![]() In the Arab-American community Hollywood’s depictions over the decades have been seen as suffering from the ‘3B Syndrome’, in which Arabs were shown to be either belly dancers, billionaires or bombers. Even before the days of Rudolph Valentino’s roles in silent films like The Sheik in 1921 the cast was set for depicting Arabs as questionable characters who stole and murdered. One group that’s been demonised for decades with varying degrees of intensity is Arabs – and Muslims. Around the time of World War II, for obvious reasons, Germans appeared as villains in US films – as did the Japanese. The Russians might be the villain of choice right now but over the decades many different races and nationalities have had their moment in the evildoer spotlight. “I think particularly since the reemergence of Putin and a much more hardline regime, with the problems now in the Ukraine, there’s been this sense that Russia remains a geopolitical threat and a hostile power – even if it’s post-communist – and I think that’s really the reason you see this type of villainy,” says Chapman. Scholars see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tough stance as the reason for the increased presence of Russian villains now. “It never really eased up enough for Russia to feel that it is not a constant enemy,” she says. Khrushcheva, who teaches at New York’s New School, follows how Russians are portrayed in American entertainment and in her estimation the prevalence of Russians as villains hasn’t really abated since the days of the Cold War. “You can’t even turn the TV on and go to the movies without reference to Russians as horrible,” says US-based Russian-American professor Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Perhaps for a while their presence eased off but Russians remain the studios’ favoured villains. Surprisingly the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t bring an end to Russian villains onscreen. “But takes on a particular ideological inflection during the Cold War when you get the association not just Russia but also Soviet communism.” “Even before the Cold War, Russia was represented often as a geopolitical threat to the West,” says James Chapman, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. ![]() The Russian news agency Interfax reported in August that Batu Khasikov, a member of the culture committee at the upper chamber of the nation’s federal assembly, had stated that “movies where everything related to Russia is overtly demonized or shown in a primitive and silly way should be banned from theatrical distribution.”ĭepicting the Russians as villains has a long history. There has even been the threat of a Russian boycott of Hollywood movies, highlighting the risk studios take when they demonise a nationality. Russian politicians and filmmakers have now made clear their displeasure with the US movie industry’s ongoing depictions of Russian characters as villains. Nihilism may be the most fitting attitude in one of these instances, but it is jarring in the others - especially in a film whose interwoven structure suggests an intention to make sense of a world outsiders don’t understand.From a sadistic former KGB operative in The Avengers to the Russian evildoers in A Good Day to Die Hard, there’s certainly been no shortage of Russian villains on screen recently. But the screenplay fumbles some attempts to tie things together, offering abrupt moments of violence whose motivations we feel we ought to understand but don’t. The action becomes more familiarly story-driven as the film progresses, especially as we watch Rio’s first encounters with an attractive new student (musician Kelli Wakili, credited here as Kelli Strader). (An abundance of facial tattoos makes the latter job easier.) The quasi-documentary approach suits Rechenberg’s no-frills, realistic dialogue, but doesn’t keep it from growing mundane over the course of the longish pic. ![]() He and DP Lyn Moncrief frame scenes tightly with a handheld camera that tags along restlessly for much of the film, we follow behind characters so much that we can identify the backs of their heads more readily than their faces. Instead, Rechenberg focuses on making us feel like we’re silent observers moving within their world. Rio, though seemingly smarter than his peers and gentle at heart, goes along too readily with bad-news acquaintances Flores, a new prison guard getting an education from coworkers in how to abuse his authority, puts up no fight that we see when they make him part of their no-snitching brotherhood. Though we see enough of each man’s private life to understand his motivations to some extent - even if we hardly sympathize when Miguel violently pushes for increased stature in his aunt’s crime organization - none offers the kind of viewer-surrogate moral framework most films of this sort provide.
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