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As long as I am playing movie geek today, I thought I'd pass along this little tidbit regarding Viggo Mortensen's work on Eastern Promises (another film that I'm hoping to see).The 43 tattoos Viggo Mortensen displays on his body in new film "Eastern Promises" were so authentic, Russians really thought he was a Mafia heavyweight. The Lord of The Rings star, who plays a Russian mobster in the new thriller, spent four hours in the make-up chair having the skin art applied and he realised it was worth it when he saw the looks of terror on Soviet youths he met in a London pub.
He recalls, "They were looking at my hands and suddenly stopped talking. "It was right when the (Alexander) Litvinenko (former lieutenant colonel of the Russian Federation's Federal Security Service) poisoning happened in 2006, and I looked very shady. So I got up and left. They were probably freaked out." Mortensen reveals he travelled through Russia, met with real gangland bosses and meticulously studied the Mafia's tattoo art to make sure his latest character was as authentic as possible.
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5 comments:
Wally, I'm surprised you aren't dismayed about the fact that this film - if it becomes a hit - will extend the lifespan of the "Russian mobster" stereotype for another five to ten years at least. I want to see it, too, but I'm already steeling myself for bad fake accents and people acting improbably and irrationally, which is OK, because, you know, they're supposed to be Russian. I always think of an old Law & Order episode in this context, which manages to shoehorn more stereotypes into 44 minutes of airtime than you'd think possible - young, attractive, golddigging Russian & Ukrainian ladies (repeatedly called "Russian whores" by various Americans); a floor-scrubbing babushka; an overdressed woman singing Ochi Chornye (horribly) in a Brighton Beach nightclub; a fat Russian "mobster" who offers the detective a shot of vodka; a drunken, hopelessly romantic Russian poet who threatens suicide....in general, I expect to see at least 50% of the above list in this forthcoming movie. But I'll definitely still go see it.
"It was right when the (Alexander) Litvinenko (former lieutenant colonel of the Russian Federation's Federal Security Service) poisoning happened in 2006, and I looked very shady. So I got up and left. They were probably freaked out."
This is kind of silly. Is there some new versiia about old-school Russian vory v zakone (the kind that get tats) being involved in Litvinenko's offing? And I wonder if Mortensen considered that the "Soviet" youths who he "freaked out" quite possibly have parents who got rich honestly or at least through white-collar crime, without getting their hands dirty, and that those youths fell silent because they just thought prison and OCG tats were low-class?
Oh, and I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the movie star's meetings with "real gangland bosses." Please. Studying the tattoo art is more plausible - there are coffee-table books with photos of Russian prison tats, and their meanings are, I think, well documented.
If I thought this movie would actually get the Russian criminal world right, I might be less pessimistic about it, but I think one has to watch Russian movies (I'm thinking of Bumer) for a more realistic view. Then again, perhaps my expectations for Hollywood shouldn't be so high.
You're right about it extending or even reinventing (in the popular mind) the Russian mafia stereotype. I've actually groaned over the accents in the previews, etc.
But then my pure movie geek takes over and I decide the fight scenes just look totally bad-ass.
I can say the same thing about movies like Goodfellas, Sopranos, etc. - but I'm still a fan of that genre. Despite all the exaggerations and details it gets wrong.
Suspension of disbelief, I suppose.
I thought the same thing about sitting down with real Russian mafia heavies and people being "freaked out" because of the Litvinenko poisoning, etc. But given that it was just a small blurb about Eastern Promises, I decided not to appear indignant about the actors small ignorances.
There is supposedly a fight scene in this film, that is the mother of all fight scenes. Roger Ebert's review (and others) allude to it, but won't give the details.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070913/REVIEWS/709130303
Viggio Mortensen's many lady fans will probably go to see it, if nothing else!
Pertinent article from 2004: "The Perpetual Bad Guys: From Soviet Spies to Oily Oligarchs, Russians Continue to Be Hollywood's Favorite Villains".
This RTTV review of Eastern Promises essentially says that the movie is a new form of Russia hating shit:
http://www.russiatoday.ru/features/news/14795
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