Tuesday, April 24, 2018

A couple of obituaries

Verne Troyer, who died over the weekend at the age of 49, is probably best known for playing Mini-Me to Mike Myers in the Austin Powers movies. It's hard to think that the first of those movies is already 20 years old. My parents had the one on DVD, but I can't find what happened to that DVD. After Mom died, my sisters came up and helped clean out part of the house: Mom was a hoarder, and you should have seen the back bedroom. So I looked through the CD cabinet since I thought the DVDs would be there, too, and couldn't find it. I think the very first DVD they got when they got a DVD player however many years ago was Anaconda, which is a head-scratcher since that's not the sort of movie I'd think of them watching. I don't know what would happened to the DVDs, since my sisters didn't throw out the kajillion Irish music CDs that Mom had. And there were some other DVDs: Michael Collins (unsurprising with all those Irish CDs) and The Manchurian Candidate (the original; and ooh, I didn't know that one was lying around the house!)

I'd never heard of the Russian actress Nina Doroshina, or the movie Love and Pigeons that Wikipedia's English-language obituary page lists for her. (The obituary is also in Russian.) Apparently the movie is also known as Love and Doves, which makes reasonable sense considering that Russian uses the same word for both and doves are really nothing but white pigeons anyway. The movie actually sounds interesting, but it's not available on DVD in the US. Amazon supposedly used to offer it in their streaming service, but apparently the rights to it ran out since when I checked Amazon says it's currently unavailable. However, as of this writing there is a version with English subtitles available on Youtube. (I can read Russian reasonably well, but I find the pace of spoken Russian to be more difficult than German or even French, which for me should be much rustier.) I'm not giving out the URL because I've got too many posts here with Youtube videos that have been taken down for alleged copyright violations, even to old silents that should be in the public domain: either there can be music issues, or the poster's other videos have copyright problems. And then there are the channels that get removed for no good reason.

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