Word: vera
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Waterhouse St. resident Vera F. Bisell said the group is encouraging people to engrave identification numbers on valuable items and holding meetings on how to protect homes from burglars...
...Vasili Pichul's smash hit Little Vera, the kids look like Sunset Strip punks and act as if they'd just invented adolescent angst. Vera's dad is a drunken oaf, abusing the children who hate him yet cling to him and lie to protect him. He could be the petty dictator of a pre-Gorbachev regime, and his daughter the strident soul of rebellion. In her sharp, defiant voice, you can hear the sound of breaking glasnost...
Glasnost cinema is good news for Soviet citizens, who go to the movies four times as often as Americans and ten times as often as the British. Today Soviets get to watch sexual barriers fall like dominoes in slow motion. Little Vera features a love scene -- 82 seconds of topless necking and a quick tickle under Vera's dress -- that has shot viewers' eyebrows up through their hairlines. By American cable-TV standards the episode might be tame, but in a culture as repressed erotically as it is politically, Little Vera is big news...
...another sense, all Soviet cinema has become sexy, a novel commodity on the global culture market. Little Vera opens this month in the U.S., after playing the New Directors/New Films series at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in tandem with Boris Frumin's The Errors of Youth, shot in 1978 but just completed this year. Eleven Soviet filmmakers are touring the U.S. with Glasnost Film Festival, whose 22 documentaries include robust exposes on Chernobyl, the Armenian revolt and the war in Afghanistan...
...expect some 21st century director to filch a scene from Little Vera the way David Lean, Brian De Palma and others have quoted the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin. For one thing, critical realism, the style of most glasnost films, eschews the bold editing effects and pristine iconography of the Soviet silents. But style is subordinate to message just now: the priority is journalism, not art. To U.S. eyes, the rebels without a cause in an alienated-teen drama like Valeri Ogorodnikov's The Burglar are a sight as nostalgic as Hula-Hoops. But in the U.S.S.R. these...