A new movie opens July 30 starring Melanie Laurent and Alexei Guskov and it sounds like a fun summer diversion for Russophiles. We're waiting for our review copy to deliver a judgement, but here is a synopsis...

Life is always stranger than fiction, or, in this case, it may have been imitating [bad] fiction. Or at least so it seems from the transcripts of the case against Anna Chapman.

Avatar has become the largest grossing movie in Russian history. But, more interestingly, a spin-off photo morfing site (which seemed to be connected to McDonald's Finland) allowed visitors to turn pictures of famous people into the blue Na'Vi. A Russian newspaper tried it with Medvedev and Putin. Here are the tinted results. First Putin:

When it comes to bogeymen, China, Cuba, even North Korea can't hold a candle to old Mother Russia. This week, as tempers flared and theatrical protests abounded around health care, a woman offered this irrational take on proposed reforms at a town hall meeting ...

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol is one of Russia's greatest and yet least appreciated writers. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and other classics, said that "we all came out of Gogol's Overcoat." What he meant is that Gogol was completely unlike any Russian writer who preceded him, and that all Russian literature that followed was indebted to him.

I get so much spam trash, that today I decided to harvest a line or two from each spam I got (well, the PG or less ones) and shuffle them together into a found poem. Trash into art? Not quite. But something...

Saw an entry from Stanislav Mishin's Mat Rodina Blog, when it was posted to Johnson's List. A superb and well-argued summary of several things Russian business people need to attent to if they want to do business with the West. 

I just stumbled across this nice interview (July 07) of Victor Bogorad, who does the cartoons for our Survival Russian feature. Too bad the video is not archived online... 

Many have scoffed at Cindy McCain's defense of Alaska Governor (and GOP Veep candidate) Sarah Palin's foreign policy chops with the assertion that "Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia." Scoff not. The truth is so more startling still.

This hilarious YouTube satire video by the Perm KVN group gives a bit of background on the recent Russian election, and how Medevedev was recruited for his role. The dubbing is superbly done. (All in Russian)...

In the 2002 film Oligarch, by Russian director Pavel Lungin, the main character predicts his own downfall, saying, "Russia is a bear. You think you are playing with it and it devours you."

Hilary Clinton stumbles over the name of the next president of Russia, and a Ukrainian TV host offers a pronunciation lesson.