New Russian TV series: YuZZZ, Life on Call, Dropper, Goremyki and Chimera

The impudent ragamuffin Ravil (Kuzma Kotrelev) lives in Rostov-dad, delivers pizza and dreams of becoming a programmer at the University of Texas. And he also falls in love with a major Elya (Maria Matsel) with dangerous relatives. Her uncle is the authority of Kok (Gela Meskhi), who has taken over almost the entire Rostov-on-Don, except for the most criminal district of the city – the South-West (aka SW). They are run by another bigwig – Smoke (Anton Kuznetsov), to whom Ravil gets a job.

Each text about this series must begin with a disclaimer: the South-West region does not exist in real Rostov-on-Don, and the name seems to have been chosen because of the similarity with the expression “use”. It’s a pity, but this is where the fantasy of the screenwriter and director Stas Ivanov ends. For a realistic portrait of the southern criminals, there are too many absurd details and not enough Rostov accent among the actors. And for a full-blooded pulp fiction“Pulp Fiction”. palp is missing. The idea of ​​import-replacing the West Side with Rostov-on-Don has its own charm, but Ivanov generously compensates for the lack of familiarity with the hackneyed screenplay.

Ravil is an avatar of the target audience, through whose eyes we look at what is happening. It works when the series plunges us into the wild world of crime, and it is unbearable when they try to present Ravil as the hero of a romantic story. His romance with Elya is the most boring part of the whole series. Someone will be able to project their own desires and experiences onto their line, but only because the heroes of Kotrelev and Matsel are beautiful empty vessels. Ela was especially unlucky in this – the girl got into an extremely macho storywhere women are assigned the stereotypical roles of lovers, traitors and ladies in trouble.

There is something to praise in “UZZZ”. Gangster Rostov, filmed with a hand-held camera, can already recoup the time spent for someone. As well as the charisma of individual artists: Kuznetsov and Meskhi are especially good in the roles of crime bosses. But everything successful is crossed out by the script, as if written on the go. For example, the already mentioned love line is given a huge piece of timing, but closer to the final it is thrown out as unnecessary. The denouement of Ravil’s line was completely written as if under the influence “Hayes Code”The Code of Ethics that operated in Hollywood in the 1930s-1960s.. What did Ivanov want to say with this series? Don’t go into crime if you’re not too smart? God knows what a discovery.

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Constantly tense man Alexander Schmidt, nicknamed Magic (Pavel Priluchny), runs an elite escort agency called “Magic”. Magical is strict, but fair on the verge of a patriarchal caricature: he can first give a bream to a misbehaving employee, and a minute later – a huge bonus for the treatment of a sick mother. A new nuisance is added to the nervous work: someone is trying to squeeze out the business of Magic and sends investigators from the UK to him.

“Life on Call” at first appeared in the news reports under the provocative sign “Skin Market”, which, coupled with the directorial participation of Sarik Andreasyan, Ed WoodAccording to many experts, one of the worst directors in the world. national cinema, promised a carnival of fun and smiles. However, for marketing reasons, the name had to be changed to a more chaste version, and the series itself turned out to be a circus from which all the clowns left. Fans of this director’s work will certainly appreciate his traditional handicraft slovenliness: how could it be otherwise, when another million projects need to be filmed before the end of the year? Someone will be amused by the creepy aphorisms of the heroes. However, in the end, “Life on Call” causes mostly tired yawns..

The declared provocativeness raises the most questions. For a series that is supposed to shake the puritanical foundations, “Life” looks utterly modest. Some of the erotic scenes are made in such a way that you can literally hear the nasty giggling of teenagers who have discovered porn for the first time off the screen. In general, the erotica in the series is shot with an aggressive gloss, borrowed from The Wolf of Wall Street. But where Martin Skoresese wanted to fuck the audience with excess luxury, Andreasyan has a quiet admiration. Naked female bodies for him are separated by commas with yachts, luxury cars and expensive watches – elements of luxury in the life of a “real man”.

However, in the fourth series, Andreasyan tries to turn on the moralist, but it would be better if he did not do this. Not only does the game of edification look unconvincing against the background of previous episodes, but the tragic backstory of Priluchny’s hero for some reason repeats the misogynistic fantasy of the world’s worst (and at the same time incredibly cult) film The Room. Well, at least somewhere import substitution in the country really works: now we have not only our own Ed Wood, but also Tommy WiseauThe director of the same “Room”..

