If you just want to dip your toe in, Dostoevsky’s short horror-comedy story “Bobok” is fabulous and highlights the best of his abilities. It’s funny and creepy and (mercifully) only a dozen pages. Like I guess a lot of readers, I liked him a lot more when I was a teenager than now, but there are still works I go back to, like “Bobok” and Demons, and at least some parts of Karamazov.

The Brynner album is linked above in the story, and it is… something. I had no idea he became so passionate about Russian gypsy songs (!) until looking up info on this movie, but I guess everybody’s got a hobby?

Something else I couldn’t fit in here: the famous gypsy-song interpreter Natsya Polyakova did her own recording of “The Pacer” sometime in the early 20th century. The lyrics are very different, but it’s very much the same song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clRFxSZB3LA

(edited because stupid disqus put the video in the middle of the paragraph)

Meanwhile, I’m like “all these people could use my coaching. Have they really never had to lie to the cops before?” (I mean, in Eric’s case, obviously not, but I’d really expect Joel and Sheila to be a little better at it.)

I’m not as brave as Abby but my sense of self-preservation is strong enough not to crack.

Yeah, this is an exception, but unlike most expository dialogue, it’s a great speech. (Although let’s be clear — dude don’t know shit about Superman.) The parts of a narrative that QT can make into a bitchin’ scene, he does. The parts that he can’t, he leaves out of the movie altogether.

Yup shes the ‘add good looking actress in later seasons’ cop show trope, but since this is the shield she has to actually exist as a character. In some of the What Happens Next? discussions on here people have suggested her following Acevedas path into being the captain and I agree.

She’s a really great example of the show’s ability to be original when that would be more interesting than cliche – like, on her own she’s not really someone you see in cop shows, let alone taken this seriously.

Same. Found her distractingly miscast in both Hugo and (sorry, folks) Let Me In. She has this resting ironical face that reads as too mature/sophisticated in the former and too always-about-to-laugh in the latter. But she’s perfect in Clouds of Sils Maria!

The novel is good! but very, very long. I used to teach Demons because it’s much shorter but also awesomer, probably his best balance of entertainment and depth. I do think Karamazov is worth it, and the chapter I linked above (the devil) is one of the very best, funniest, most savage things he ever wrote.

Have you heard any of the Brynner tracks, by the way? His Russian is a glorious mush, but the songs are a lot of fun, especially Alyosha Dimitrievich hooting and hollering around him like a gypsy-folk hype man.

I like Rockwell a lot, but he’s maybe too charismatic? (Smeryadkov is pointedly passive.) He’d be great as some other Dostoevsky characters, though, especially the buffoons. A little older and fatter, he’d be a brilliant Karmazinov in Demons.

He was good in NA but thats also the best written part in the movie by a mile.