Streets of Magic Lanterns – Weekend

Streets of Magic Lanterns – Weekend

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“Magic Precinct” is launching on the Okko platform – not the first, but quite a worthy attempt to combine fairy tales and reality, this time in the spaces of a folk police series.

Text: Stanislav F. Rostotsky

When in the past, a seemingly good guy, but now burdened with alcoholism and PTSD, the guy Lekha Popov (Nikolai Naumov) finally stuck his head out of a barrel of fuel oil – and he sat there, holding his breath, in the hope of winning back the treasured bubble – the first ones he I saw that they were not scourge friends, but sister Katya (Maria Akhmetzyanova) and niece Vasilisa (Eva Smirnova), a lively eight-year-old girl with Pennywise the clown on her jacket. But it would be better if Lekha never got out of trouble: her sister reports that she has serious heart problems, the doctors give her very little time, so in order for Vasilisa not to be taken to an orphanage, it makes sense for Lekha to come to her senses and get used to the role of a guardian.

From the fairy tale that Uncle Lesha tells Vasilisa before going to bed, it turns out that once upon a time, not so long ago, one sniper (or in fairy tale “sagittarius”) served in one glorious squad, and served so well that they began to call him “well done archer” ” But then, when some monsters (or, in fairy tales, “slapsticks”) captured the Moscow-Dubai magic carpet, the young man’s hand trembled, and instead of a slapstick, an arrow hit the crown prince.

There are more than enough reasons for oil baths in Lekhina’s life. But then, as in a fairy tale, the door (or smartphone, it doesn’t matter) creaked, and citizen Alexey Popov became an employee of the OBSP – the department for combating fairy-tale crimes. To begin with, Lech, using a thermal imager scope left over from the life before last, identifies a gnome brownie with Tourette syndrome (Ilya Sobolev) in her sister’s apartment. Brownie in full accordance with the “Morphology of a Fairy Tale” by V.Ya. Proppa takes on the functions of a magical assistant (but mostly gets in the way), and then plunges headlong into the first big case – a bank robbery, which was carried out by three goblins who got hold of an invisibility cap. And there, other evil spirits are slowly catching up, like Gorynych, who suffers from a personality disorder, or Kashchei the Immortal, who moved to the Internet privates.

The current viewer will be reminded of this kind of situation, and quite rightly, of the series “Grimm” that exploded 10 years ago. But on our soil, the plot about the interaction of the real and fairy-tale (and more broadly, mythological) worlds blossomed and established itself much earlier. Namely, in the second half of the 60s, when over the course of several years the cartoon “Vovka in the Far Away Kingdom” and Vysotsky’s fairy tale songs (including “From Boring Sabbaths…”, where a company of witches) almost simultaneously entered and became established in the cultural life of Soviet people. , the goblin and the ghoul “under the guise of tourists they ate and drank in the Grand Hotel cafe”), as well as the most efficient translation of “The Goblin Sanctuary” by Clifford Simak for those times. And first of all, of course, “Monday Begins on Saturday” by the Strugatsky brothers , immediately after its publication it was recognized not only as a cult phenomenon, but also as an unshakable genre standard: “You really can’t consider what happens in a hut on chicken legs to be an adventure!” – they were indignant then on the pages of Literary Russia. But it turned out that it was very possible. So while in the New World such ideas soared to heights subject only to Neil Gaiman and American Gods, then they plunged into the malmstrom of young adult adventures, like series of books about Percy Jackson, we preferred to adhere to the Strugatsky canon: a neophyte, far from magic, discovers the existence of the magical world through chance contact with the corresponding specialized institution (brotherhood, union, order), of which he immediately becomes an employee. This scheme works flawlessly with transfer to the screen (by the way, 17 years before “Sorcerers,” the first part of the “fairy tale for younger scientists” was dramatized surprisingly close to the text on Leningrad television.) It’s all a matter of intonation: if in “Night Watch” “Monday” …” ended up married to the black toad “TASS is authorized to declare”, then in the case of “The Magic Plot” the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is “Streets of Broken Lanterns”. “In general, everything is as usual,” the immediate boss (Andrei Dobrovolsky) enlightens Lyokha, who had recently overeaten rejuvenating apples and has just returned to the appearance appropriate to his position and age. “We catch criminals, solve thefts, robberies… .” And in fact, it’s very similar, except that the arsenal of special equipment is somewhat expanded by artifacts like gusli-self-dancing (“For example, you have two gangs of Caucasians fighting. If you try, the Lezginka begins. If you get tired of dancing, you’ll be thrown into a paddy wagon”), yes and the criminals are not simple – “some have a hat, others have immortality, others have a golden antelope living on their balcony…”

It’s all quite charming, moderately funny (but were, for example, “Ghostbusters” really funny?), at times quite effective (as in the scene of the notorious “invisible” robbery) and so predictable that it takes your breath away. But be that as it may, almost everything that happens in the local “huts on chicken legs” can be called real “adventures”. And make sure that “in the world of zkasok” today “love” not only “buns”, but also shawarma. Double, in cheese lavash.

Look: Okko


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