Enter Malish
24 February 2026 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeSo we've finally met 'Malish' -- who gives his real name, but I didn't get it as it flew past...
I started off on this 'episode' of "Smok and Malish" (half an hour or so of watching; we are still in the first episode of the series) with the studious intention of doing all the 'work' over short segments; watching the scene straight as intended, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles and pausing with a dictionary, then finally rewatching with the auto-translated English subtitles to see if that picked up any colloquialisms or other material that I'd missed. And for the first couple of scenes I did do just that, although I forgot (silly as that sounds) to do the auto-translation stage so was going just on the Russian and the very necessary dictionary.
There is a *lot* of vocabulary here that is either technical (terms for parts of a mountain) or highly colloquial, so the best I could manage on the first pass was to pick up that Kit is introducing himself to the lady in the tent as the clumsy fool from their first meeting, while she expresses surprise, although more with amusement than malice, that he even got this far, and then that he proposes some kind of deal to the man hiring out his boat which involves giving him his pickaxe and pointing up the mountain. (Without the dialogue detail, I didn't even pick up that they are subsequently supposed to be *un*loading the boat and restacking the cargo on the far side of the water; as with King and Conqueror, both banks look pretty much identical, probably for the same reason that departure and arrival were filmed on the same location :-P)
Intensive dictionary-work did unveil some more explanation; the line that I'd assumed to be saying that it was lucky Kit had not overset the stove in the tent during his precipitous arrival turned out to be her saying that she was surprised they hadn't left him safely at home(?), while he tells his reluctant hostess (whose name, again, was given -- possibly Jo? -- but since it is pronounced phonetically in Russian I couldn't pick it up: "Christopher Bellew" with all the Rs rolled and the vowels Slavonicised is about as much as I can manage!) that he had got rid of his unsatisfactory porters, which as I recall was in fact a considerable liberty with the truth ;-)
And after a lot of looking-up of vocabulary, where different parts of the sentence turned out to represent totally different terms from what I'd assumed, I think I managed to grasp that Kit's money-making plan --lots of mining analogies, presumably deliberate-- involved climbing up to the top of the mountain ridge, digging out a gully in the snow from top to bottom, and charging people (or possibly their luggage) fifty cents to go 'head over heels' down to the lake, just as he had done: 'all you have to do is put up a sign saying "this way to the lake", sit by and rake in the money'! After which he leaves his new acquaintance -- addressed in various archaic friendly terms ('old chap', 'old boy'?) -- to keep watch over his grandfather's trade goods while he, Kit, goes off to prospect the route in front and find some more porters.
Except that the next section of the story involves a lot of mountain climbing, and I really didn't see how anyone was going to carry all those heavy boxes over there. Also, hadn't his grandfather explicitly gone ahead in the first place in order to find water transport -- and wouldn't there surely have been an established trade route already to the depot up ahead? I'm pretty sure that Kit, with all his possessions still strapped to the clumsy wicker hamper on his back, is *not* supposed to be wandering the rock-faces on his own in search of a pass...
At any rate, he runs into 'Malish', who is wielding a rock-hammer up ahead, and immediately snatches up a pistol when he sees the newcomer... and then apparently instead decides that Kit is harmless, and invites him to breakfast, or at least a tin mug of (presumably) tea. He expresses doubt as to the suitability of Kit's boots -- Kit shows his hobnails and the rope slung on his luggage, and they continue on together.
Malish talks a *lot* (something about going to Arizona as a TB cure, and planting an apple orchard, I think) and I could only pick up fragments of it on that single pass. Except that I couldn't stop, and kept on watching further and further with my heart in my mouth as they traverse the rocks (a lot of the dangers shown only in close-up through the characters' faces and reactions, until we get to the big scene) while YouTube persisted in inserting advertisements in the worst --or most effective-- places imaginable.
It absolutely cannot have been random. Every time something lethally dangerous happened, there was another cliff-hanger ad break at that exact moment, with multiple ads clustered close together in the most action-filled section :-P
I mean, objectively I knew that both characters had absolute plot armour at this point in the story, because neither the titular Smok nor Malish (even if we don't yet know how Kit becomes 'Smoke') couldn't possibly die in their first scene together. I even consciously *told* myself that during one of the enforced pauses for advertisements. But by that point the film had grabbed me to such an extent that I had my nails dug into my palms and my jaw clenched tight, and couldn't look away, and when it was all over I felt quite drained and definitely couldn't go back to deal with such niceties as points of dialogue...!
The final climax is when they are roped together, and Kit attempts to follow Malish across a crumbling traverse, and slips. After a dizzying moment of wild camera swing he finds himself brought up by the rope, which is sawing over a sharp ridge of rock, and dangling with no possibility of foothold, while Malish, who has flung himself backwards to counterbalance the fall, is dangling on the other side of the outcrop and scrabbling for a grasp. Malish tries again and again to climb back up, dizzied by the drop below, but can't make it. Kit tries to swing round to him and fails. Meanwhile I was expecting the rope and/or the crumbling rock outcrop to get sawn through at any moment, as we get repeated shots of the strain...
Kit, still dangling helplessly in thin air, collects himself to make a rousing speech in an effort to put heart into his companion (at some point in this dialogue the episode title, "The Taste of Meat", occurs, although I couldn't make out the context) and speaks of freedom. Then he makes the next logical choice, and manages to get at his knife. He has no wife, no children, no apple orchard waiting for him back home... and there is no point in them both dying here. If Malish can't make it back up the rock face on his next attempt from the tiny foothold on which he is balanced, then he, Kit, is going to cut the rope between them so that the other man can live instead.
