This Is How They Teach ...

 ... the history of WW II Eastern Front in the West. Judging by the utter a-historic trash which still circulates among many US military professionals as a genuine history, you know some of those names, it is not surprising that they still cannot understand what hit them. When your world view is formed by fairy tales about WW II written by what amounts to Wehrmacht and SS "sources" and how NKVD "executed" 1 million Red Army soldiers--what do you expect? Here is a good tearing apart of a Hollywood BS whose scenario was "written" by the same people (or rather their ideas) who only read Solzhenitsyn and Soviet dissidents and believe that it was the US which defeated Hitler and that the Red Army was nothing but kettle prodded into the battle by evil commissars and NKVD. Luckily, there are still some diligent people out there who cannot tolerate BS and do something about it. 

Only two weeks old. Excellent job and a good overall discussion in the comments. 

Inception.

In Christopher Nolan's outstanding 2010 flick Inception, main protagonist, Dom Cobb, played ably by undeniably talented Leo DiCaprio, was using the so called totem, to have an idea if he was dreaming or was inside reality. If the totem toppled--Cobb wasn't dreaming. 

Totem was this Ariadne's thread allowing not to lose connection to the reality even in the dream. You may ask why I am waxing here Siskel-Ebertish in mostly geopolitical and military blog? The answer is simple: I allow myself once in a while go to Foreign Affairs publication by the Council on Foreign Relations site to get a gander on the state of America's allegedly most super-pooper, most sophisticated and most powerful minds behind what passes in the US as a foreign policy. Needless to say, that in the last few years those visits are increasingly rare, not least because I cannot tolerate American political "scientists" pseudo-intellectual newspeak--same phenomenon as economic lingo which is a newspeak covering the nature of the institutionalized robbery which passes in US as "economy" (see Michael Hudson's writing on this issue), plus, as I already stated not for once (hey, forget about me, many people stated this, such as Daniel Larison yesterday) I am not interested in wasting my time explaining a systemic delusion which is being presented as a viable "science". But today I ran into Richard Haas' (CFR's biggest honcho) piece about.... blah-blah-blah, yada-yada-yada accelerating something something history, something something to look intellectual and profound  etc. It is not profound, because Haas obviously doesn't know the real history of the 20th century and he is both energy, military and economy blind, using Arthur Berman's definition, but then something caught my eye and I took a screen shot:

Forget Haas' bloviation about WWII or WWI--drawing (pseudo)historic parallels is a fool's errand, not to speak of the fact that actual history of interwar period, not to speak of the realities of WWII is generally beyond the grasp (or is not allowed to be properly exercised in analysis) of US foreign policy "elite", most of which knows "strategy" and warfare from a white board abstracts in their Ph.D theses written away from warfare realities, any warfare. But it was so symbolic to see to the right of the Haas' "text" an image of what in Inception was Cobb's only connection to the reality--a rotating totem. Even in the closing moment of Nolan's masterpiece we are not given direct answer to the state Cobb and his reunification with his children are--is it still a dream or is he finally able to hug his children in a real world? 

I am on the record that far from experiencing any real respect to US foreign affairs establishment, I seriously think that these people live in a dream, in which the modern United States still can be compared to an industrial colossus, unscathed by horrors of 20th Century wars, which is capable (or at least it thinks so) to guide the world to a better future, dispatching its "finest fighting force in history" to remote shores and that it is just the matter of "selling" (that means outright lying) US foreign policy to Americans. Obviously Haas, being preoccupied with geopolitical and pseudo historic "profundities" doesn't use a single number to grasp a reality that the United States in China and Russia alone look at combined GDP and military capability which dwarfs that of the United States (Europe is not even an asset in all that) and is completely capable to deny the US access to Eurasia other than the US being incorporated as one among big equals into the new world order. But for Haas and CFR to really grasp the reality, albeit even he admits that the business is usual is pretty much over, he must wind the totem at the image to the right of his article and wait until it ether topples over, thus indicating the state of residing in reality, or will continue to rotate, indicating the most likely outcome of still dreaming, or residing in the dream in which cause and effect are not connected. But then again, ignoring causality is what makes the present state of the United States and her "elites", who should know better, but don't, so precarious. But I am sure we all know what it is to know about "exceptionalism" and how it destroys the nation which refuses to take a look at the rotating totem.          

