Leofwine_draca
Once again Amazon Prime has come up trumps in delivering a high quality print of a film I'd never even heard of before watching. OPERATION 'Y' & OTHER SHURIK'S ADVENTURES, despite the awkwardness of the title, is a light and breezy comedy anthology from Russia. There are three tales here, all of them featuring Shurik as the main character, and actor Aleksandr Demyanenko is a delight in the role. Shurik is a high energy character, geeky looking, but whose drive and enthusiasm makes for a likable protagonist.The stories are of differing quality and the first is by far the best. This is a long-running battle of wits between rival workers on a building site; the whole episode is constructed around slapstick humour and as a result it's frequently hilarious, with good production values. The inspiration is clearly the kind of physical comedy popular in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s and as a result this is a lot of fun.The second story starts off in the same vein with plenty of hilarious book-reading scenes in which the principal characters are joined at the hip. It's light, vibrant, and funny, although less so when the story becomes a traditional love story later on. The third story is about a pretend robbery and is less interesting, although still not bad. I hope Prime open their archives to more Russian fare because this has provided an eye-opening experience for this viewer.
hte-trasme
This feature actually consists of three half-hour-long story lines one after another, related only in that they all star the same hapless protagonist. I read somewhere that the director took Charlie Chaplin as a model for his comedy, and the influence shows here, even to the point of the short-subject-length segments -- and especially in the first story. That one is basically a pure slapstick comedy, drawing gags from the situation of the Sharik character (who actually ends up resembling Harold Lloyd in appearance and behavior more than Chaplin) working part time on a construction site, alongside the man who he caused to be working there as a sentence. The second segment is the one I thought to be the greatest success, as it combines the visual humor (many sequences of which, throughout, would work without dialogue at all) with a well-tuned funny situation and good actor chemistry. The third and titular segment is amusing as well, but perhaps get a little too involved in its own story. Overall, it's funny material and recreates well what made the silent comedies of the short-subject era funny, if without the inspiration of an actual Chaplin on set.
revere-7
O.K., before I review this DVD (it's actually more than one "movie"), let me disclose a couple facts. First, apart from the unparalleled works of Eisenstein, I am not a huge fan of Russian Cinema. I find much of it ponderous, and overly bogged down in State approved propaganda.Operation "Y" or Operatsiya Y i drugiye priklyucheniya Shurika (Operation Y and other Shurik's Adventures) as it's known in Russian, is the most popular Soviet Era comedy, possibly the most popular Russian comedy of all time. So, despite the double negative of Russian Slapstick, I had to give it a look.It's hard to hate Shurik's adventures, but if you're not a slapstick fan, they're not really going to fully win you over either. Shurik is a young go-getter in the vein of Harold Lloyd's 'Glasses Guy' (Shurik is also bespectacled) and his Adventures fall somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Benny Hill both chronologically (since it was released in 1965) and stylistically. While the vignettes aren't as charming as Chaplin, they are, mercifully, less annoying than Hill, and thankfully, the Soviet propaganda while undeniably present is set to a very low pitch. Not being a fan of the genre, I'll refrain from actually endorsing or cautioning about this film collection, but I will say, exhaust the Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd cannons (and perhaps the cartoons of Chuck Jones too) before moving on to these.
Oleg Sinitsin
This naive old comedy is a landmark of Russian cinema. The humor is mostly Charlie Chaplin style (cake in the face etc.), however many verbal jokes from this comedy have made it into everyday language. There are three novels in this movie: one about a convict doing community service hand by hand with a student with orthogonal morale, another about college students cheating, and the last one about a trio of junks (the famous Russian comedians Nikulin, Vitsin, and Morgunov) staging a burglary to cover the real one.I would like to invite visitors to see pictures from the movie and watch a detailed trailer at RussArt.com. Those who read Russian can find more materials useful: reviews, actor biographies, articles, etc.Pictures: http://russart.com/?moviepictures&mid=69 . Trailer: http://russart.com/?movietrailer&mid=69 .
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