Moscow on the Hudson (1984)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is one of Robin Williams's very early movies just a couple of years after the TV series 'Mork and Mindy' and right before such successes as 'Good Morning Vietnam' and what followed. Of course now we know what a big star he became, and also his unfortunate death last year.Robin Williams is Russian musician Vladimir Ivanoff and most of the first part of the movie depicts how hard it was in Moscow in the early 1980s. When a performance troupe is in New York he takes the bold step of running off at a department store, chased by Russian officials, but he manages to secure refuge.The rest of the movie has him working hard to make his new home there, thus 'Moscow on the Hudson.' He first takes a job busing tables in a restaurant, just carrying dirty dishes back to the dishwasher. Eventually he takes jobs like clerk at a fast food counter, running a street hot dog cart, a limo driver ... until he is able to get a new saxophone and play good music gigs.The other running story is his attraction to pretty (actually Hispanic) Maria Conchita Alonso as Italian Lucia Lombardo, also making her way into this new land. It is on again, off again because she is not sure she wants to commit to a marriage relationship but in the end it seems they will.Good movie and Williams' Russian seems fairly authentic. I saw it on the 'Movies!' channel, some of the scene with the two of them in the bathtub is blurred and some words are bleeped out.

Usually when I think Robin Williams I think of him going off the handle and yelling wildly and stuff such as that. However, in this film where he plays a Russian who defects to the United States during the height of the cold war he actually does so in a more calm manner than I am used to seeing him. He does a Russian very well here, and less crazy like the one he portrayed in Nine Months (though do not remember if he was Russian in that one). In this film he plays a musician in Russia who defects when he sees his friend taken by the KGB. Most of the film is him struggling to adjust to the United States way of life, which is vastly different than what he is used to and not all that it was advertised to be. It is funny at times, and it gets dramatic too. It is also a fairly long film for a comedy with a nearly two hour running time. Still, for the most part it is a funny and entertaining film and it does show a person the phenomenon known as culture shock as this person goes from a place where one has to wait in lines for everything to a place where there is no such restrictions. However, he also goes from a place where there is virtually no crime to a place that is fraught with it. So it kind of looks at things in many different ways.

An actor as iconic as Robin Williams playing a Russian? Could it work? You wouldn't think so but the splendid little flick Moscow on the Hudson makes it work. Robin Williams stars as a Russian saxophone player named Vladimir Ivanoff. Vladimir and the circus troupe he performs with take a trip to the United States in to perform. While there, Vladimir makes the spontaneous decision to defect while in Bloomingdale's. He manages to get away with it and is left in the states. There he makes friends, looks for work, and learns why America is the greatest country in the world. The film doesn't come without its cheese, but there's something so charming and lovable about the film that I thoroughly enjoyed it.First thing's first, Robin Williams is as good as ever in this flick. He sports an impressive Russian accent throughout the film and about a quarter of his dialogue is actually in Russian, a language you would think he was already fluent in with how well he spoke it. Plus, the character of Vladimir Ivanoff is wonderfully lovable and it's a joy to watch his character progress and mature. Moscow on the Hudson at first starts out with the goofy and confused foreigner who doesn't know what he's doing, but it slowly moves away from that cliché as it makes Vladimir into a real character, rather than a gimmick. He is perfectly believable and goes through a progression that I can buy into. The film deals with the overwhelming nature of America for a foreigner, and it hits on some great points that go along with these ideas. Watching as Vladimir copes with the bustling New York City life is entertaining as well as touching and charming. We feel all of his excitement, anxiety, and even pain as he struggles with such a drastic change in lifestyles.Now, as interesting as the character development of this film might be, it is served with a heaping side of fresh cheese. There are some undeniably silly moments of the film where it begins to take itself a little too seriously and goes too much of a clichéd route to get a point across. I understand that one of the central themes of this film is America as the greatest country in the world, despite all of the problems, but this point is driven a little too exaggerated at points. There is one particularly eye-roll worthy scene on the fourth of July when Vladimir and other immigrants are quoting the Declaration of Independence and other parts of the Constitution inside a café, showing how we can all come together and put aside our differences. I found this to be a little too obvious and melodramatic and wished the film would have toned down some of the cliché in spots. However, it didn't keep me from really enjoying the majority of this film.I didn't have a clue what to expect going into Moscow on the Hudson, but I'm very glad I watched it. I probably wouldn't sit through it again, as I got everything I needed out of one viewing. This is a fun film with great characters and fantastic performances. It delivers a sincere, albeit clichéd, message that makes the film a little more than just another silly foreigner in America film. Plus, putting this film in context makes it all the more important. This is a Cold War era film that really pushes a message of peace and love, and I give it undying respect for that. It shows that we can get along if we just try, while also exemplifying that America stands to be the nation of peace and acceptance. Whether that is true today is up in the air, but that's a whole different topic. The fact of the matter is, Moscow on the Hudson is a pleasant little film that is well worth a one time watch.

