Nominations for the forthcoming Nikas, the Russian Oscars. You can buy a black market ticket to the ceremony on 31 March for $5,000 (stanis-sadal, in Russian),
"Russia's leading independent movie producer, Alexander Rodnyansky, has taken a majority stake in one of the country's leading art-house distribs, Kino Bez Granits" (Variety).
Transformers part III to be shot in Moscow (AIF, in Russian)?
Mike Newell's film about Litvinenko [to be called Londongrad] will be half Bourne, half Syriana (alexgoldfarb, in Russian).
Universal shuts down Timur Bekmambetov project after Angelina Jolie refuses to take part (MIGnews, in Russian).
From the film Once There Were Three Bachelors.
Let's Bring Art To The People, 1979.
22/02/2010
[North] London-based former Harry Potter director Mike Newell is to make a film, based on his own script, about the Litvinenko affair (gazeta.ru, in Russian).
Review of Alexei Popogrebsky's How I Ended Last Summer (Variety). It was the only Russian movie in the main competition at the Berlin Film Festival last week; in the event it received silver medals for actors and cameraman (Lenta.ru, in Russian). I saw the director's previous movie, Simple Things, and it was good. The title of this current film is somewhat more amusing in Russian than in English: it is grammatically incorrect: Как Я Провел Этим Летом.
15/02/2010
Russians seek co-productions at Berlin Film Festival (Variety) (thanks, MK).
Renny Harlin movie Georgia.
08/02/2010
A Room and a Half is a fictionalised biography of Joseph Brodsky (NYT) (thanks, MK). I once, in the late 80s, spent Christmas day with Brodsky: he lived in a flat over the road from me in Hampstead Hill Gardens, London, and we both ended up in the same neighbour's house in the afternoon.
Gibraltar court gives none of Badri Patarkatsishvili's estate to Joseph Kay (aka Soso Kakiashvili) (Izrus, in Russian).
Berezovsky's fortune falls below a billion (Kompromat, in Russian)?
Potanin plans to give his wealth to a charitable foundation (FT).
01/02/2010
The Desert Of Forbidden Art is inspired by the story of Igor Savitsky and the Nukus Museum (desertofforbiddenart) (thanks, MK). Once upon a time, at the suggestion of Ray Johnson, I wrote a film-script about a young art dealer in Moscow rescuing masterpieces of socialist realism; it didn't go anywhere.
Russian travesty-themed movie to open non-competition programme at Berlin Film Festival (stanis-sadal). Seems you can watch it online (my-hit.ru).
25/01/2010
Olga Sviblova's ground-breaking 1988 film on the post-1957 avant-garde, Black Square. Download (net-film).
Positive review of the December movie release Antikiller 3 (stillavinsergei, in Russian). It's out on DVD and apparently you can down load it here (Myfilmix; somewhat NSFW ads on this page).
The French film Le Concert, about Brezhnev-era classical musicians, is a hit in France (Nouvelobs, in French).
Tarkovsky season at LACMA (LA Weekly) (thanks, MK).
Trailer for the film On This Earth Live Kind, Good People.
13 translators from the VHS era. As far as I know, these movies were dubbed on a single run-through, without preparation.
Pavel Bardin's Film Russia-88 is being investigated under anti-extremism laws (Kommersant, in Russian):
a band of skinheads makes agitprop video-clips for the internet. (...) The head of the band, Shtyk, finds out that his sister is dating a boy from the Caucasus, Robert. Shtyk calls a meeting at which his friend kills Robert. (...) The prototype of the protagonist is reckoned to be the neo-nazi Sergei Martsinkevich, known as Tesak, who is currently in jail
I would add: and the prototype of the plot seems to be Romeo and Juliet.
Does Avatar plagiarise the Strugatsky brothers (Guardian)? St P communists demand director James Cameron's arrest (Kommersant, in Russian).
