Taking a break once a week from the current headlines is a tradition I'd like to start here at Russiablog.

Today I'd like to highlight an essay by David Gurevich. Gurevich is a Russian-born film critic and the producer of the Israeli documentary film Empty Rooms, about the largely Russian-Ukrainian born victims of a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv night club. Gurevich has previously published essays in Details magazine, the New York Times Book Review, The Forward, and the conservative cultural journal the New Criterion.

My own experience with late Soviet and post-Soviet cinema is limited: I have watched the excellent World War II partizan drama Come and See (1985), and the indispensable Burnt by the Sun (1994). Fortunately Netflix has made it much easier no matter where you live to view foreign films on DVD, so I'll be catching up in the next few months.

Gurevich laments that Russian cinema has largely fallen victim to the general economic crisis in the country. Vanity projects starring gangsters' girlfriends still get made - a real-life source of dark comedy (Yuri informs me that previously tough guy Russian mobsters are going metrosexual, and were recently tripping in their designer tracksuits to pay thousands of dollars for Elton John tickets). As with Bollywood in the 1970s and 80s, the Mafia muscles in on productions, but unlike Bollywood, doesn't get any return on its investments besides ego.

As Gurevich notes, the total number of releases produced in Russia a year ago was only 24. Outside the wealthy enclaves of Moscow and St. Petersburg, ordinary people living on 300 dollars a month can't afford to go to the movies - even pirated DVDs are luxury items. Gurevich does note that the Russian equivalent of the Oscars are passed out at Planet Hollywood in Moscow, and that a new American-style cinema has recently opened.

UPDATE: Gurevich has another essay here, on the upcoming Night Watch, which has been showing up on movie posters with creepy/wolfish vampire figures haunting a silhoutted dusk Kremlin backdrop. Gurevich also notes the Russian equivalent of the WWII bomber crew in American movies of that era, and a few films focused on intelligentsia Muscovites with no concept of the lives of ordinary Russians in "flyover" country (sounds familiar, but the contrasts between Moscow and rural Russia are even more stark than between Manhattan and rural Mississippi).