.Enjoy it for what it is, and enjoy the artistic value of such a film.

"Everything is Illuminated" is an embarrassingly bad stinker on almost every count, with two exceptions: Eugene Hutz is weirdly, wildly charismatic as Alex, a goofy young Ukrainian who imagines himself a hip-hop star. And "Everything Is Illuminated"'s score is excellent, consisting, as it does, of authentic Eastern European folk music.The first half of "Everything Is Illuminated" consists of g-rated versions of "Borat" jokes. Ukrainians are funny because they try to be cool like Americans. Ukrainians are laughable because they speak English in a simple-minded pidgin, calling "African Americans" "Negroes," for example, and saying "repose" for "sleep." Ukrainians are funny because of their sex lives. Ukrainians are also dirty, irrationally and by nature violent, they hate Jews, they wear unattractive clothing; the men are ready to beat up any newcomer to their town naïve enough to ask for driving directions; the women are either cowed housewives married to husbands and fathers who lead with their fists, or slatternly, sullen, obese waitresses; goat-herding Ukrainian children engage in mindless vandalism like flattening car tires. These folks are so debased that even their dogs are ugly, stupid, and vicious. Yup, there's even a creepy household pet. Of course these comically stupid, ugly, crude yokels are responsible for the Holocaust. At one point, Elijah Wood, as Jonathan Safran Foer, insists that the Ukraine was as bad as Nazi Germany.This nasty stereotype is not the invention of Liev Schreiber, the director and script writer. Schreiber and Safran Foer, the author of the book on which the film is based, are merely exploiting, not inventing, hateful ethnic stereotypes. The image of the brutal Eastern European peasant has been around for centuries. Americans are most familiar with this stereotype from Polak jokes and the film "Borat." Eugene Hutz is genuinely funny in his thankless, Eastern European "Amos-and-Andy"-style role. He acts the Ukrainian dunce with as much grace and dignity as possible, and is the only thing worth watching in the film. Some scenes are laugh out loud funny, especially when Wood lectures Hutz on the use of the term "African American." But "Amos and Andy" was funny, too.After about an hour of Bohunk jokes, "Everything Is Illuminated" abruptly turns off the comedy tap and turns into a turgid, static Holocaust film. What little action there was in the film, provided by Hutz's kinetic mugging, shuffling, and jiving, or by Ukrainians punching other Ukrainians, stops. Characters stand still and offer speeches about horrible things that happened in the past. Jonathan and Alex arrive at the one pleasant house, with the one dignified resident, in all of Ukraine. The colorful cottage is out of a Disney fairy tale. Clean laundry snaps on the line. Orderly rows of sunflowers surround the home. The peasant woman living in the cottage is gracious and lovely. Aha. She's not really Ukrainian. She's Jewish.On the other hand, Elijah Wood, as Jonathan Safran Foer, a modern American Jew, comes off no better than the stereotyped Ukrainians. He, too, is a stereotype: the uptight, obsessional, neurotic, socially backward, weak, frightened, passive Jew. Wood, as Jonathan, is so stiff he could be playing a corpse. A writer and director should have a very sound aesthetic reason for making the Jewish character in a film about the Holocaust a passive Jew. Scheiber has no good reason. He's just playing two stereotypes against each other, insisting that one needn't learn anything from one of the most horrendous crimes in history in order to make a film about it. Given that there is a very self-destructive death of another Jewish character in the movie, Wood's passivity is even more troubling.The Holocaust is never honored by "Everything Is Illuminated." In the unlikely event that this is the only Holocaust film the viewer ever sees, that viewer would have no idea what the Holocaust was. As slow, pretentious, and ponderous as this film is, it never for one moment manages to convey the monumental horror and heartbreak of the Holocaust.Again, I'd love to see Eugene Hutz in just about any new film; meanwhile, I've been watching youtube videos of his band, "Gogol Bordello." Hutz sings and dances like a man who has vowed to live fast, play hard, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.