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Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’.

Болшой Город нам ра��кажет, где покупать еду в Мо�кве..

Lenta.ru and Novye Izvestiya report that Ulyanovsk, the birthcity of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, is planning several projects in order to attract tourists to their historical city.

Sergei Morozov, governor of the Ulyanovsk region, originally proposed gathering old Lenin statues from all over Russia and creating an open-air museum not far from a Lenin-themed ski resort. However, some American mystery investors consider another idea more profitable and have decided to pour their capitalist money into a Lenin theme park.

A whole theme park devoted to Vladimir Iliyich? What will we do there, you ask?

??????? “??????????” ?????? ?????? ??????? ???????, ?? ??????? ?????? ???? ????? ????????? ???????????? ????????????. ??????????, ?????? ???????????? ????????, ??????, ????????, ?????????? ? ?????????????????? ??????? ??? ????????? ????????? ?????? ??????, ?????????????? ? ???????????????? ???????. ????? ?? ??????? ?? ????? ?????????? ????????? ?????, ???????? ???? ????????? ???????.

The centerpiece of Leninland will be a replica of Red Square on which there will be daily May Day Marches. Visitors to the park, in search of experiencing the exotic, can try their hand working at a Kolkhoz (ED: communist collective farm) or hear a talking statue of Lenin speak of the ideals of communism. Also, from time to time, park employees will play the role of secret agents and track down visitors the park.

Of course, the idea of a commercial amusement park with Lenin as its Mickey Mouse has plenty of people up in arms. Valery Perfilov, director of the Lenin Memorial Museum in Ulyanovsk, had this to say:

«???? ???? ?? ??????????? ???????????? ???????? ????????? ?????. ? ?????? ?????? ???????? ?????, ???? ?? ?????, ???????? ? ???????? ??????? ??????, ?????????, ??? ??… ???-?? ????? ???????????? ?????? ? ????? ???????????? ?????. ???? ????????? ???????? ????????????? ??? ??????».

What we’re talking about is an undisguised exploitation of the symbols of the soviet era. By all appearances, Vladimir Ilyich will be portrayed as some sort of scarecrow or bugaboo… These people have decided to use Lenin for purely commercial reasons; Leninland is being made exclusively for amusement.

As exciting (read with sarcasm) as this sounds, I highly doubt that an animatronic Lenin and communist farm will draw tourists 900 kilometres outside of Moscow. Especially when they can see the real Red Square and the real fantastic plastic Lenin in Moscow.

My guess is that this theme park will never happen.

My fellow students of the Russian language and lovers of all things Russian may enjoy this online archive of Soviet cartoons. They’ve got quite a bit of everything there. For starters, try Nu pogodi.

Here are some mp3’s of Iron & Wine’s November 30th performance on NPR’s All Songs Considered.

Whenever I come back to the States, I make a point (and a list) to see films and buy books which haven’t made it to Russia. Lately, both Kelly and Kottke have been singing the praises of Primer, the independent film which won the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Festival, so this one was at the top of the list. It didn’t hurt that comparisons were being made to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento, two movies which I’ve really enjoyed.

Just like the films it’s been compared to, Primer is a jigsaw puzzle of a movie that leaves you mapping out timelines long after the credits roll. It tells the story of two engineers, Abe and Aaron, who, while developing a device which alters the apparent mass of objects, accidentally invent a time machine. When they realize the power they now posses, it becomes a true test whether they can trust each other - or even themselves.

It would be easy to overlook this film seeing as the whole time travel genre has been way overdone by Hollywood. Still, even though Primer revisits some of the same concepts and questions concerning time travel, ethics, causation, and fatalism it stands out high above the rest. It’s also worth noting that this remarkable film was practically singlehandedly made by Shane Carruth, who wrote, directed, starred in, and arranged the score for Primer all for around $7000.

Still, though the storyline is awesome I think the acting leaves a bit to be desired. Carruth and David Sullivan just weren’t convincing to me as two men who experience invention, monumental discovery, ethical struggle, betrayal, and so on. Their acting was cardboard.

You’ve got to see Primer. Probably even multiple times if you really want to catch everything. Kottke posted a few explanations, but I’d recommend seeing the film first before you read them:
1. Primer timeline discussion #1
2. Primer timeline discussion #2
3. Detailed visual timeline

The film was just released on DVD and is available at Amazon.

I used to be the kind of minimalist guy that preferred barebones software. The bells and whistles weren’t that necessary and a shiny graphical interface was even less important than that. For me, a simple text editor was much better than whatever Macromedia Dreamweaver had to offer. The same went for music players. I’ve tried the whole lot and pretty much came to hate them all.

