Most of people who watch Branded (also known as The Mad Cow and Москва 2017), a Russian and American science fiction film written and directed by Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerayn, will choose to hate it. Why? In the Western world because it attacks the consumerism - their life style, everywhere else - because they will feel disconnected! There is no other option!
As the movie begins, the names of famous visionaries including Joan of Arc, Albert Einstein and Alexander the Great flash on the screen (probably hundred different names) and the caption reads, "All of them saw things others didn't see. All of them changed the world." In this story, starting in the early 1980s, in Soviet Russia, young Misha Galkin is struck by lightning. A woman examines him and, seeing that he is still alive, predicts that his life will not be ordinary. And it wasn't! In a series of documentary-style flashbacks, narrated by the same unseen narrator, we were led through the events to see how Misha used his natural marketing savvy to rise from a poor clerk to a marketing exec. His big break came when he met Bob, an American hired to spread Western brands and businesses in post-Communist Russia...
Did you know that this film was not screened for critics and has received predominantly negative reviews? Go back to my first paragraph - people who live from consumerism would not like it presented like this! This is much deeper movie which tried to even educate the audience... but instead of "thanks" was branded as "convoluted and pretentious... so packed with ideological pretension". Yes, it is ideological, it is silly at moments, far from executed the best possible way, and I will say for one reason: at least one of the directors tried to sit on "two chairs" - criticizing the late stages of the capitalism and trying to make money out of it in that same stage of the capitalism. The team was just not brave enough to carry the mission to the end - and they failed.~
If you don't think that this society is fair, and that politicians are just executives for the more powerful people, believe in 'voices' and love good photography, give it a go. A NO GO for everyone else!
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