Red Penguins

I spent those same years in PR China as a young rep for a US Engineering firm, so this elicits a bit a sense of sympathetic nostalgia for the expat adventure. I have stories, but the difference is that I'm not Steve Warshaw. While the venture eventually failed, clearly Steve left a mark on the country, his creative boundary pushing facilitated by lack of rules in the new Russia. The apparent latitude that he was allowed (took?) by the Baldwin / the home office was amazing and amusing. Where were the corporate lawyers? Seems like one of those unique intersections of time and place that we will not see again and anyone who enjoys stories that revolve around cultural clashes, with a bonus dash of intrigue, hockey fan or not, will not go wrong by giving this a watch.

So much of "Red Penguins" came as a surprise to me, even though I was an adult during the time period in which it occurred. It seems that after the fall of communism in the old USSR, the once-legendary Russian Army hockey team was in ruins. All their best players had recently defected to the NHL and the team was bankrupt. Amazingly, the Pittsburgh Penguins saw a major opportunity in this, as the plan was to rejuvenate this team with a massive influx of cash and NHL know-how. The film is about how this ultimately failed....and amazingly some of the Russians interviewed blamed the NHL and the United States for this, though the truth lies much closer to home.

The film shocked me how much the film appealed to a wide audience. Some of this is because many of the problems that ruined the Red Penguins are in place today and control Russia today. Well worth seeing and quite engaging.

My American friends may take offense about the title I chose for this review, but they have to face the fact: the American investors (including the mighty Disney empire, would could only plead plausible deniability) were taken out to the cleaners by a bunch of bankrupt Russian mobsters. Back in the early 1990s, moments after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the USSR, the US-based Penguins NHL franchise bought a 50% stake in what they believed was the ownership of the most successful hockey team outside North America: the Soviet Army Hockey team (CSKA), which was the backbone of the very successful USSR National team. On paper, that was a brilliant, creative idea. For that kind of money, if the Pittsburgh Penguins could get a couple of Stanley Cup winning players, it was worth it. That's what they thought. And that side of the story is well covered in the movie. What they did not see, is that they were not entering a playing field they knew the rules of. This is evident in the final minutes of the documentary (even though no one admits that they had no clue as to what awaited them). I felt that the documentary did a good job of documenting the facts from both sides of the cultural divide. Where it lacks is in any form of critical investigation is about how naive the Penguins were to make this investment in the first place. In fine, this a magnificent reminder about cultural ignorance. And this is where the effort falls somewhat short of the mark, failing to draw the lessons learned from this very remarkable story. Still very watchable, now that you know the limitations of the piece.

Well, you know the saying: sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear comes out to skate and hand out Penguins beer.

This is wildly entertaining, sometimes as funny as any great comedy of errors and outrageousness, and yet all the same it's quite a time as an American to watch this - frankly, my dears, I'm actually pretty happy to be a US citizen after watching how completely out of control and dangerous Russia was in the 90s (hell, still now). At one point the filming of an interview is interrupted because an... Unidentified person shows up behind director Polsky(!)

But what one comes away with the most is just how absurd Capitalism in all its circus elements can make something like the Red Army hockey team - and on a much darker level what the Russian Mafia did to everything with just how scary (yet in its own way still absurd) it could get - and that the first row seats to the circus one gets when born as an American (to paraphrase George Carlin) can be so surreal when put in front of Russian audiences. And at the midpoint I wondered "hmm, why there weren't any former players from the team interviewed for the documentary"... Until I realized, if they were still alive, some of them might be worried still about being identified!

In all seriousness, The focus on the management on American and Russian sides, and some other key figures in the know, seems like a tight one and tethered to the idea of the corruptive influences of money on people with little idea of a functioning democracy (including that one "Businessman" who only served 10 months in prison for some shady things, but hey, only 10 months means he wasn't guilty!) If anything it's a little short at 79 minutes.

Awful documentary very poor with only recordings and boring interviews.