Category

Vor

• 12.05.09
  Floor washing
  Komissar, Nonna Mordyukova, Proshu Slova, Semnadcat' mgnovenij vesny, Vor (0)

  Last week I tried washing our kitchen floor the way I've seen it done in Russian movies. It's a way to do a good job of it, but it's not that easy. I haven't done enough of it to decide whether the method should help Russian women stay young and agile, or if it would age them prematurely. Last fall I took a one-night-a-week class in conversational Russian at MSU. In a session when our teacher, a young woman from Ukraine, was teaching us how to describe some household activities, I asked her if Russian woman really ...
  
  
• 10.06.09
  Voditel dlya Very
  Nikita Mikhalkov, Pavel Chukhraj, Utomlyonnye solntsem, Voditel dlya Very, Vor (0)

  So far I've watched up through part 5, and so far it's great--one of the best I've seen. I wouldn't have known how good it is based on the Wikipedia article about it, though: The film received mixed reviews from critics. The entertainment magazine Variety referred to the film as "more off-putting than enthralling" and noted that while the film has been compared to the Academy Award–winning Burnt by the Sun, it lacked a main character that a viewer could identify with. Variety commented that Viktor's personal struggles "[seemed] irrelevant" and criticized Petrenko's "limited emotional repertoire", as well ...
  
  
• 07.19.09
  Kommunalki
  Pokrovskiye Vorota, Vor (2)

  Best find of the month: "Communal Living in Russia: A Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life." I learned about it at English Russia. There are video clips of Ilya, who no longer lives in a kommunalka, but who takes his two young children back to see where he once lived. The English voice-over is good in that it doesn't completely obliterate the Russian speaking. Sometimes it follows the Russian, and sometimes precedes it. Very good for language learning. There are also bilingual, side-by-side transcripts in Russian and in English translation. There is also a page ...
  
  

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