New Year Wishes

 Ironiya Sudba  No Responses »
Jan 012010
 

new year party 32

С Новым  Годом!

Before midnight we watched some of the music show that was on RTR Planeta. It has been a while since I watched one of those. This was a special one for New Year’s.

I was going to make a comment about how it’s like the one that English Russia talked about a few days ago, when it pointed out that the show actually recorded over a long period, several days in advance, and that most of the fruit is fake and the champaigne is really lemonade. But that wasn’t news to me. I had figured out long ago that these shows couldn’t possibly be live. When their turns came, the performers would need more time to go from the audience to the stage to perform, for just one thing.

Then I realized that tonight we were watching the very same show English Russia had told us about. English Russia had given us a few photos of in advance. One of them is shown above.

It was interesting to watch for people I recognized. Alla Pugacheva was in the audience. And I thought I saw Dmitri Dyuzhev a couple of times, but if he was one of the performers I missed it. Some of the singers I’ve seen before — some of them have distinctive voices — but I don’t know their names.

medvedev-2009

In the movie Ironiya Sudba-2, Vladimir Putin gives a brief greeting at midnight on New Year’s Eve. I wondered if there would be the same thing tonight. Sure enough, when the time came the music stopped so Dmitri Medvedev could give a little speech.

Now that I’ve listened to it, I’ve seen more of him on TV than of Barak Obama. Maybe if you count only the words I understood, it’s about the same as what I’ve seen of Obama.

Some wishes for the New Year:

May whistleblowing police officers like Alexey Dymovskiy be able to speak out on YouTube without being fired and prosecuted. May whistleblowing bloggers like Steven Frischling be able to reveal the silliness of government regulations without being threatened and intimidated by the TSA.

May dissidents like Lyudmila Alexeyeva in Russia and the Tea Party Protestors in the United States have reason to be proud to live in countries that are liberal enough to allow them to take to the streets to criticize their governments.

 Posted by Reticulator at 4:04 am

Brat-2 fulfils its purpose

 Aleksey Balabanov, Brat, Gruz 200, Ironiya Sudba  No Responses »
Nov 072009
 

brat2

I recognized the above scene near the end of Brat-2. It was from the cover to one of Anna Lawton’s books.

The main purposes of sequels is to exploit us and disappoint us, I suppose. Brat-2 fulfilled its purpose better than, say, the sequel to Irony of Fate, which while not as good as the original, was worth watching twice, and which I’d like to watch again sometime.

After it was over, I was hoping Brat-2 could be excused by having been made by someone other than the maker of the original Brat, but IMDB tells us that Aleksey Balabanov made them both. Balabanov also made another excellent film: Gruz 200. Maybe sequels are just too limiting even for somone of Balabanov’s abilities.

Both Brats are violent films, but the violence in Brat-2 is merely senseless violence. In Brat-2 we aren’t even made to feel horrified by what it does to the victims or the perpetrator. Victims just pose so they can be easy targets to be gunned down.

There is nothing of Doestoevsky in Brat-2, like there is in Brat with the relationship with Daniela’s brother, or the girlfriend, or the German or Kat. In Brat-2 the brother is just dropped out of the picture at the end, which is symbolic of what’s missing in the entire film.

 Posted by Reticulator at 5:26 am

Party-Time

 Barbara Brylska, Beregis Avtomobilya, Eldar Ryazanov, Ironiya Sudba, Semnadcat' mgnovenij vesny, Sluzhebnyiy Roman, Voditel dlya Very, Vokzal dlya Dvoikh  2 Responses »
Oct 132009
 

irony-10

I still haven’t worked up enough nerve to finish watching Voditel dlya Very. Instead I took in something easy and watched parts of Ironya Sudba.

I’ve watched it a few times already, but this time something caught my eye just a few seconds from the end of Part One.

In most of the Eldar Ryazanov films I’ve seen, he works something about western communication technology into the film. In Vokzal dlya Voikh (1982) it was a VCR player. In Sluzhebnyy roman it was a built-in 8-track player in a car. In these two films, the items were shown as if some new technology was being introduced to the viewers. In Beregis Avtomobilya the bad guy helped obtain a western tape player (if I remember correctly) on the black market, because the customer said a Soviet one wouldn’t do.

Ryazanov has made a lot more films than that, most of which I have not seen. So I don’t know if this is a theme that recurs throughout. Until I saw the above screenshot in Ironya Sudba, I thought it might be an exception. But the close-up of the phonograph turntable shows the English words “Party-Time.”

Why an American (or English) phonograph in a film in which Barbara Brylska had her voice dubbed because it wasn’t Russian enough? I presume that in 1971 there were Russian phonographs, too. Is Ryazanov playing a little game with us?

Google hasn’t helped me learn much about Party-Time phonographs, btw. I’ve found a few that are sold as collectors items, but they look cheaper than the one shown in the film. It’s not a brand name that I recall ever paying attention to.

 Posted by Reticulator at 1:32 am

Irony of fate, the sequel

 Andrei Myagkov, Barbara Brylska, Ironiya Sudba, Liya Akhedzhakova, Yuri Yakovlev  No Responses »
May 112008
 

Tonight we watched the rest of Irony of Fate, the Sequel. It was better than we had expected — not bad for a sequel. It was fun to see all the actors again, 30 years older than in the original. Andrei Myagkov and Yuri Yaklovev have aged nicely. Barbara Brylska looks great, but surely has had some top-notch help from plastic surgeons to look that good in her mid 60s. It would have been nice to see Liya Akhedzhakova, too. She is the only character, other than the two mothers, who I found missing in the sequel.

The original from 1975, besides being a goofy comedy and a love story, was a satire on the uniformity of the Brezhnev era. This one is in part a satire on the cell phone culture.

If there is any doubt that this is a post-Soviet movie, the militsia (police) are portrayed as sleepy, good-natured drunks (it’s New Year’s Eve, after all) who are easily deceived and bribed. I wonder how long Putin will allow that before movies have to go back to portraying them as in the Soviet days.

The younger generation of actors did fine work, I thought. Sergei Bezrukov as Irakliy was great. I’d like to see what other kinds of characters he can play. I was rooting for a reformed Irakliy who learns to get his priorities straight would to get the girl in the end (and kiss her without interruptions from that cell phone attached to his head) but it was not to be. Konstantin Khabensky, who plays Zhenya’s son, does fine as a drunken Russian, but drunken Russians are a dime a dozen in movies. Liza Boyarskaya as Nadya, Jr. doesn’t have a lot to do besides look pretty — compared to what Barbara Brylska did in the original — but she showed some signs of being a capable actress anyway.

 Posted by Reticulator at 10:49 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
© 2012 Kino Reticulator Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha
Easy AdSense by Unreal