Well, you know the saying: sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear comes out to skate and hand out Penguins beer.
This is wildly entertaining, sometimes as funny as any great comedy of errors and outrageousness, and yet all the same it's quite a time as an American to watch this - frankly, my dears, I'm actually pretty happy to be a US citizen after watching how completely out of control and dangerous Russia was in the 90s (hell, still now). At one point the filming of an interview is interrupted because an... Unidentified person shows up behind director Polsky(!)
But what one comes away with the most is just how absurd Capitalism in all its circus elements can make something like the Red Army hockey team - and on a much darker level what the Russian Mafia did to everything with just how scary (yet in its own way still absurd) it could get - and that the first row seats to the circus one gets when born as an American (to paraphrase George Carlin) can be so surreal when put in front of Russian audiences. And at the midpoint I wondered "hmm, why there weren't any former players from the team interviewed for the documentary"... Until I realized, if they were still alive, some of them might be worried still about being identified!
In all seriousness, The focus on the management on American and Russian sides, and some other key figures in the know, seems like a tight one and tethered to the idea of the corruptive influences of money on people with little idea of a functioning democracy (including that one "Businessman" who only served 10 months in prison for some shady things, but hey, only 10 months means he wasn't guilty!) If anything it's a little short at 79 minutes.
This is wildly entertaining, sometimes as funny as any great comedy of errors and outrageousness, and yet all the same it's quite a time as an American to watch this - frankly, my dears, I'm actually pretty happy to be a US citizen after watching how completely out of control and dangerous Russia was in the 90s (hell, still now). At one point the filming of an interview is interrupted because an... Unidentified person shows up behind director Polsky(!)
But what one comes away with the most is just how absurd Capitalism in all its circus elements can make something like the Red Army hockey team - and on a much darker level what the Russian Mafia did to everything with just how scary (yet in its own way still absurd) it could get - and that the first row seats to the circus one gets when born as an American (to paraphrase George Carlin) can be so surreal when put in front of Russian audiences. And at the midpoint I wondered "hmm, why there weren't any former players from the team interviewed for the documentary"... Until I realized, if they were still alive, some of them might be worried still about being identified!
In all seriousness, The focus on the management on American and Russian sides, and some other key figures in the know, seems like a tight one and tethered to the idea of the corruptive influences of money on people with little idea of a functioning democracy (including that one "Businessman" who only served 10 months in prison for some shady things, but hey, only 10 months means he wasn't guilty!) If anything it's a little short at 79 minutes.