Dark Russian Springtime
Mar. 31st, 2020 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinIt started with Magnitsky the Musical, a story about Russian tax fraud and government corruption, property markets, and the elections of 2016, rendered in indie folk ballads; incongruous, and yet somehow successful. Shortly afterwards, The Death of Stalin – simultaneous bumbling and horror at the top of Soviet power – finally turned up on Netflix, so I gave that another spin. Then I caught up with Chernobyl, last year's harrowing HBO series about nuclear disaster and the tension between an effective response and Soviet political ideology.
I've decided to embrace the theme and just make this a Dark Russian Springtime – turns out there's been a film adaptation of the Kursk tragedy (submarine disaster vs post-Soviet pride), which unlike the other two I distinctly, viscerally remember being in the news. There is also a new film about the journalist who uncovered the Holodomor (Soviet government, this time being very effective, engineering a famine/genocide in Ukraine).
This one is particularly interesting because I learned, later in life, that one of my most influential childhood movies was directed by someone who was already famous for rather gritty Eastern European art films: Agnieszka Holland. Mr Jones is hers, too! It was supposed to come out this year, but either The Virus or some cold-footed distributors have forced it online; I intend to get it off Google Play as soon as possible.
It seems appropriate, here, to remind you of my favourite music video of all time:
... Aside from plain entertainment, finding it while in a situation not unlike the one at 3:50 also twigged me to parallels between the internal workings of the Walt Disney Company and those of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – a conceptual link which is validated more as I learn about the USSR. That the pinnacle of American capitalist corporate success should resemble the pinnacle of the Marxist communist state is a surprising and revelatory example of Horseshoe Theory, but it all comes down to human psychology in the end, and humans are humans everywhere. I can't claim priority on this observation: Terry Pratchett hit the nail on the head in Witches Abroad, and he didn't even have to work at Disney to see into its soul.
Does anyone know if there are any good film adaptations of Dostoevsky? I saw an excellent one-man show of Notes From Underground and have a much-beloved radio adaptation of The Idiot (the radio Brothers Karamazov is good too) but I have not heard of any films or TV series. Too dark?
I was going to celebrate Dark Russian Springtime with some (vaguely) Russian black bread, but I lost track of time and so made it appropriately Darker than it ought to be (as in, carbonised). I am a good peasant worker who doesn't pass up a calorie when it crosses my path, so I will eat it all the same. Wasn't charcoal the new superfood, before we started caring about matters of actual life and death? It's probably only black on the outside.
UPDATE: The bread is FINE!
I've decided to embrace the theme and just make this a Dark Russian Springtime – turns out there's been a film adaptation of the Kursk tragedy (submarine disaster vs post-Soviet pride), which unlike the other two I distinctly, viscerally remember being in the news. There is also a new film about the journalist who uncovered the Holodomor (Soviet government, this time being very effective, engineering a famine/genocide in Ukraine).
This one is particularly interesting because I learned, later in life, that one of my most influential childhood movies was directed by someone who was already famous for rather gritty Eastern European art films: Agnieszka Holland. Mr Jones is hers, too! It was supposed to come out this year, but either The Virus or some cold-footed distributors have forced it online; I intend to get it off Google Play as soon as possible.
It seems appropriate, here, to remind you of my favourite music video of all time:
... Aside from plain entertainment, finding it while in a situation not unlike the one at 3:50 also twigged me to parallels between the internal workings of the Walt Disney Company and those of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – a conceptual link which is validated more as I learn about the USSR. That the pinnacle of American capitalist corporate success should resemble the pinnacle of the Marxist communist state is a surprising and revelatory example of Horseshoe Theory, but it all comes down to human psychology in the end, and humans are humans everywhere. I can't claim priority on this observation: Terry Pratchett hit the nail on the head in Witches Abroad, and he didn't even have to work at Disney to see into its soul.
Does anyone know if there are any good film adaptations of Dostoevsky? I saw an excellent one-man show of Notes From Underground and have a much-beloved radio adaptation of The Idiot (the radio Brothers Karamazov is good too) but I have not heard of any films or TV series. Too dark?
I was going to celebrate Dark Russian Springtime with some (vaguely) Russian black bread, but I lost track of time and so made it appropriately Darker than it ought to be (as in, carbonised). I am a good peasant worker who doesn't pass up a calorie when it crosses my path, so I will eat it all the same. Wasn't charcoal the new superfood, before we started caring about matters of actual life and death? It's probably only black on the outside.
UPDATE: The bread is FINE!
