What's Wrong, Fwad?

In the spirit of the season, we went to go see FRED CLAUS on the English language screen at the Oktobr. This was Fwad, Fwad's wife Maggie (and I apologize for Anglicizing the spelling), Marius, Marius' girlfriend Marina and myself. The movie had not been generously reviewed in the U.S. but I laughed a lot.

After the movie we settled into the theater's cafe'. I had a cheesecake.


Fwad is a screenwriter. He went to film school in Los Angeles with Marius. Fwad is in the middle of a contemplation of the conflict between films as entertainment and as an art form worthy of scholarly redemption and thus one's time.

It seems that there is still something of a distinction here between films as popular entertainment, unworthy of serious regard and films of more serious intent, in theme and purpose, and that these two worlds shall not intersect. It weighs heavily on Fwad. In the U.S. worth is all too often based entirely on your ability to make money. Yet even with this commercial test, America has, for the most part, left this distinction behind. Not that AMPAS knows this. But the audiences do.


We piled into Fwad and Maggie's Volvo and set out for a drugstore. Marius' girlfriend Marina arrived in Moscow last night from Los Angeles. She will be here for the next couple of weeks during the extended New Year's holidays. She also arrived with a terrible cough. So she needed to cruise a drug store for an appropriate remedy. I needed to cruise a drug store for bath soap and shampoo.

Marius wanted to show Fwad and Maggie some clips from HITLER KAPUT! so we went back to Marius' apartment. Shoes were deposited outside the door and house slippers were distributed.


Neither Fwad nor I got slippers. This was disappointing. But I shall put this ugliness behind me and continue on.

The subject of film and entertainment and art and the whole imbroglio was picked up again as assorted raw meats were prepared and set out on the coffee table.


Marius is a bona fide kindred spirit. In spite of having grown up in Russia in the waning days of the Soviet system, he has the most profound respect for American filmmaking and the attendant professionalism that accompanies it. Philosophically speaking, the aspect of it that most inspires him is in respect to comedy. In making comedies without political agenda, America truly honors the audience, honors the individual. Russian state-sponsored films almost always come with the not-so-subtle subtext that the experience is to be codified as an expression of one's loyalty to the state.

But in the U.S. -- and you'll forgive me for heaping all this meaning on it all -- but in the U.S., Will Farrell running around a race track in his tighty-whiteys shouting, "Help me Baby Jesus! Help me Oprah Winifrey! Help me Tom Cruise!" is a uniquely American expression of our core values of individual worth. Obviously it's not something we in the U.S. would ever stop to consider. But for someone like Marius, this is a powerful idea. And it rededicates him to bringing this sort of thing to Russia. Now when it needs it the most.


Fwad is a brilliant, conscientious writer. But so far he's never done comedy. So the dilemna of what his peers consider to be worthy and what they do not weighs on him.

It does not weigh on me. I thought FRED CLAUS was hilarious. Anyway, here are the credits.