From 'Stalin's Wife' to steroid-popping weightlifters

Here's a little insight into the culture in Ukraine and in the U.S.:

When I was on the marshrutka heading to Kremenchuk last week, the television in the front of the van was showing two intriguing films -- both Russian. One was a 2006 movie called "Граффити" (translation: "Graffiti). Here's a description:

---

Set against a background of a pastoral Russia is this rhapsodic human drama of three freedom-loving people. Director Igor Apasyan born in Georgia to an Armenian family is a veteran filmmaker of international acclaim.

The chief of a small town asks a traveling Moscow art student to paint a portrait of the town's leaders on a wall. The student during his stay in the town strikes a friendship with a drunken old man and a septic service truck driver.

As the student begins painting a town resident comes and asks him to draw a picture of his relatives now dead on the wall too. The student complies and soon more and more people show up with photos of people they would like painted. The student finally decides to completely redo the picture.

---

OK -- I wish I had Googled the movie before I saw it; I would've understood a lot more. Even so, I grasped some of the plot, and the marshrutka passengers seemed to like it.

Then came an equally engaging drama -- two segments from what appeared to be a mini-series called "Stalin's Wife" (in Russian: «Жена Сталина»). The Moscow Times described it this way:

---

Till Death Do Us Part

He was a vicious dictator. She was just a teenager when they fell in love. An upcoming television series turns Stalin's marriage into a soap opera. ... Josef Stalin is depicted as a passionate lover who missed the October Revolution because he was in bed with his teenage lover, Nadezhda Alliluyeva ... According to the film's version of history, the reason he was absent during the storming of the Winter Palace was because he was in bed with his lover. "The Bolsheviks have taken power -- or haven't," he tells her, as they hear the sound of shooting outside.

---

The drama was produced and co-directed by Mira Todorovskaya. It is based on a novel called "The Only Woman" by Olga Trifonova, which came out in 2001 and presented a semi-factual account of Stalin and his complicated personal life.

If the films shown en route to Kremenchuk were the cultural high points of the trip, the films shown on the return trip were definitely the cultural low points. In fact, I don't think you can get any lower, any worse, than "Twin Sitters," a 1994 stinker featuring two steroid-inflated weightlifters named Peter and David Paul. (Yes, they're twins. In this movie, they were called the Falcone brothers.)

How stupid was this movie? Here's some dialogue:

---

Ma Falcone: Well, it's true! Your necks are bigger than your heads.

David Falcone: Ma, that's only because there are no muscles in our heads to exercise.

Ma Falcone: Yeah? Well, what about your brain?

Peter Falcone: Ma, the brain is not a muscle; it's an organ!

David Falcone: And it's a good thing, too. Otherwise, our heads would be so huge, we would fall over!

---

It gets worse. It was a blessing, I guess, that the movie was dubbed in Russian (and renamed "The Babysitters" -- maybe the translation of the original title didn't make any more sense than the script). Don't believe me? Here's the trailer.

After assaulting us with "Twin Sitters," the marshrutka driver tried to inflict another Peter and David movie on us -- "Too Big." But the passengers rebelled against the Paul Twins Film Fest. Instead, we watched a French movie that wasn't much better. (It did, however, feature a lot less spaghetti being thrown at people.)

One last cultural note: Our translator, Yulia, and her boyfriend went to a rock concert last night. It was held at the Sports Palace in Kharkiv. The headliner group was the King and the Joker (Korol' i Shut) from St. Petersburg, Russia. From what Yulia described, it sounded like "rage rock," in the vein of Insane Clown Posse or Limp Bizkit.

If there's a lesson here, it's that all over the world, the kids are all right.