As a clip compilation, it arguably has little point other than entertainment: it’d probably be an incredible communal experience with a good house and plenty of booze. The Road Movie has aspirations to become something greater than the sum of its parts. The dispassionate editing is both the film’s worst and best attribute, forcing its personality to rely exclusively on that of the footage itself all the setups and payoffs are found entirely within individual clips. A few montages here and there pump up the pacing a little, but most of it is just clip-on-clip. Surprisingly, Kalashnikov’s curation is much more straightforward than one would expect - its aggressive trailer gives a decidedly false idea of what the movie’s actually like. That’s all in the clips themselves, of course. That’s not true, obviously, as police-brutality victims can (or can't) tell you, but The Road Movie’s subjects’ reliance on their dashcams is fascinating - an indicator of the film’s status as a product of the “share and subscribe” age. There’s a curious measure of protection to the dashcam, at least psychologically - a sense that because everything’s being recorded, that people can be held accountable for their behaviour. The craziest shit in the world can take place outside the car, but the camera remains unaffected, even as drivers try to make sense of their surrounding world. Dashcams are, by definition, cold, impassive eyes, constantly moving forward and viewing everything with zero editorial distinction. Indeed, the nature of the cameras recording this material makes for an intriguing watch. “Did you record that?” is a frequent refrain others struggle to work out how to operate their hardware. Obviously, everyone with a dashcam knows they have a dashcam installed, so many clips feature commentary about how everything is being recorded. Remarkably, nearly everyone involved in these clips seems self-aware to one degree or another. In-car commentary helps to make many clips laugh-out-loud funny, like when one driver encounters a bear running full-tilt along the highway and sighs “that’s just the fucking thing I need," or terrifying, like the family caught in the middle of a police shootout. These tiny stories - minutes or less in length - are the stuff Weird YouTube is made of. One clip even documents a dashcam’s own theft and recovery. Road rage, police chases, and disastrous driving lessons mix with explosions, lost animals, naked people, and people high on drugs. ![]() A military tank attempts to go through a commercial car wash. The best clips in The Road Movie are those that expose bizarre mini-dramas from everyday Russian life. Then the Chelyabinsk meteor happens, and shit starts to get wild. Escalating from there, we see near-misses and non-misses, car accidents of every variety, bad driving, flooding and forest fires and all manner of inclement weather. This dashcam odyssey begins slowly, introducing its Russian setting with a series of driving mishaps caused primarily by icy roads. You’ve seen stuff like this before: footage shot from cameras fixed to automobile dashboards, usually depicting wackiness taking place outside. That’s more than one question.)Īs for the content itself, The Road Movie is a smartly-curated mixtape. ![]() What is special about The Road Movie? How is it edited? Where does it sit in the documentary genre? Would this film - to all appearances, a simple compilation of Russian dashcam footage - bring anything to the table that warranted a theatrical presentation, as opposed to one on YouTube? The clips are sourced from YouTube, after all, and presented in a format familiar to anyone who’s spent time on the internet. ![]() Heading into Dmitri Kalashnikov’s documentary The Road Movie, I had one question.
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