By Denis Pinchuk
members
"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" stars
Harrison Ford as an archeologist in 1957 competing with an evil
KGB agent, played by Cate Blanchett, to find a skull endowed
with mystic powers.
"What galls is how together with America we defeated
Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them. But
they go ahead and scare kids with Communists. These people have
no shame," said Viktor Perov, a Communist Party member in
Russia's second city of St. Petersburg.
The comments were made at a local Communist party meeting
and posted on its Internet site www.kplo.ru.
The film, the fourth in the hugely successful Indiana Jones
series, went on release in Russian cinemas on Thursday. Russian
media said it was being shown on 808 screens, the widest ever
release for a Hollywood movie.
In past episodes Indiana Jones has escaped from Nazi
soldiers, an Egyptian snake pit, a Bedouin swordsman and a
child-enslaving Indian demigod.
RUNNING DOGS
"Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett (are) second-rate actors,
serving as the running dogs of the CIA. We need to deprive
these people of the right of entering the country," said
another party member, Andrei Gindos.
Though the ranks of the once all-powerful Communist Party
have dwindled since Soviet times, its members see themselves as
the defenders of the achievements of the old Soviet Union.
Other communists said the generation born after the 1991
collapse of the Soviet Union were being fed revisionist,
Hollywood history. They advocated banning the Indiana Jones
outright to prevent "ideological sabotage."
"Our movie-goers are teenagers who are completely unaware
of what happened in 1957," St Peterburg Communist Party chief
Sergei Malinkovich told Reuters.
"They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957
we made trouble for the United States and almost started a
nuclear war."
"It's rubbish ... In 1957 the communists did not run with
crystal skulls throughout the U.S. Why should we agree to that
sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?"
Vladimir Mukhin, another member of the local Communist
Party, said in comments posted on the Internet site that he
would ask Russia's Culture Ministry to ban the film for its
"anti-Soviet propaganda."
The "Indiana Jones" film is not the first Hollywood
production to offend Russian sensibilities.
A government official at the time said the film, starring
Bruce Willis as the leader of a team of astronauts sent to
deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, "mocked
the achievements of Soviet and Russian technology."
Reuters/Nielsen
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