Red Penguins--Back in 2014 filmmaker Gabe Polsky chronicled the Soviet Union's national hockey team during the Cold War years with the documentary Red Army. Now Polsky is back with this post-Cold-War take on Russian hockey as it abandoned itself to western-style capitalist decadence.
The new film tells how, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, a group of U.S.-based investors led by Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin, and including Mario Lemieux and Michael J. Fox, took a 50% financial interest in the broke, decrepit Soviet National team. They dispatched a young marketing whiz named Steven Warshaw to the team's crumbling Moscow stadium on a mission to, as the saying goes, get asses in the seats. He wasn't above using a wacky penguin mascot, strippers and circus bears to do it.
Polsky's film is brisk and jaunty in tone, but it contains some grim passages showing how rough the transitions between political and economic systems can be. It gradually settles into a contrast between the manic, bouncing-off-the-walls hustler Warshaw and the team's baleful coach, Viktor Tikhonov and GM Valery Gushin, both scary old-school Soviet apparatchiks who resented and mistrusted the vulgar (and effective) antics of this young American showman. Gushin and Warshaw are still around to tell their tales as talking heads (Tikhonov died in 2014). Both seem to have mellowed with age, but traces of the '90s-era craziness remain.
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