22 Dec – Watching Russian New Year comedies to create the mood
There are plenty of films which are traditionally watched few days before and week after the New Year Eve. Not all of them are about New Year, but these films has become cult films. Here are they!
The Carnival Night (Карнавальная ночь) is a 1956 Soviet musical film. It is Eldar Ryazanov's first big-screen film, Lyudmila Gurchenko's first role and also one of the most famous films starring popular comedian Igor Ilyinsky.
It is the New Year's Eve and the employees of an Economics Institute are ready with their annual New Year's entertainment program. It includes a lot of dancing and singing, jazz band performance and even magic tricks. Suddenly, an announcement is made that a new director has been elected and that he is arriving shortly. Comrade Ogurtsov arrives in time to review and disapprove of the scheduled entertainment. To him, holiday fun has a different meaning. He imagines speakers reading annual reports to show the Institute's progress over the year, and, perhaps, a bit of serious music, something from the Classics, played by the Veterans' Orchestra.
Obviously, no one wants to change the program a few hours before the show, much less to replace it with something so boring! Now everyone has to team up in order to prevent Ogurtsov from getting to the stage. As some of them trap Ogurtsov one way or another, others perform their scheduled pieces and celebrate New Year's Eve.
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Magicians (Чародеи) is a 1982 Soviet film directed by Konstantin Bromberg, loosely based on the science fantasy novel Monday Begins on Saturday by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
Film became a classic Soviet New Year's Eve romantic comedies, such as Irony of Fate (Ironiya sud'by) and The Carnival Night (Karnavalnaya noch).
Ivan Puhov (A. Abdulov) is in love with a young and pretty girl Alyona (A. Yakovleva). Little does know Ivan that Alyona is working as a witch. The marriage is already scheduled, but just one circumstance of "winter heart" magic induced by Kira Shemahanskaya (Ye. Vasilyeva), the institute director, who is convinced by Sataneev (V. Gaft), separates them. Her friends — magic wood masters, working in NUINU (Scientific Universal Institute of Extraordinary Services, a NIICHAVO subsidiary in Kitezhgrad; for NIICHAVO see Monday Begins on Saturday) - decides to interfere and help to save the love. They convince Puhov to return and save Alyona right now.
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The Diamond Arm (Бриллиантовая рука) is a 1968 Soviet comedy film directed by slapstick director Leonid Gaidai and starred several famous Soviet actors, including Yuri Nikulin, Andrei Mironov, Anatoli Papanov. The Diamond Arm has become a Russian cult film.
The boss of a black market ring (known only as "The Chief") wants to smuggle a batch of jewelry into the Soviet Union by hiding it into the orthopedic cast of a courier. The contraband ends up in the cast on the arm of "ordinary Soviet citizen" Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov who gets mistaken for the courier while on a cruise shore excursion. He lets the militsiya know about this, and the militsiya captain uses Gorbunkov as bait to catch the criminals. Most of the plot are various attempts of two inept crooks, Lyolik and Gennadiy Kozodoyev,to lure Gorbunkov into a situation where they could have quietly, without a wet job, taken the cast off him.
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and of course!!!!
The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром!) is a Soviet comedy-drama directed by Eldar Ryazanov. 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 the former Soviet republics and satellite states every New Year's Day.
The key to the plot is the relative uniformity of public architecture. This results in the entire planet being polluted 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.
Following their annual tradition, a group of friends meet at a banya (public bath) in Moscow to celebrate New Year's Eve. The friends all get very drunk toasting the upcoming marriage of the central male character, Zhenya Lukashin to Galya. After the bath, one of the friends, Pavlik, has to catch a plane to Leningrad; Zhenya, on the other hand, is supposed to go home to celebrate New Year's Eve with his fiancée. Both Zhenya and Pavlik pass out. The others cannot remember which of their unconscious friends is supposed to be catching the plane; eventually they mistakenly decide that it is Zhenya and put him on a plane instead of Pavlik. Zhenya wakes up in Leningrad airport, believing he is still in Moscow. He stumbles into a taxi and, still quite drunk, gives the driver his address. It turns out that in Leningrad there is a street with the same name (3rd Builders' street), with a building at his address which looks exactly like Zhenya's. The key fits in the door of the apartment with the same number (as alluded to in the introductory narration, "...building standard apartments with standard locks").
Later, the real tenant, Nadya, arrives home to find a strange man sleeping in her bed. Zhenya desperately tries to get back to Moscow, and Nadya herself wants to get rid of him as soon as possible. Thus the two are compelled to spend New Year's Eve together...
And now we invite you to watch it next week in our cinema club!
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