IZO

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.

Anna Semenovich in Hitler is Kaput trailer.

Avatar posters (via dmitrivrubel LJ).

Oligarchs/tycoons

Len Blavatnik bidding for MGM (Moscow Times).

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).

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).

Olga Sviblova's ground-breaking 1988 film on the post-1957 avant-garde, Black Square. Download (net-film).

Cinema news

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.

Cinema news

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).

Cinema stuff

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.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose! Unexpected fragment of 1955 film Behind The Department Store Window (via max1976).

A fragment of Abram Room's 1936 masterpiece An Austere Youth, banned in the USSR for several decades.

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).

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").

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".

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.

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).

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.

Crap movies may as well be watched as Russian bootlegs (Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava)?

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).

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.

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.

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.

The ninth Russian Film Week in New York is 13-22 November (Russia!).

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).

The 3rd London Russian Film Festival is at the Apollo Cinema 30 October-8 November (Academica Rossica). Full programme .pdf (Academica Rossica).

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.

Full article in .pdf form (Mikhalkov Polansky).

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.

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).

Renata Litvinova-and-Zemfira-are-married rumour (radulova).

Gerard Depardieu playing in Kazakh movie (RFE/RL).

Madonna ex Guy Ritchie to make movie about striker Andrei Arshavin's transfer to Arsenal (MIGnews, in Russian).

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).

Hollywood planning a movie on the Russia-Georgia conflict (Obozrevatel, in Russian).

1987 Russian underground movie: Igor and Gleb Aleinikov's The Cruel Illness Of Men (maxmaxovich).

Film-stars pix Russian chix. The list is growing.

Leonardo DiCaprio is squiring Russian model Anne Vyalitsyna (SFGate) (thanks, MK). Mel and Oksana (iol). Ashton and Margarita (MIGnews, in Russian). And last but not least: "Is Miami Social’s George French’s Russian girlfriend Lina Fidler a prostitute or escort?" (starcasm.net).

Alexander Sokurov's documentary about the Leningrad blockade will be shown on 9 September at the Venice Film Festival (RT).

This movie's ads were plasted all over the NY buses last week: Orphan, a horror film based on the controversial practice of adopting Russian children, maybe; in this case it turns out bad (Big Picture Big Sound). More here (atomictown.com):

Isabelle Fuhrman’s Esther also arguably sits close to the top of the list of best kid-horror movie villains. Her dark, kewpie-doll eyes are the perfect picture of machine-like malice. Sometimes, she has a Russian accent. Sometimes, she doesn’t. You almost think that’s on purpose.

Confusion and disputes over the ownership of rights is preventing the broadcast of classic Soviet films such as The Irony of Fate and A Dog's Heart on Russian TV (MK, in Russian).

Ukraine bans Bruno (Guardian).

Everyone, MB included, seems to agree that Mikhail Kalatozov's (Kalatozishvili) 1964 Soviet-Cuban movie Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), which I watched recently for the first time at Berlin's Arsenal classic-movie cinema, is visually one of the most amazing films ever made. Everyone also seems to agree the story is rubbish (imdb). It's certainly simplistic. But wasn't there youthful idealistic revolutionary revulsion against Batista, his repressions and his mob ties? And aren't most movies fairy tales?

Actor Rupert Everett's book of memoirs, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, has a colourful chapter about shooting Quiet Flows the Don under Sergei Bondarchuk at Mosfilm in 1990; Everett was in Moscow for a year. You can't read the relevant pages at Amazon for free yet, unfortunately (I got my copy for £1.50 at Sue Ryder Cancer Care in Aldeburgh):

Gangs of Turks posing as queers hung out in the little park in front of the Bolshoi, as Bruno found to his cost one drunken night. Mid-embrace, his lover's friends leapt out from behind trees and stole all his clothes, leaving him in his underpants in minus ten degrees, jumping up and down while trying to hitch a ride home.

I doubt they were Turks, although I don't doubt the anecdote.