Soviet Television Films (Study Guide) - The Irony of Fate, Charodei, Mary Poppins, Goodbye, Failure of Engineer Garin, Heart of a Dog (Paperback)

This is nonfiction commentary. Chapters: The Irony of Fate, Charodei, Mary Poppins, Goodbye, Failure of Engineer Garin, Heart of a Dog, Crime and Punishment, the Great Citizen, the Gadfly, Solaris. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 30. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath (Russian: Ironiya sudby, ili S lyogkim parom ) is a Soviet comedy-drama directed by Eldar Ryazanov as a made-for-TV movie. The screenplay was written by Emil Braginsky and Ryazanov, loosely based on Ryazanov's 1971 play Once on New Year's Eve (Russian: ). The movie was filmed in 1975 at Mosfilm. Simultaneously a screwball comedy and a love story tinged with sadness, the film is traditionally broadcast in Russia and some other former Soviet republics every New Year's Eve. It is as fondly viewed every year as the American film Its a Wonderful Life is during the Christmas holidays. Many memorable quotes from the film have become catch phrases in the Russian language. A sequel, The Irony of Fate 2 was released in December 2007. The key to the plot is the relative uniformity of Brezhnev era public architecture. This is made explicit in a humorous animated prologue, in which architects who know better are shown polluting the entire planet with identical, unimaginative multistory apartment buildings - of the sort that can in fact be found in the suburbs of every city and town across the former Soviet Union. The rest of the film is live-action. Following their annual tradition, a group of friends meet at a banya (traditional public bath) in Moscow to celebrate New Year's Eve (, Novogodnyaya Noch). All of them get very drunk toasting the upcoming marriage of the central male character, Zhenya Lukashin (Andrei Myagkov) to Galya (Olga Naumenko). After the bath, one of the friends, Pavlik (Alek...http: //booksllc.net/?id=1052753