Youtube, or T-34, or Russian Movies In General Or Something
So Pandora finally figured out how to block my VPN a bit ago, and spotify quickly showed itself to be so awful at predicting music I might like that about 90% of its choices were awful, and then Ii discovered that youtube does a pretty good auto-mix predicting music I might like. Well that was good for awhile and I actually discovered a fair number of songs I liked, but what it's not good at is anticipating when I've heard a song I like _too_ much and now I'm starting to become a bit frustrated with youtube always serving me up the exact same selection.
But the other consequence of this is that I've been logging into youtube on the daily, primarily for the music, but its always optimistically suggesting other things. So I rediscovered my love of Stephen Colbert, and then tentatively branched out to other stand up hosts: I found Jimmy Kimmel bareable, Jimmy Fallon can get a chuckle if one is really bored but somehow his demeanor comes off like he's skulking in a corner like a chastised dog, and this guy Seth Myers, is it just me or is he like 0% funny? He's like a guy reading the news in a desperate trying-too-hard tone with the occasional dead-on-arrival joke punctuated by a "that was funny wasn't it??" expression. It's painful to watch.
Anyway what I came here to write about was that so I got served up this compilation of scenes from a movie:
Click to viewAnd I felt quite compelled to watch the movie. It turns out it's not easy being a pirate any more. It took me quite I bit of fiddling with torrents and wading into dodgy website before I finally managed to get the movie, T-34, and even then it didn't have subtitles but surprisingly downloading and integrating subtitles only took 5 min or less.
I didn't really have high hopes, but late Saturday night I was finally in the mood to lean back, pour myself a glass of mead, and watch a mindless shoot em up movie. I was actually pleasantly surprised. Don't get me wrong, it's not exactly deep and meaningful with subtle analogies future generations will analyze or inspiring character development arcs, but as a shoot em up movie it delivers. It's heavy on the sort of CGI you see in the above video but I thought that was well done as far as CGI goes. And wheras most shoot em ups are people running around with guns or random explosions, it was kind of fun to see a shoot em up that was specifically tanks doing their tank thing. There was even a surprising twist about a third of the way through which caught me totally by surprise because I wasn't expecting any twists.
Its also hilariously propagandistic. It's clearly made by and for a Russian audience and the "rah rah rah Russia is the best!" component is a bit eyeroll and giggle worthy. The movie would have you believe the Germans were absolutely shaking in their boots at the utter prowess of all Russian tankers. For a context not given in the movie: the Russian T-34 was, I believe, an inferior tank to the German tanks it was facing though it was pretty good for its "price point" and Russia was able to churn out a bazillion of them, stuff them with scarcely trained farm boys and "Zerg rush" the Germans with them. So to have one T-34 destroying joblots of panthers is... very optimistic ;)
I took a Russian Film class back in college and one thing I had enjoyed actually was the way propagandistic themes were woven into the films, so for me personally it had the added layer of comparing the specific thrusts of its propaganda with old classics of the Soviet era such as Chapaev and The Cranes are Flying.
But all that being said, the jingoism wasn't sickeningly saccharin just kinda laughable, and we can all get behind nazis getting what they deserve anyway, so I enjoyed the movie and felt in a silly good mood by the end. So can recommend as far as shoot em up war movies go. A-
As long as I'm on about Russian movies, my favorite soviet classic is The Reds and the Whites (the director actually got in real hot water for portraying the Whites (anticommunists) too humanely and the war not as a heroic affair but as awful and brutal); and favorite more recent film is Prisoner of the Mountains which takes place during the (first) Chechen war in 1996.