Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Latvia but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Latvia
Movie: Kriminālās ekselences fonds [The Foundation of Criminal Excellence]
Director: Oskars Rupenheits
Year: 2018
The Elevator Pitch: A TV screenwriter quickly gets in over his head when he tries to enact the heist schemes he writes about for his job.
How Was the Movie?: I mostly enjoyed this movie, it had a lot of real pops of brilliance and comes together in the end after some really long winded and sagging parts in the middle though it does seem like a person who was given money for a movie and kind of understood they would only get one swing at trying to put in all their ideas.
The film is a little rough around the edges but there’s enough enjoyable moments in there that kept me hanging on scene to scene. I was expecting more crime shenanigans but it was more of three stooges esque guys who are too stupid to know their plan won’t work level of mistakes which most people enjoy but it verges a little too hard on cringe comedy for me. I found it interesting because the visuals of Riga aren’t that different from Tallinn but the attitude is quite different.
I probably wouldn’t recommend this movie if only for the weird gay panic jokes and the fact that it doesn’t really work as one cohesive film but the costumes are at least extremely fun and all the old soviet tech everywhere was interesting to see. You can tell I wasn’t that into it because I basically have nothing to say, I think the secondary problem is that it was a comedy and it didn’t generally strike me as very funny most of the time so I was just waiting between jokes that weren’t landing for me. I don’t regret watching it but it’s overlong at 2 full hours.
What was for Dinner?: If I had to judge anything about this dinner it would be that for some reason I picked the most Estonian-like dinner possible? Not sure if I did this subconsciously or just how I was feeling when I made the list the first time.
For the main dish I made kotletes which are just cutlets with a mushroom sourcream sauce and on the side a potato salad (kartupeļu salāti). I made my cutlets from turkey and this was absolutely completely fine. I don’t usually make this kind of food but it’s very homey and delicious, it’s hard to go wrong with it. For dessert I made rūpjmaizes kārtojums which is a layered rye breadcrumb, cream, and sour berry jam trifle basically and I kind of absolutely hated this which was funny because in theory I should like this as I love black and rye bread, I love cream desserts, and I love sour berry jams but all together it was heavy and overly sour and too many flavors even though there’s too much in it. I enjoyed about one and a half bites before I gave the rest to my husband who thought it was great.
That’s it for Latvia, see you next in Nigeria!