One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Excellent, a Must See

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The summary translated the sub-title phrase as "I don't like your answering machine." Such was the problem with the translation and a fluent speaker in the room was a terrific help for me. What the actor had actually said was "I crap on your robot." Was It, Or Was It Not is the English title of this film, a mockumentary about the fall of communism in Romania. The story centers around a drunk who wastes his entire paycheck on booze, and every payday gets shaken down by his sponsors and returns home to his nagging wife. The film builds up slowly to a talk show which portrays the masses as being ineffective to stop anything the nomeklatura want. As a result of such unheroic conformity, nobody did anything to get rid of communism, even the execution of the brutal Ceaucescu was mere amusement shown on the boob tube.Such is the hard lesson of government overthrow, and Americans need to take notice.

Excellent !! I laughed and agreed to every scene of this movie. Indeed, you have to know the Romanian society and most of all the language (with the present English subtitles it misses most of the funny points). Like Ion Luca Caragiale the best Romanian satiric writer, the movie director caught the spirit of Romanian society (verbaly brave, practically gutless) like Fellini on Italians. Very good camera work, low budget movie and excellent results. The theme of this movie raises more interesting issues (and perhaps historical facts) that Romania never went through a real revolution, but only local rebellions or less, and went from one dictatorship to another (including several hundred years of Turkish occupation). Good work and very funny !!! 2 fingers up.

There is really a lot to this movie. Even thought there is almost no evident action, except for the long television broadcast of an obnoxious talk show - even some apparently loose ends or inconclusive stories - the fact is you can ponder on days on this beautiful work of art. Acting is superb in most cases, and images of dusk and dawn in the freezing Romanian winter - so gray, so hard - are pure poetry.The reference to dogma, among other keen jokes, talks about a clever story writer, and a cultured film maker. I'm really glad I got to see this movie as a part of the "Eurocine" European movie showcase that visits us these days (april 08) in Bogota and the rest of Colombia. We get a chance to see the best of Romania, a country apparently so far away, yet so close to our hearts.

Director Porumboiu confesses to admiring the early work of Jim Jarmusch, but this feels as if it could have spun off from one idea in a Tati comedy. It is set in an un-named little town, somewhere east of Bucharest and built mostly of drab post-communist concrete. All of the exterior shots emphasise the drab modernity, in grainy near-monochrome. In contrast to this, the lives of the town's citizens are described almost as if they are living in a village, during the build-up to New Year; or as the subtitles have it, 'new year's'. The old man who regularly does a 'Santa', the school teacher who throws his earnings down his throat, the talk-show host desperately attempting to gather enough guests to discuss whether or not a revolution happened locally to coincide with the downfall of Ceaucescu, the kid who wants to be a video artist instead of gamely pointing the TV camera where he is told. The story introduces all these characters, giving them no obvious interconnection, until they are dropped into the TV studio with the added pressures of real time and occasional phone-in callers. It's here that the quiet, wry humour steps up a level, and with especially the creative use of the 'F' word gets the audience laughing out loud instead of smiling sadly. There's a kind of coda, taking a line from the interview about how street lights work and extending it into a metaphor, back in the grainy streets as darkness falls again, but dressed up for the season. If it were music, it might take its place beside the romantics, although it's perhaps closer in spirit to Zappa. Discuss!