Sacramento area community musical theater (esp. DMTC in Davis, 2000-2020); Liberal politics; Meteorology; "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul," and Albuquerque movie filming locations; New Mexico and California arcana, and general weirdness.
Rachel and I went to go see her son Larry in the final performance of "Antigone in Munich: The Sophie Scholl Story." Penelope Deen was excellent as Sophie Scholl (a member of the student-based White Rose Society, trying to fight back against the Nazis) as she underwent Nazi interrogation. The Interrogator was good too.
I was excited to see the new Olivier Assayas film at the Tower Theater. The film relies on the audience to remember forty years of recent Russian history: the FSB, the oligarchs, Yeltsin, the terrorist bombings, the war in Georgia, Kadyrov and Prigozhin, the Crimean invasion and the Orange Revolution. Gotta keep up!
I had a bit of a problem understanding people's speech. I may not have been alone. I overheard one man talking with his friends afterwards saying that he only understood about 60% of what was said. Part of this was there was not a unified control on accents in the show, reflecting the diverse international cast.
It begins with Baranov’s student days in the early 1990s, in the heady “new Russia,” just after Soviet communism had collapsed. Everything felt possible and money flowed freely. As Baranov recalls it, those days felt like a never-ending bash, or maybe an orgy, where you might watch a naked man on a leash follow a punk rock singer around at a house party. As an avant-garde theater student and then director, Baranov lived a life of art and poetry with his girlfriend, Ksenia (Alicia Vikander). When the vulgar but fun Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge), the inventor of Russia’s first commercial bank, enters their lives, things grow brighter, then more sour.
But Baranov moves on, taking a job in trashy reality television production, and this is where the historical tale begins to take shape. “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is really a movie about how Russia went from those heady post-Soviet days to the rise of the oligarchy to, eventually, the establishment of Vladimir Putin (a mostly chilling Jude Law) as president, a former K.G.B. officer who valued power over money. The oligarchs who choose Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s successor realize too late that this man will not be their pawn. “What interests me is restoring integrity to the Russian Federation,” he tells Baranov. And that means consolidating power — in himself.