Countess Lopukhina?

She died at the age of 24, leaving one of the most stunning evidence of beauty and femininity in 18th Century Russia. 

What is remarkable, in late 1980s--early 1990 Svetlana Druzhinina decided to make a movie about adventures of Russian naval cadets (guarde-marines) in 18th Century Russia, not unlike those of Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas, which turned into a national (and international--UK ran it) movie phenomenon with an incredible music and it was Olga Mashnaya who stunned everyone with her uncanny similarity to Lopukhina, despite the fact that she was playing a serf-woman. But no matter, the stunning femininity of Mashnaya captured the imagination and, of course, was this blonde Armenian guy Dmitri Kharatyan who about 30-40 million Soviet women fell in love with, LOL. Judge for yourself--1990s and 2016. 

And 30 years later. The girl is wonderful, but not Mashnaya. Kharatyan, in the same time, well, he barely ages...

Still nice, though.  Ah, yes, it is Friday.

War And Peace, BBC "style".

I am no art "prude"--I do sometimes allow myself a trial run of something I know would be dreadful and unconscionable in the art sense, even if for the reason that "I've seen or heard" some "art" and have at least mildly "enlightened" opinion on one or another piece o' shit. I am also not a movie, music or literary critic. But what I witnessed yesterday.....

‘War & Peace’: Leo Tolstoy As a YA-Novel Writer 

Defies imagination, especially for people who know Tolstoy's masterpiece by heart (as I do) both in Russian and English languages. 

War & Peace screenwriter admitted he added sex scenes to keep viewers interested 

There are some things which must be left untouched in the world of high culture. The moment the society wants to know if Scarlett O'Hara gave a blowjob to Rhett Butler, it is not Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece's, however defined as overly sexual in its time, downfall--it is society's.  And then there is War And Peace by Count Tolstoy. It is arguably, approaching the "absolutely" position, greatest prose ever written. The scope, the scale, the humanity of this immortal novel are unmatched in world literature. It was also first polyphonic novel of this scale, which set up the trend later continued by said Margaret Mitchell with her epic Gone With The Wind (Mitchell never hid the fact of being influenced by Tolstoy), by John Galsworthy in his The Forsyte Saga and, of course, later Soviet/Russian epic novels such as Sholohov's  And Quiet Flows The Don (Tikhii Don) and Alexey Tolstoy's The Ordeal (Hozhdenie Po Mukam). I could continue the list with Hemingway and others but that is beyond the point--it is a scientific fact of War And Peace being a gem of a literature. It is also a scientific fact that Tolstoy didn't describe how Dolokhov fucked Helen Bezukhova--on the table, doggy style or in missionary position. But that is precisely what concerns contemporary BBC purveyors of this dreck and here is the second, most important, issue. 

There are some things which must not be touched in any way when a milestone exists already. Imagine current Russian cinematographers attempt on Gone With The Wind remake. The question is, apart from the obvious question of why, how can Russians convey all those typical American Southern Civil War time idiosyncrasies which make this cinematographic masterpiece genuinely American, not Russian "version" of it? It is obvious that NO Scarlet O'Hara other than Vivien Leigh can exist anymore--period. Vivien Leigh IS Scarlet O'Hara and nothing can change this fact. So is true for Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. They became iconic and this term implies worshiping, and deservedly so, not trying to change an icon. Of course, in my amateur opinion it is sometimes possible to do better, as it happened with Coen brothers' True Grit, where incomparable Jeff Bridges and Heilee Stainfeld created on-screen magic so powerful that it is difficult to go back to John Wayne's version of Rooster Cogburn. But then again, even this wonderful novel and a movie are still not in the same league. Enter War And Peace movies. 