Review of Alexander Sokurov's The Sun (Chicago Tribune) (thanks, MK):
Very little happens in the usual sense. It is 1945. The ravages of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, glimpsed later, lay well outside the realm of the palace of Hirohito. The emperor, played by Issei Ogata, prepares for another day. His chamberlain (Shiro Sano) discusses the immediate agenda, while his other aides observe, listen, wonder about their fates. When the key encounter between Hirohito and Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson, miscast and diffident) arrives in "The Sun," it barely registers as dramatic, let alone momentous.
A consideration of Jean-Luc Godard's rarely-shown film The Kids Play Russian (Les enfants jouent à la Russie, 1993) (lights in the dusk).
Review of Karen Shakhnazarov's Vanished Empire, about perestroika-era youth (Seattle Post Globe):
Every generation has its vanished empire, its city of the wind, the one blown away by time. In Karen Shakhnazarov’s magnificent new film, that city and that time is the Moscow of 1970’s, where a group of college friends, with an emphasis on a love triangle involving classmates Sergei, Stepan, and Lyuda, express their youth by rebelling against the rules of the Soviet game.
Thorold Dickinson's Queen of Spades re-released (Herald Scotland).
Sherlock Holmes, Russian trailer.
21/12/2009
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose! Unexpected fragment of 1955 film Behind The Department Store Window (via max1976).
14/12/2009
A fragment of Abram Room's 1936 masterpiece An Austere Youth, banned in the USSR for several decades.
07/12/2009
On the families - Mikhalkov, Bondarchuk, Yankovsky, Todorovsky - that control Russian cinema (Svobodnaya Pressa, in Russian). Below, actor Mikhail Efremov gives his opinion of Nikita Sergeevich Mikhalkov ("заебца") and writer Boris Akunin ("пошел он на хуй").
Review of The Last Station, a new movie about the end of Tolstoy's life (NYT):
“The Last Station,” written and directed by Michael Hoffman (“The Emperor’s Club”) and based on a novel by Jay Parini, is the kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste. The humor is mirthless, the pathos is daubed on like jam on a blini, and the shuffling of books and papers substitutes for real intellectual energy.
And a look at contemporary Russian and Georgian propaganda movies (Time).
30/11/2009
Paavel Lungin's film Tsar upsets Vyacheslav Manyagin because Ivan the Terrible, "founder of the Russian state", is portrayed as a "schizophrenic, sadist and maniac".
23/11/2009
Excerpt from Svetlana Baskova's The Green Elephant.
Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm was adapted from Chekhov and anticipated Nabokov's Lolita (NYT) (thanks, MK).
World Socialists offer extended defence of Roman Polansky based on his artistic career (WSWS). I can't see the socialist logic; maybe anything the USA does, they're against it.
Best Cold War movies (LAT) (thanks, MK)? Well, I'm sorry Betsy, I guess you did a quick Google trawl and a poll of your mates, but it just ain't good enough: any list that doesn't mention The Manchurian Candidate (1962 version) fails.
09/11/2009
Oligarch/tycoon news:
Roman Abramovich drops £29,000 on NY restaurant lunch for six (Telegraph) (thanks, MK).
Kazakh-Jewish oligarch Alexander Mashkevich is the reticent owner of the Lady Lara super-yacht (Izrus, in Russian).
Len Blavatnik has bought a controlling stake in Mel Gibson's movie-rental and -rights firm Icon UK (gazeta.ru, in Russian).
Kazakhstan stuff:
Italian PM Berlusconi praises the virility of Kazakh men (Telegraph).
Yep, those men are virile enough for a Russian bride scam at $1-5,000 a time plus military housing benefits (AP).
Pawel Pawlikowski in praise of Chimkent-born documentary film-maker Sergei Dvortsevoy (Guardian).
Aktau City is a new "energy showcase" metropolis being constructed from scratch in Kazkhstan's western desert (TOL).
