The Road Movie

2016 documentary

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A compilation of dashboard camera videos from Russia.

Hold on a second. This isn't a movie. This is just some guy compiling Russian dashboard camera footage and calling it a documentary, isn't it?

That's probably true--the closing credits actually confirm it--but that hasn't stopped critics from really liking this one. I'll confess that I enjoyed watching it, too, but I don't really think there's enough done creatively with the assembling of these videos to make this a real documentary. There's no meaning with the progression of the videos. They could have been put in any order at all and had the exact same effect. They don't really paint a comprehensive picture of Russian people or anything like that. It's really just like going to YouTube, setting it so that videos will autoplay, and watching a bunch of Russian dashboard camera videos.

I really did enjoy a lot of it though, and there are a lot of memorable highlights. A monkey-man jumping on a stranger's hood and gesticulating wildly, a woman wandering aimlessly and eventually reaching the hood of another car, a tank being washed at a car wash, the dodging of horses with the driver exclaiming "Fuck a duck, bitch!", seeing that giant meteor thing that was all the rage a few years ago, a guy stealing the camera from a parked car, some sledgehammer road rage, a parachutist. A lot of the videos are accompanied with whatever music the driver and passengers are listening to, and a lot of times the selections bring an irony to the whole thing.

The real highlight is a terrifying, psychedelic forest fire that some people are, for whatever reason, driving through. That was something else!

I'd recommend this even though I'm not sure it's a movie.