Then along came iTunes. By the time Apple released it to Windows, there was already a decent amount of buzz generated. I was a bit skeptical at first, but decided to give it a whirl since it would help me get some of the music I couldn’t find here in Russia. At first I was just using it to purchase music.

In the last year, though, it’s really grown on me. I’ve got to hand it to the folks at Apple, unlike my experience with WinAmp, the great new features in each update of iTunes have impressed me.

The latest version is no exception. When I bought the latest Dave Matthews Band CD from their music store, it came with a making-of video and a ‘digital booklet’. This was just one more reason to buy this particular album on the net. It turns out that the digital booklet is just the liner notes in PDF format. Starting with version 4.8 it seems that you can add PDFs to your music library. I have a bunch of mp3s of lectures and sermons with accompanying PDF notes/outlines, so this turned out to be a cool little feature for me.

There’s been a great deal of speculation as to what the future holds for iTunes and its video features. Will they sell music videos or even full-length films any time soon? An insider at Slashdot says, “No”. . .

Also, it was just announced this week that the forthcoming version of iTunes will support Podcasting. It’s not clear exactly how this will be done, but it sounds pretty spiffy.

What are your thoughts about Apple iTunes?

Walk into any DVD shop around Moscow and you’re bound to come across the work of Dmitry Puchkov. He’s neither an actor nor a director, but you’ll more than likely find credit given to him on the front of every film on which he’s worked, usually in the form of a red and black stamp with his picture.

Puchkov - better known to Russians as Goblin - has gained a reputation and fame for his unauthorized translations of popular Hollywood films like Snatch, The Matrix, Shrek, and the Lord of the Rings series. He’s been at it for about ten years, but it’s only in the last four years that his pseudonym has become so well known.

Goblin is especially loved by the young teenage crowd due to the fact that his translations don’t censor or soften profanity in the way that the official studio dubbings typically do. In fact, according to this 2003 Moscow Times article on Puchkov, one of the reasons he began translating films was because he didn’t like the censored versions of his favorite Hollywood movies.

However, vulgarity isn’t the only change found in Goblin translations. Puchkov has also taken liberty with characters and storyline to give his version a twist of parody. For example, here are a few changes that he makes to Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy:

-The titles of the films have become Bratva i Koltso (The Posse and the Ring), Dve Sorvanniye Bashni (Two Toppled Towers), and Vozvrascheniye Bomzha (Return of the Bum).

- Goblin renames Frodo Baggins as Fyodor Mikhailovich Sumkin (sumka means bag in Russian), Gandalf becomes Gandalf-Pendelf (Gandalf the kicker), and Gollum becomes Goly (naked), Boromir and Faramir are called Baralgin and Efferalgan (medicinal drugs), and Gimli becomes Givi and speaks with a Georgian accent.

-As the fellowship is escaping from the Mines of Moriah in the first film, Goblin adds the Tatu song Nas ne dogonyat (They’re not gonna catch us).

- In a scene where Elrond (played by Hugo Weaving, who was Agent Smith in the Matrix) is speaking with Arwen (played by Liv Tyler, daughter of Steven Tyler from Aerosmith), Arwen says, “You aren’t my father! You’re Agent Smith. My father is Aerosmith.”

- In the awesome scene where Gollum get schizophrenic and argues with himself while Frodo and Sam are sleeping nearby, the ‘bad’ Gollum takes on a Ukrainian accent and argues with the Russian ‘good’ Gollum claiming that the Ukranian Dynamo will most certainly beat the Russian Spartak football team.

Interestingly enough, even though the studios were originally pissed off at Puchkov for his unauthorized translations of their films, it seems that they’ve recently decided to use his popularity to their advantage.

First, the Russian TV company STV brought him on board to write and direct Anti-Bumer, a humorous version of their own film Bumer. Shortly after, REN TV hired him to create accurately obscene Russian translations of 31 South Park episodes.

Most recently, Puchkov has been in the news for his second collaboration with the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone: United Pictures International, the distributors of Parker’s Team America, hired Puchkov to translate the film for the big-screen in Russia.

As Puchkov himself admits, his name sells things. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that a local radio station has put the Goblin logo on their ad, even though Goblin has nothing to do with the station:

So, now that Puchkov has been snatched up by the studios to create legitimate translations of their films, will he stop altogether creating spoofs like the ones that built up his popularity? It doesn’t look like it. In fact, Puchkov announced that he will continue to make these hilarious translations under the project called Bozhya Iskra (The Divine Spark), a side project of his main company Polny P.

For the most part, the public loves him. Even Leonid Volodarsky, arguably the most famous translator of modern films into Russian, thinks well of Goblin. My guess is that we’ll see Puchkov doing a lot more official dubbings of films - perhaps he’ll even expand into some different genres.