Kazakh patriotism is at an all-time high of 90.4% according to the latest poll, up from 53.4% in 2006 (Tsentraziya, in Russian).
Pavel Lungin's movie Tsar, about Ivan the Terrible, premiered in Moscow last week. The comparison in everyone's mind is to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, widely interpreted as a vision of Stalinism; Lungin has described his film as "a metaphor for Russia past and present". Review (Screen Daily):
...the tone of The Tsar grows increasingly overwrought. One moment armies are engaged in mortal combat, the next the Tsar is being carried aloft through white clouds of Spring blossom. That may very well reflect the reality of 16th century Russia but it makes for an indigestible narrative.
Apparently really bad new Russia-themed movie (LAT):
In the thoroughly terrible "Victory Day," Sam Cassels (Sean Ramsay), a hot-headed photojournalist working in Prague, becomes a one-man judge and jury after abducting a billionaire Russian oligarch (Milan Kolik) he accuses of crimes against humanity in the former Soviet Union. (...) But as Oksana, a young Russian woman trafficked into sex slavery -- and saddled with the world's worst hairdo -- who Cassels tries to save from evil forces, Natalie Shiyanova gives perhaps the film's most egregiously awful performance.
More promising: a Room And A Half is "A fanciful and melancholy portrait of exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky" (Hollywood Reporter). For some time I lived opposite Brodsky in Hampstead Hill Gardens, a street in North London. But we didn't have much to do with each other.
Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, who is maybe a Russian spy. Looks fun; but there has to be a job in Hollywood for someone who can get the putative "Russians" speaking properly: the name's not Vas-ili, it's Va-sil-i.
02/11/2009
The ninth Russian Film Week in New York is 13-22 November (Russia!).
26/10/2009
Trailer for Timur Bekmambetov-produced Black Lightning, about a flying Volga.
Andy Garcia plays Mikheil Saakashvili in a movie about last year's Russia-Georgia conflict (Reuters) (thanks, MK).
Veselchaki (Merry Fellows), a movie about drag-queens, is "the first articulate film in our country that supports... gay people" (AFP) (thanks, MK).
19/10/2009
The 3rd London Russian Film Festival is at the Apollo Cinema 30 October-8 November (Academica Rossica). Full programme .pdf (Academica Rossica).
05/10/2009
It's all pedophilia this week... Russia's most powerful film-director, NIkita Mikhalkov, has come out in support of the recently-arrested world famous convicted pedophile rapist Roman Polansky (donbass.ua, in Russian):
Nikita Mikhalkov has spoken out in defence of his friend Roman Polansky, arrested at Zurich Airport. The Russian master announced that there was nothing unnatural in relationships with young girls.
And while we're on the subject, here's the refrain from a prize-winning Russian poem about Polansky (Polit.ru):
Поланского поймали! Америка, ликуй! Конец твоей печали - ему отрежут нос.
Rage, starring Jude Law as a Russian transvestite model, goes straight to mobile phone (Daily Mail).
The 1943 film of Samuil Marshak's anti-Nazi propaganda poem Young Fritz was never shown and was destroyed at the studio; but now you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. It looks very interesting, in fact. Part one below.
Leningrad in the 60s: A Day Of Sun And Rain.
28/09/2009
At the New York Film Festival: "Don Argott’s Art of the Steal (...) energetically traces the history and scandals surrounding the Barnes Foundation, home to one of the world’s most celebrated collections of modern art" (NYT).
Video interview with Young Russian film directors visiting USA (via Telluride Inside).
14/09/2009
Gerard Depardieu playing in Kazakh movie (RFE/RL).
24/08/2009
Nikita Mikhalkov is kicking ass: hostile Iskusstvo Kino magazine forced out of premises; union rival Marlen Khutsiev forced out of film-makers' school VGIK (RFE/RL).
Madonna ex Guy Ritchie to make movie about striker Andrei Arshavin's transfer to Arsenal (MIGnews, in Russian).
