Category

Oleg Basilashvili

• 11.16.09
  Inna Mikhailovna Churikova
  Idiot, Inna Mikhailovna Churikova, Oleg Basilashvili (2)

  I don't normally care much for movies about the lives and manners of aristocratic families. But this family in Idiot is fun to watch. I'm not sure how much of the credit should go to Dostoevsky and how much to the filmmakers, but together they made these people interesting. It isn't just the individuals, but the inter-generational interactions that draw us in. There is some of your typical youthful rebellion, but the whole of the relationship between parents and children goes a lot deeper than that. In this scene, General Yepanchin (nicely played by Oleg ...
  
  
• 03.21.09
  Gulag hair
  Oleg Basilashvili, Vokzal dlya Dvoikh (4)

  The film Railway Station for Two begins and ends with a scene in a Siberian gulag. The above screenshot is from the opening scene. Excellent gulag photography in this film, btw. I love the above scene -- not as a place to be, of course, but as an excellent portrayal of a northern winter in such a setting. In Anna Lawton's 1992 book, "Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in our Time", she says this about the movie: Because of a car accident caused by his wife -- a materialistic woman representative of the nouveau riche ...
  
  
• 02.22.09
  Visitors
  Kalina Krasnaya, Oleg Basilashvili, Osenniy marafon, Vasili Shukshin, Yevgeny Leonov (0)

  In this scene from Osenniy Marafon, the character played by Yevgeny Leonov (on the right) walks in on Buzykin (Oleg Basilashvili) and his guest, Bill Hansen. Leonov's character doesn't even notice Bill until he says two words in Russian (not his first language). Then there is a long silence while Leonov looks at him suspiciously, followed by an introduction (shown above). Leonov then asks, "Does he understand Russian?" Well, I thought it was funny. Bill knows more Russian than I do, but there was something about the way he sounded when he opened his mouth that made clear ...
  
  
• 02.18.09
  Pedestrians vs drivers
  Oleg Basilashvili, Osenniy marafon, Vokzal dlya Dvoikh (0)

  The van driver in this 1979 movie is angry at Buzykin, the character played by Oleg Basilashvili, who was preoccupied with problems caused by the competing attentions needed by his wife and his girlfriend. Buzykin wasn't watching where he was going, and got nicked by the van. The subtitle is of angry words from the driver. It's interesting in that three years later, Basilashvili was in another movie in which this same standard of justice was the premise. In "Vokzal dlya dvoikh," his wife hit a pedestrian in the dark. Since the pedestrian wasn't drunk, ...
  
  

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