How Do You Say 'Green Lantern' in Russian?

Now here's a trend I can get behind: "[U]p to December, there hadn't been a single Russian film in the top 20. The film expected to create a bombastic box-office crater -– war epic Burnt By the Sun 2, at $40m the country's most expensive production ever –- fizzled out embarrassingly when part two was released in May. A few years ago, Russians learned to stop worrying and love the blockbuster as they began producing SFX-laden spectaculars like Night Watch; now they're learning about the flipside -– the car-crash pleasures of rubbernecking a box-office flop." [The Guardian]

Head of Russia's Oscar Committee Calls for Giant Bomb/Official Selection to Withdraw on Account of It Sucks

You think the Oscars selection process gets political here? Just imagine sitting in the room when Russia's national Oscar committee grudgingly voted for Nikita Mikalhkov's enormous critical and commercial bomb, Burnt by the Sun 2: Citadel (Utomlyonnye solntsem 2: Predstoyanie), to become the country's official foreign language selection. Filmmaker and committee head Vladimir Menshov so strongly opposed the pick of the $45 million flop that he's now lobbying publicly for the film's director to pull out of the race.

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