"Moscow On The Hudson" is a 1980s version of "The Wizard Of Oz." If you are an American watching it, there is no place like home.Vladimir Ivanoff (Robin Williams) is a saxophonist with a Russian circus in the days of the bad old Soviet Union. Tired of waiting in line for toilet paper and bribing a snooping KGB agent (Saveli Kramarov) with shoes that won't fit him anyway, Vlad has a catharsis somewhere between Estee Lauder and Pierre Cardin in a Manhattan Bloomie's and decides to defect. America means freedom, but will it mean happiness, too?"Have you ever felt like just not talking?" asks Vlad's new girlfriend Lucia (Maria Conchita Alonso)."In Russia that's permanent way of life," answers Vlad."Moscow On The Hudson" is another of those superlative Paul Mazursky films that was a hit in its day and has been ignored since. Mazursky's films play off the contrast between the fantastic and everyday reality. The early scenes, of Vlad in Moscow, feature a chilly, brittle environment of little humor, with Williams scoring points not for being a cut-up but for being so muted and beaten-down. It's so gray it feels at times like a Bergman film, with welcome clownish notes struck not by Williams but Elya Baskin as his friend whose dream becomes Vlad's reality.Then we get the trip to New York, a wondrous place where "you can do anything in this country if you want" but "everybody I meet is from somewhere else." A suddenly vibrant color scheme is married to a sometimes goofy sense of humor, yet a sense of menace and despair hangs over all. There are goofy scenes, moments of humor that don't quite work, yet Williams' performance remains balanced and straightforwardly character-driven throughout. No shtick here.Most of the time, the film is too busy celebrating the idea of America as the land of immigrants. Mazursky isn't making "Yankee Doodle Dandy" here. He may be celebrating the United States, but not blindly. Our first shot of New York is of Abraham Lincoln, on a billboard wearing over-sized earphones with the legend: "Not all stereophones are created equal." Not all people, either. The black family who adopts Vlad early on makes do with a breakfast of Cocoa Puffs and no work in sight.But Mazursky keeps things merry, with an eye toward opportunity and strength through diversity. Even when he leans too far in search of a shot, it still brings a chill, like when group of immigrants recite their oath of American allegiance or an old Asian guy lifts a sparkler up to the Empire State Building in celebration of the Fourth of July.It was easy to love America in films of the 1940s and 1950s, but by 1984 you needed to work a little harder at it. "Moscow On The Hudson" doesn't soft-soap Vladimir's struggle, or sell it as a political act ("I'm not political" are the first words out of his mouth after his defection is made clear). But it celebrates the idea of America with a vibrancy and courage few films have shown since, and more interestingly, does so from what Roger Ebert noted was a liberal point of view. Liberal, but with a strong capitalist touch, back in the day when the two ideas were still compatible.Maybe they still are. You can still watch this on Amazon.com, can't you?