My Infatuation with Russian Movies

Browsing videos on YouTube is my favourite passtime.Digging deeper, I came across a few movies. I prefer watching movies of genre action or war.I happened to come across a few Russian movies as well which to my delight were war based, adventure based Russian movies.

Over a period of  5-6 months, I have watched over 10 Russian movies and honestly, I have enjoyed all of them.Russian movies happen to be very different from my country's movies in terms of person-to-person behaviour and tune of their language(which I enjoy).I have been recommending the same to my friends.

On a short note, I ll give a gist to a few movies and try reviewing them so as to persuade the reader to feel the elegance of Russian movies I have witnessed all this while.

So the countdown begins

1. адмирал (Admiral)
     
   Based on the life of Admiral Alexander Vasileyvich Kolchak, movie begins with flashes back             to the Baltic Sea in 1914 in a naval battle with the Germans.Later, the Russian civil war breaksout       and the Tsar  having been exiled, the Admiral establishes an anti-communist government in                 Siberia to fight the Communist forces.The story also revolves around Admiral's love Anna                   Timiryova who is a poet.
  The movie Stars: Konstantin Khabensky as Admiral and Elizaveta Boyorskaya as Anna Timiryova.
  Year: 2008
  IMDB: 6.9/10
   Link to the full movie

          


2.  Брестская крепость (The Brest Fortress)
                  

1. The movie begins with a glimpse at the simple lives of soldiers and their families in the Soviet Union garrisoned at The Brest Fortress situated at Minsk, Belarus.Nazi soldiers carry out Operation Barbarossa and enter Russian territory and a group of Russian soldiers must protect the stronghold at all costs.
   Year:2010 IMDB: 7.5/10

        Link to the full movie    

       


3.  9 рота (The 9th Company)
           
 Based on real-life events, 9th Company recounts a year in the shared lives of a group of young soldiers drafted to serve in Afghanistan during the final year of the Soviet conflict. It is a poignant story of the unit's dedication to each other during their valiant defense of Height 3234.A futile battle that ravaged their forgotten company, who kept fighting, unaware that the war ended.
Year:2005, IMDB:7.2/10

Link to the full movie

        


4. Блокпост (Checkpoint)
      Blokpost is a film about the madness of war. Somewhere in the Caucasus, which looks like Chechnya, a dirty war is raging. There are no battlefields as such, but every peasant is either a suspect or a victim.  The film, which is shot in quasi-documentary style, aims at displaying the madness of war in which everyone suffers, including the soldiers.
Year: 1998      

         

5. The Fall of Berlin
        

          The Fall of Berlin is split into two parts. The movie is about the attack on Russians by Germans, and the retaliation leading upto the flag hoisting at the Reichtag, Berlin.Although this movie is a soviet propaganda  portraying Stalin as the darling of the Soviets, it provides some elegant view of the great war which engulfed Europe.

Year: 1953

Link to Part 1

Link to Part 2

6. Come and See 

1. The invasion of a village in Byelorussia by German forces sends young Florya (Alexei Kravchenko) into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha (Olga Mironova), who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Florya finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.
2. IMBD: 8.3/10
3. Year: 1985

         

   The intention of the post remains exploring, sharing and discussing movies which makes brighter sense.I am also trying to explore the emotions common to all humans in the past and  in the present.

Movies other than War Genre

 Siberie Monamour
IMDB: 7.7/10

Note: I was completely reliant on the subtitles for watching these movies.
Your comments or suggestions are always welcome.

Different View of India: Pictures of Indian cities you don't see in overseas media.

Author: Balaji Vishwanathan @Quora

In the western media, we often see only one type of Indian image. Crowded, dirty and polluted. The pictures would be often taken from random sewage canals and slums. The problem is that those underbellies exist in every part of the world. Shanghai can be like this or like this: 

This is not to deny that Shanghai and other great world cities have nicer infrastructure than the Indian metropolises. It is just that we are seeing things in binary instead of shades of gray. Indian cities sure have more than their share of dirtiness. Those are the reality and so are the ones below. The problem is that if only one type of pictures are shown it totally distorts the reality. Here is the other side. 

Mumbai skyline:

Driving through Mumbai's marine drive. 

A few kilometers north, Bandra-Worli sealink that connects traditional Mumbai city with its suburbs:

The new Mumbai airport & its environs

The serene Sabarmati river running through Ahmedabad

Jaipur: The land of palaces - now getting modern

The heart of Bengaluru: Vidhan Soudha

Mysore: Bangalore's royal cousin

Heart of New Delhi during the parade

The sparkling clean Delhi metro

Heart of Chennai in lush greenery

Chennai's iconic Marina beach

Chennai's southern skyline - not as good as other Indian metropolis but getting better

Kochi's aspirations to enter as a Tier-1 Metropolis

Hyderabad center around the Char Minar

Rapidly growing skyline of Hyderabad:

Kolkata - the old capital of India

Kolkata's Vidaysagar Setu

Heart of India's former summer capital - Shimla

Chandigarh: One of India's most planned cities

Gangtok: The serene northeastern city

Jodhpur: India's blue city

Chennai's Anna Memorial

New Delhi's Lotus Temple to rival the Taj

The Yamuna Expressway to Agra.

New 8-laned expressways of Hyderabad

Chennai's Kathipara junction

India's new highways.

India is moving. Not one or two cities, but the whole nation. By not looking at the pictures above we get the distorted view that India is not progressing. If a media house shows a picture of New York, which of the following would they normally use?

Both of them exist in the same city, but we use only one of those pictures as representative. Same for most cities in the world. However, when it comes to the Indian cities, we take only the negative images as default art to portray and that is a travesty to people who are working to build the country. Let's be fair in representing cities of the world as that impacts investments and poverty alleviation. Romantic skylines for one city and a dirty sewer for the other city is not fair.

We need to be real. But, that doesn't mean dwelling in pessimism.