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No love, no dough, no clarity: the 4th season of “Major” as an illustration of a new era of stagnation

A new series by Ilya Aksenov (“Peace! Friendship! Gum!”, “Relatives”), which tells about the anesthetist Vanya (Denis Prytkov), who agrees to illegally pump out star drug addicts because he needs money for the treatment of his mother. In this difficult task, a one-armed taxi driver (Nikita Nikitin) helps him, and one of his clients becomes a troubled tiktoker (Anastasia Reznik, a member of the “Women’s team” of the show “Game”). The author of the idea was blogger Ida Galich, and the project was born during kitchen gatherings with friends and the discussion of one post on social networks (although its plot is suspiciously reminiscent of The Drunk Firm).

The first thing that “Drip” draws attention to is the actors’ unworn faces (and the main character has such an unmemorable face that you immediately forget it). Nevertheless, the authors of the series seem to want to make a new Sergei Bodrov out of Denis Prytkov: he wears the same sweater as Danila Bagrov, and is also a brother. Judging by the pilot, “Drip” can turn out to be a spectator hit no worse than “MJ”. The first series is a real thriller that permanently keeps you in suspense and appeals to a sense of social justice. Aksenov’s direction is recognizable from the first minutes. The director does not seem to know that there are other musicians besides MujusaAs in “Peace! Friendship! Chewing gum!”, in “Drip” the Zodiac song plays: “Our guns be like: /“ Ra-ta-ta-da-ta, / Ta-da-ta-ta, / Da-ta-da-ta “”.abuses shooting from the air (in one scene the camera takes the point of view of the soul separated from the body), and Sergey Stepin from “ChOP” and “MJ” again took on the role of the father of the main character, because with something, but with the roles of Stepin’s fathers copes excellently.

E.T.

“Our Wild West”: why “Peace! Friendship! Gum!” – the main series of the Russian new wave

You won’t surprise anyone with a sitcom about a roommate these days. But what if the cohabitants are not people, but talking dolls? What if these dolls go on a drinking binge? And what if the series parodies the movie hits of the last decades? “Unfortunate” – a real game, and game in the best sense of the word. At first, Nikita Tamarov’s project (“Millionaire from Balashikha”) seems like an adult version of The Muppet Show. Three talking dolls live among people – the musician Nikita, the swindler Gosh and the elderly miser Yefim Maratovich. And then one day they lose the Internet. To find out who is stealing traffic, they go to a nearby apartment. The “intruder” turns out to be a schoolboy who just wanted to do his homework, because his drunkard father did not pay for the Internet and plunges deeper and deeper into a binge. In order to get the boy’s father out of a drunken limbo, three comrades arrange an alcohol marathon for themselves..

From that moment on, the degree of insanity and absurdity in the series begins to grow uncontrollably – and the “Wretches” from “The Muppets” turn into “Dolls” by Viktor Shenderovich, with the important difference, however, that if Shenderovich’s satire was political, then here it is social. However, both projects are also related by the fact that they boldly parody the pop culture hits of their time. So, getting out of a binge delightfully mimics Nolan’s “Beginning”, and Yuri Bykov appears in the self-ironic role of the boy’s drinking father, who again tries on the image of a watchman – but not a simple one, but a caretaker of Robert Eggers’ “Mayak”. If at this point you are not yet interested in the series, then you are unlikely to be interested in it, but believe me, this is not only terribly obscene, but also homerically funny spectaclewhich is better to see once than to hear about it a hundred times.

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Again (after “Crystal”) a crime drama written by Oleg Malovichko and directed by Dushan Gligorov. The series takes place in 2012, but it seems that he himself was filmed ten years ago. What does it look like? On a bad cosplay of The Godfather. “Chimera” consists of three storylines: one is dedicated to the St. Petersburg gangster family (Egor Koreshkov takes over from Andrei Smirnov, like Michael Corleone from his father Vito), the second is about a frostbitten policeman (Alexander Kuznetsov), who wants to cover this mafia cell, and the third – to a novice pawnbroker (Eldar Kalimulin) who just wants to raise money to save his relatives. “Chimera” is chimera of genre clichés, inanimate cinema in which there is no one to root for and in which Kuznetsov’s character, with or without reason, copulates with the heroine of Lukerya Ilyashenko, because … well, you need to somehow attract the attention of the audience.

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Screenwriter Oleg Malovichko: “A story about serial killers is a story about all of us”