There were numerous attempts on Tolstoy's classic. Most of them in Anglo-world. There were numerous TV series and then, of course, there was a a 1956 major Hollywood attempt with charming Audrey Hepburn as Natasha and Henry Fonda as Pierre. It didn't cut it. And yes, Natasha never met Prince Andrey Bolskonski on the hunt, she met him at the ball being introduced by Pierre. Raping the actual plot and timeline of the novel have become such a tradition that it still continues today with all those screen writers freely rewriting Tolstoy's classic to fit their pathetic needs. The problem here is aggravated with the fact that there is a cinematographic icon, in fact masterpiece, which solved the scope and scale of Tolstoy's text--it is Sergei Bondarchuk's 431 minute long magical TRUE adaptation of not only colossal polyphony of Tolstoy's novel but of its timeline and its, what is most important, spirit.  That is what Roger Ebert wrote in 1969 about that, already Oscar-winner film:

".... the Russian version of "War and Peace" is a magnificently unique film. Money isn't everything, but you can't make an epic without it. And "War and Peace" is the definitive epic of all time. It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and -- yes -- splendid movie. Perhaps that's just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph.By now the statistics regarding "War and Peace" are well known, but forgive me if I recite them with a certain relish anyway: the film was five years in the making at a cost of $100,000,000, with a cast of 120,000, all clothed in authentic uniforms, and the Red Army was mobilized to recreate Napoleon's battles exactly (it is claimed) as they happened.

The prestige of the Soviet film industry rested on "War and Peace" for half a decade, and the result looks like it. You are never, ever, going to see anything to equal it. Indeed, because of the need to schedule the film in two segments of three hours each, you may never even see it unless you go during the current four-week run at the Esquire. It is difficult to imagine this massive, six-hour film playing neighborhood theaters or turning up on the late show. It is easy enough to praise director Sergei Bondarchuk for his thundering battle scenes, or his delicate ballroom scenes, or the quality of his actors. But these were almost to be expected. What is extraordinary about "War and Peace" is that Bondarchuk was able to take the enormous bulk of Leo Tolstoy's novel and somehow transform it into this great chunk of film without losing control along the way."

War and Peace, Ebert 1969 

When Bondarchuk's film came out it stunned the wold, never before nor since anything like this was made. As Nick Pinkerton of Village Voice wrote: "This is the barbaric yawp of the Soviet film industry circa 1968, an entertainment A-bomb test announcing to the world: 'Here is what we are capable of' .'' 

It could take me many pages to just list praises to what have become the most unique cinematographic experience of the age. A superb acting, strict following of the text and timeline of the novel, absolutely unrivaled battle scenes, stunning music score by Ovchinnikov, camera work--all came together to make Tostoy's novel alive on the screen. It also became the most expensive movie ever made. But these were novel characters which since then became iconic to such a degree that for any cultured Russian (or any other nationality) man or a woman it is impossible anymore to see Natasha Rostova other than Lyudmila Savelieva, Pierre other than Bondarchuk himself, who managed to transcend the age of his character. It is impossible to imagine Prince Andrei other than Vyacheslav Tikhonov or see Kutuzov as not Boris Zakhava. Oleg Tabakov IS Nikolai Rostov, to the very last fiber of what Nikolai is in the novel. The movie itself transcended the novel. All this was achieved without fucking, blow jobs and incest which NEVER was in Tolstoy's epic, other than description of Helen Kuragina's (later Bezukhova) "marble" rich breasts, which naturally beautiful and talented Irina Skobtseva (real life wife of Sergei Bondarchuk) portrayed by exhibiting her cleavage in the scene of Pierre being devastated by the death of his father. That is it. Yet, both book and movie are filled with love, betrayal and devotion of its characters. This is what got lost on the "creators" and rapist of the original book at BBC. How could Tolstoy fail to notice that his immortal novel would have been much better with the description of sexual positions, probably blow jobs and incest. Too bad, he didn't live to be instructed by BBC producers.

And, of course, those cretins will never be able to understand that Russian Army couldn't greet Tzar Alexander, who, accidentally, viewed Russian and Austrian troops on the eve of Austerlitz in the company of Emperor Francis, with shaking their hands with weapons in them and jumping. Regular armies, do not behave like this and since the times primordial, maintaining a beautiful line of rank and files in a face of highest authority is what military does, responding to greetings unison greeting and with hooray. Didn't they see any parades from Red Square?  

So, after Dolokhov fucked Helen on the table, after Russian Army greeted its Tzar  behaving as a bunch of undisciplined monkeys I got the message--this is a disgrace. I turned off the TV and am not going to watch this POS anymore. BBC, go fuck yourself....on the table for defacing a great work of art and literature. Creeps. Better yet, upload it to the Pornhub--it is where it belongs. I, however, will stick to the icon.