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Russia

Tennis, Anyone?

I don’t know how that translates into Russian.

March 23, 2006 3:55 am | Link | 1 Comment »

Films Recently Viewed

The Life and Death of Colonel
Blimp
1943

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A fine film, worth seeing. I’ve spied a few Blimps-in-training at the Mess in Wyvern. Also, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff is a heck of a good name for a character.

La Grande Illusion
1937

Directed by Jean Renoir. I enjoyed this film greatly. It made me wish I had been a WWI pilot shot down by the Huns just so I could be invited to luncheon with the German officers. Everyone comported themselves well in those days (or at least in the cinema version of those days). According to IMDB, the Viennese Erich von Stroheim had spent so much time in America that he could barely speak German when the film was made.

The Birth of a Nation
1915

Directed by D.W. Griffith. Disturbing. The film’s basic premise that the United States was forged as a nation by the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan is balderdash, pure and simple. Still, a powerful and remarkable propaganda film. “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true,” said Woodrow Wilson, whose Southern racism most modern liberals like to ignore.

Alexander Nevsky
1938

Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein, score by Sergei Prokofiev. More brilliant propaganda, this time for the USSR, not the KKK. Beautifully shot, but the battle scene is a tad too long. Though very nationalistic, it is not hard to see the communism behind the film in a number of scenes. Found the only slightly veiled swastikas on the mitre of the Teutonic bishop rather droll.

The Battle of Algiers
1965

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, score by Ennio Morricone. My second viewing of this splendid film. Colonel Mathieu: “There are 80,000 Arabs in the Casbah. Are they all against us? We know they’re not. In reality, it’s only a small minority that dominates with terror and violence. That minority is our adversary; we must isolate it and destroy it.” And they did. Still managed to lose Algeria though – which was a damn shame for the Algerians.
July 17, 2005 10:25 pm | Link | No Comments »

New Eyewitness Goes Blind

Novy Ochevidets, Russia’s blatant imitation of the New Yorker is shutting down after only five months in operation, according to the Moscow Times.

Novy Ochevidets, which translates as the ‘New Eyewitness’, specially commissioned a Cyrillic font that fashioned after that of its mentor, and even had it’s own version (seen at right) of the New Yorker‘s classic fopp, Eustace Tilly.

I mourn for the New Yorker. It has yet to recover from Tina Brown’s years at the helm, and shows no signs of getting better. Indeed, quite the opposite, as was shown this past year when the magazine endorsed a political candidate for the first time in its history. (If you hadn’t already guessed, it was the man perenially described by James Taranto as ‘the haughty French-looking senator from Massachusetts who, by the way, also served in Vietnam’).

Via the indispensible Arts & Letters Daily.

January 18, 2005 10:11 pm | Link | No Comments »

Transnistria

Those fretting about our recent divisive election in the United States should turn for a moment to the Republic of Transnistria. President Igor Nikolayevich Smirnov has so united the people of his unrecognised independent republic that he was elected with 103.6% of the vote in the northern region. Andrewcusack.com: your leading source for Transnistrian news.

Transnistria on Wikipedia.

November 9, 2004 11:46 am | Link | No Comments »

A Saint Returns Home

Relics of Saint Elizabeth Romanoff have been greeted enthusiastically by Muscovite crowds, according to Russia’s state-run ITAR-TASS news agency.

To discover the beautiful witness to Christ of Saint Elizabeth, read more about her at the Orthodox Christian Information Center and on the site of Fr. Demetrios Serfes. A statue of the holy Grand Duchess now graces the front of Westminster Abbey.

July 27, 2004 10:34 pm | Link | No Comments »

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