I thought it was gonna be about the guy who actually made Tetris, but no they cover that in 2 minutes at the beginning and the rest of the movie is about the American copyright lawyer trying to get the rights for Nintendo.
It's literally all about how bad the USSR is and how good corporations like Nintendo are. When the American arrives in Moscow they take his passport down to an evil KGB bunker and the whole movie shifts to being tinted blue and grey.
There's literally a scene where the Russian programmer says to the American "we want to be free, we want your coca cola and Levi's jeans". If it wasn't so boring this would read as satire of American media in the Cold War.
Yeah, I've noticed a shift from Muslim terror to anti-soviet stuff these 5 or so years.
Funny how they never make movies about the people Capitalism has fucked over.
Like a movie about Nicola Tesla dying penniless and starving after spending his life having his work exploited, only to have the FBI pick at his corpse once he's dead.
Like a movie about Nicola Tesla dying penniless and starving after spending his life having his work exploited, only to have the FBI pick at his corpse once he’s dead.
The ultimate would be a movie about Ayn Rand but only in her last years living off social security and dying alone.
While still saying welfare is communism and communism is BAD! Truly american experience :amerikkka-clap:
Nicola Tesla, Steve Wozniak, Ub Iwerks, and Jack Kirby all have someething in common. They all got fucked over by people that would get all the credit for their work. Out of all of them, Wozniak is the most successful.
The 90s were weird because without the Soviets Hollywood didn't know who to cast as the evil bad guys in Action movies. They tried various middle eastern terrorists. They tried South African mercenaries with names like Hans and Fritz. Nothing really stuck. When 9/11 happened you could hear a palpable sigh of relief from California that there was finally a credible official enemy again for them to demonize in the annual action blockbusters.
anti-soviet stuff
Hey, that's a nice Stranger Things you got here, sure would be a shame if we inserted countless scenes of David Harbour getting beaten up in a Gulag that completely ruin the tone and pacing just to point out that Gommunism is in fact no iPhone Venezuela 150 trillion dead
American copyright lawyer trying to get the rights for Nintendo.
The same Nintendo that will take you to court over making a fan game based on one of their cloistered IPs :yea:
we want to be free, we want your coca cola and Levi’s jeans
So movie script writers can just rip off the Civ 5 culture victory screen? I'm surprised they showed restraint and didn't add in "Jimmy Buffet" and "Jello-based casseroles."
Thank fuck then that it's only on Apple +. Also funny thing about the coca cola and blue jeans. China has both and more.
Jeans lead to those raw denim weirdos though, so I gotta stand on the anti-jeans side of things
we want to be free, we want your coca cola and Levi’s jeans
REAL Soviet historicans would know that Pepsi was their capitalist soft drink of choice.
porky doesn't even remember their own victories anymore to propagandize about them later. Truly capitalism is in decline smh
Vita Cola, Club Cola, and dozens of local brands in the GDR, Kofola in Czechoslovakia, Cockta in Yugoslavia (and Polo Cockta in Poland, which is derived from the Yugoslav recipe), etc. (I don't know about Hungary, Romania or Bulgaria)
There were many domestic brands in AES states, of which many still survive to this day and actually taste slightly different (and better or worse depending on one's taste) to Coca Cola or Pepsi.
Also, there's soft drinks like Baikal (Russian SFSR), which is actually quite good and I used to get at a local big supermarket's import goods aisle until the whole ordeal of sanctions. Now I can only get inferior American root beer there or decent (but easy to find) Turkish drinks.
American root beer is such a minefield. You might get something delicious with honey and vanilla and something that tastes like sassafras but doesn't cause cancer, and then the next brand you try tastes like pine needles and sadness and 1950s cough medicine for no justifiable reason what so ever.
We always hear about soviet programmers who want to be american programers, but do soviet peasants want to be american peasants? Do we ever hear about a longing to join America's underclass?
Yeah, this has occurred to me, too. I like to ask libs "Do you think citizens of communist countries are jealous of the child slaves mining coltan and harvesting chocolate in Africa?"
There's a hilarious comedy about all scientific research in Moscow coming to a screeching halt as Tetris spreads through the city's research computer labs like a wildfire but the world isn't ready for that.
Wow really? It sounds worse than the trailer made it out to be.
I mean the guy making Tetris isn't really that interesting, he just worked for the Soviet state software corporation and at that time it wasn't commonplace anywhere for programmers to get paid royalties. You might be able to make a story about him leaving the collapsing Soviet Union and trying to parley his invention of Tetris into a private enterprise though - first step was wrangling the million plagiarized versions floating around, second step was programming Welltris and Hattris.
I said this back when the trailer got posted here -- it's such a missed opportunity. Like, lazy half-assed propaganda aside, the story of the original programmer being flown around the globe, wined and dinned by all these companies, having his work mangled through these arbitrary "imaginary property" laws has so much potential as a film.
It’s an interesting flick. Like on the one hand it’s total capitalist propaganda, but I enjoy watching them try to the USSR Bad thing because they always find a way to make them look good.
spoiler
In the end it’s one bad guy who has been bought off by :porky-scared: who then loses billions. The bad guy is KGB and his subordinate arrests him. They also try to make Gorb look good, but he also was friends with :porky-scared-flipped: . And just ends up looking clueless and easily manipulated by western power.
There’s so many scenes where you can see what they’re trying to do and yet it fails miserably if you have an ounce of critical thinking. However Americans have been force fed USSR bad so long they won’t even question any of it.
The History of Tetris is a decent (hour-long) overview without the anti-USSR slant. It doesn't cover The Tetris Company's abuse of IP, sitting on it for years collecting royalties from licensees without innovating anything and suing unofficial clones, but what it does cover, all pre-TTC, seems accurate.
atv+ is the :LIB: est of streaming services so i can’t say i’m surprised
more importantly, i’m not interested in reliving the past through obvious cash-grabs like this. “‘remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation” — tony soprano (would be rolling in his grave)
i forgot this was a thing, and sounds exactly like i thought it would sound
Wasn't there supposed to be some other bizarre Tetris movie in development that was going to be some insane fantasy flick bankrolled by Russian (?) investors or did I dream that up
we want to be free, we want your coca cola and Levi’s jeans
Bojack Horseman spoilers kinda?
I love the bit in Bojack Horseman where there's a KGB spy who's been in a coma for 30 years who reawakens and is even more disgusted by Capitalism and thinks that America is even worse than it was during the cold war, it's one of the few things I've seen flip the stupid Moscow on the Hudson thing on it's head
