this is a brutal move in many ways and it's going to take me many small doses to get through it but it is also a very interesting movie from a psychological perspective - very. i also recognised some of the comments made early on about the state of russia in the 1990s. I was in kazakhstan in 2000 and you could sense the underbelly everywhere. it was a charming, but scary place as it made the transition out of the USSR. my host gave me plenty of advice about survival. but mostly i couldn't help wondering about the comment early on - it's easy to kill a man but its hard to live with it.
