#Влади́мир Высо́цкий | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

oneinathousand · 10 months ago

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Every once in a while the subject of digital necromancy and bad biopics will pop up and create a lot of discussion, and when it happens, a lot of the same subjects will be brought up repeatedly. However, there's one movie I came upon several months ago that combines "bringing dead actors back to life" and the disrespectful biopic in a completely unhinged way that I've never seen done elsewhere, but I never hear anybody on English-speaking parts of the internet bring it up because it's virtually unknown outside of Russian-speaking areas. Let me introduce you to a little movie called Vysotsky: Thank You for Being Alive.

First, some context on who the subject of this biopic is: Vladimir Vysotsky was a Russian singer/songwriter/poet/actor who was incredibly popular among much of the Soviet Union; you could consider him the Russian equivalent to John Lennon or Edith Piaf, all being artists, who - because they died relatively young - were elevated after their deaths to becoming cultural icons of almost mythical status.

So, in 2011, this movie was released, based on a screenplay and partially produced by Vysotsky's son, Nikita Vysotsky, and it tells a story about Vysotsky having a near-death experience while on tour in Uzbekistan in 1979 as KGB agents are spying on him. The producers apparently wanted viewers to see the "real" Vladimir Vysotsky, and to do that, they took a very... unique approach to his portrayal in the movie.

They had the actor who played Vysotsky go through six hours of makeup every day, then used CG on top of that (to what extent, I don't know, maybe it was just a general digital airbrushing, though I also heard some shots might have his face be entirely CG, but I can't confirm since there's not a lot of info about this movie in English), and then had Nikita Vysotsky dub the voice.

So far, not so unusual, other than the filmmakers being incredibly obsessive about making the actor look exactly like Vysotsky because they didn't think audiences would accept anything else.

Here's the batshit part: They didn't credit the actor, Sergey Bezrukov, upon release. They kept his involvement a secret. Instead, they credited Vladimir Vysotsky as playing himself.

It wasn't until the next year when Sergey Bezrukov admitted to playing Vysotsky, and apparently for a 2013 TV version they finally credited him. Also, this review from before the confession indicates that many people managed to figure out it was him all along. Still, that just goes to show that keeping it a secret was a pointless endeavor.

Maybe this movie is actually really good and tells this episode of Vysotsky's life in a factual, even-handed way, but I wouldn't be able to tell you since, again, not a lot of super-detailed info on Vysotsky in English that's easy to find. What I CAN say is that regardless of its quality, all those efforts pretty much go down the drain by the producers deciding not to credit the actual actor for a time. Pretending Vysotsky played himself feels like putting words in his mouth postmortem, it would be kinda like if I made a biopic about somebody and then at the end of the movie I put up a disclaimer being like "We held an Ouija board session and communicated with our subject's ghost who TOTALLY gave us the stamp of approval."

I haven't seen the whole film but from what I have seen, the use of all that makeup, CG, and dubbing plants the performance pretty firmly in the uncanny valley, and if I were a Russian who had grown up listening to Vysotsky's music and watching his acting roles, then saw this movie in a theater or on TV, I'd be creeped out and insulted at the notion that this is as good as the real deal.

The effect looks fine in some angles and lighting conditions, but otherwise it's generally weird-looking. The face is overly smooth, Bezrukov clearly couldn't emote much underneath all that makeup, and the dubbed voice doesn't always match the facial expressions, or lack thereof. It doesn't help that this movie is REALLY brightly lit and saturated as if it was shot by a 2000's video game developer who just figured out how to do bloom effects, so there's really not much the film could do to obscure the face. The creepiness is something you have to see in motion to feel, just posting pictures wouldn't get across what I mean, so if you do want to see it, the movie has been uploaded here.

#vladimir vysotsky #Влади́мир Высо́цкий #biopic #i wouldn't have found out about this movie or vysotsky in general if it weren't for Treasure Island 1988 #cause I watched the meeting place cannot be changed based on commenter's recommendations

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