Posted on 04/01/2024 10:25:36 AM PDT by sphinx
The movie came out on January 25, 2024. There had been very little of the usual promotion. Lockshin’s name was omitted from posters. His name was absent from all marketing materials, such as they were. In any event, the movie was a sensation. The public went to see it, quickly making it the top-grossing Russian movie of all time, in the over-18 category.
Furious, the state and its propagandists got to work. As Lockshin says, “a whole campaign” was launched against him and the movie. Propagandists called him a “criminal” and a “terrorist,” and demanded that the movie be pulled from cinemas. The issue even reached the Duma (which passes for a Russian parliament). How could this movie have been made? Who is responsible?
Vladimir Solovyov denounced the movie for its “sharp, anti-Soviet, anti–modern-Russia theme.” Solovyov is maybe the most grotesque of the Kremlin propagandists, a fixture on television. He called for a “serious investigation” into the film’s release.
Obviously, Kremlin officials and assorted mouthpieces see themselves in the movie. How could they not?
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Here is the trailer:
The Master and Margarita (2024) movie trailer
I am sure that I'm not the only freeper who read The Master and Margarita back in the day. It is a classic, though for me it falls into the "classics I read so long ago that I would need to reread before opining on it" category. (I've been tempted to reread it a couple of times when Jordan Peterson starts singing its praises, but that's a another story.) For those not familiar with the book, it may whet your interest to know that it was one of the samizdat classics circulating underground in Russia during the Stalin era. As with Dr. Zhivago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, its publication was one of the landmarks in the post-Stalinist thaw in Soviet culture, when Minitrue began to lose its grip.
The Master and Margarita premiered last November at a Russian film festival and hit the theaters in Russia on January 25, the date referenced in the article. IMDB reports that there were limited releases in Cyprus and Sweden in February and in New York on March 8. I can't find any indication that it has shown anywhere else in the U.S.; nor do I know how long it ran in NY. I have not found any information about the broader release schedule. It would not surprise me if this plays the festival circuit before a distributor picks it up. Given the stature of the source material, it would also not surprise me if this got a guerrilla marketing release, building through the arthouse circuit before going wide.
Those of you who keep an eye on your local film festivals -- you know who you are ...:) -- might want to keep a sharp eye out. Could be a good'un. And if it is a good adaptation, keep in mind that the novel was a Stalin era classic of anti-totalitarian literature ... which makes it highly relevant to the culture war today.
movie ping
Both a book & movie ping!
Thanks
I read the novel, mostly. I found it near unreadable. I’ll try the movie when it comes around on prime.
Oops. The limited releases were in Cyrus and Switzerland, not Sweden. It’s easy to confuse all those “S-countries:” Sweden, Switzerland, Swaziland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa/Korea/Sudan ... it just goes on and on. Can’t keep ‘em all straight.
Seems it would be an important film to be seen by Americans, they may recognize the tactics.
“sharp, anti-Soviet, anti–modern-Russia theme.”
When the Powers That Be attack those in their way, they “anti” them, casting themselves as the norm and those they opposed as reactionary, abnormal “antis” (see pro-lifers as “anti-abortion.”)
I read it over 50 years ago. I remember it being engaging enough but confusing — and not only because the author was being artsy, but because he was writing subversive literature in Stalinist Russia, and he probably didn’t want a bullet in the back of his head. Everything is highly metaphorical and allegorical and draped in mystery and inference. The Minitrue commissars hated it but at least they didn’t shoot him. It was more decoding than I was interested in (or up to) at that point. I might reread it just to see if it all makes sense now given over 50 years practice, which it might.
P.S. I will also note for the “nuke Hollywood from orbit” crowd that this is a Russian film, so you can go right on hating Hollywood and watch this with a clear conscience.
In the same vein, I will again recommend Dear Comrades! (2020). The best anti-communist films today are being made abroad.
Which is probably why it may never come out in this country.
“The best anti-communist films today are being made abroad.”
Replace “best” with “only”?
.
Hollywood (and much of the American far left) still loves communism in all its flavors, and can't bring themselves to tear it down on film.
While the protests were put down much more violently than Jan 6 in DC, there are many parallels between the Novocherkassk massacre and Jan 6. Mass arrests, fake charges, show trials, extreme sentences for merely protesting, etc. If Hollywood were to re-make this movie, the protesters would be white supremacist Nazis, probably led by a man with yellow hair and orange complexion...
“The Chekist” told the truth about the revolution in Russia.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103949/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_The%2520Chekist
A big thumbs up!
Another good one from the early 90s is “The Inner Circle”.
Ping!
Here’s an off the wall russkie one. Restore and jump a locomotive from an island. Fun and strange:
“In 1945, Soviet war hero Ignat is sent to work as a locomotive mechanic in a Siberian labor camp where he meets an assortment of Germans and Russians.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706414/?ref_=fn_al_tt_9
“A Gentleman in Moscow” just started up as a series on Showtime - I don’t know how it matches up with the others discussed here, but in my opinion it’s well worth watching.
Being that it was a Hollywood movie about Hollywood, I was very pleasantly surprised to see how the communists were depicted in the Coen brothers’ movie, Hail Caeser. And George Clooney’s character, a movie star who bought into the communist propaganda, was portrayed as an idiot. Good fun.
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