Malish insists that they will both survive this or neither, but he still can't make the climb -- and Kit frees the dead weight of his hamper from the straps across his shoulders and lets it fall to the loose rock below (is there going to be an avalanche? Not quite...) And then he sets his teeth and deliberately cuts the line to plummet down that same crippling fall himself, as the stones gather and slide around his rolling body.
Long shot on his crumpled form below, as Malish, freed from the hopeless drag of his companion's rope, shakily makes his way up the cliff face to the relative safety of the outcrop above. Then Kit groans, raises his head, and manages to squint upwards to see Malish disappear over the edge as the music soars. He halloos, and the other, disbelieving, puts his head over the rocks again to call joyously back. Their wordless shouts of triumph echo around the cliff face, until Kit, grinning, instructs his comrade to 'think up some way to get me out of here before I start to cry from boredom' (от тоска)... and I breathed a long sigh of relief and was finally able to stop watching ;-)
So by this point I'm clearly *very* much emotionally engaged in Kit's story, whether because it's an excellent lead performance or a compelling production overall (based on promising source material)!
Created a new tag, because we're obviously going to need it :-D
I started off on this 'episode' of "Smok and Malish" (half an hour or so of watching; we are still in the first episode of the series) with the studious intention of doing all the 'work' over short segments; watching the scene straight as intended, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles and pausing with a dictionary, then finally rewatching with the auto-translated English subtitles to see if that picked up any colloquialisms or other material that I'd missed. And for the first couple of scenes I did do just that, although I forgot (silly as that sounds) to do the auto-translation stage so was going just on the Russian and the very necessary dictionary.
There is a *lot* of vocabulary here that is either technical (terms for parts of a mountain) or highly colloquial, so the best I could manage on the first pass was to pick up that Kit is introducing himself to the lady in the tent as the clumsy fool from their first meeting, while she expresses surprise, although more with amusement than malice, that he even got this far, and then that he proposes some kind of deal to the man hiring out his boat which involves giving him his pickaxe and pointing up the mountain. (Without the dialogue detail, I didn't even pick up that they are subsequently supposed to be *un*loading the boat and restacking the cargo on the far side of the water; as with King and Conqueror, both banks look pretty much identical, probably for the same reason that departure and arrival were filmed on the same location :-P)
Intensive dictionary-work did unveil some more explanation; the line that I'd assumed to be saying that it was lucky Kit had not overset the stove in the tent during his precipitous arrival turned out to be her saying that she was surprised they hadn't left him safely at home(?), while he tells his reluctant hostess (whose name, again, was given -- possibly Jo? -- but since it is pronounced phonetically in Russian I couldn't pick it up: "Christopher Bellew" with all the Rs rolled and the vowels Slavonicised is about as much as I can manage!) that he had got rid of his unsatisfactory porters, which as I recall was in fact a considerable liberty with the truth ;-)
And after a lot of looking-up of vocabulary, where different parts of the sentence turned out to represent totally different terms from what I'd assumed, I think I managed to grasp that Kit's money-making plan --lots of mining analogies, presumably deliberate-- involved climbing up to the top of the mountain ridge, digging out a gully in the snow from top to bottom, and charging people (or possibly their luggage) fifty cents to go 'head over heels' down to the lake, just as he had done: 'all you have to do is put up a sign saying "this way to the lake", sit by and rake in the money'! After which he leaves his new acquaintance -- addressed in various archaic friendly terms ('old chap', 'old boy'?) -- to keep watch over his grandfather's trade goods while he, Kit, goes off to prospect the route in front and find some more porters.
Except that the next section of the story involves a lot of mountain climbing, and I really didn't see how anyone was going to carry all those heavy boxes over there. Also, hadn't his grandfather explicitly gone ahead in the first place in order to find water transport -- and wouldn't there surely have been an established trade route already to the depot up ahead? I'm pretty sure that Kit, with all his possessions still strapped to the clumsy wicker hamper on his back, is *not* supposed to be wandering the rock-faces on his own in search of a pass...
At any rate, he runs into 'Malish', who is wielding a rock-hammer up ahead, and immediately snatches up a pistol when he sees the newcomer... and then apparently instead decides that Kit is harmless, and invites him to breakfast, or at least a tin mug of (presumably) tea. He expresses doubt as to the suitability of Kit's boots -- Kit shows his hobnails and the rope slung on his luggage, and they continue on together.
Malish talks a *lot* (something about going to Arizona as a TB cure, and planting an apple orchard, I think) and I could only pick up fragments of it on that single pass. Except that I couldn't stop, and kept on watching further and further with my heart in my mouth as they traverse the rocks (a lot of the dangers shown only in close-up through the characters' faces and reactions, until we get to the big scene) while YouTube persisted in inserting advertisements in the worst --or most effective-- places imaginable.
It absolutely cannot have been random. Every time something lethally dangerous happened, there was another cliff-hanger ad break at that exact moment, with multiple ads clustered close together in the most action-filled section :-P
I mean, objectively I knew that both characters had absolute plot armour at this point in the story, because neither the titular Smok nor Malish (even if we don't yet know how Kit becomes 'Smoke') couldn't possibly die in their first scene together. I even consciously *told* myself that during one of the enforced pauses for advertisements. But by that point the film had grabbed me to such an extent that I had my nails dug into my palms and my jaw clenched tight, and couldn't look away, and when it was all over I felt quite drained and definitely couldn't go back to deal with such niceties as points of dialogue...!
The final climax is when they are roped together, and Kit attempts to follow Malish across a crumbling traverse, and slips. After a dizzying moment of wild camera swing he finds himself brought up by the rope, which is sawing over a sharp ridge of rock, and dangling with no possibility of foothold, while Malish, who has flung himself backwards to counterbalance the fall, is dangling on the other side of the outcrop and scrabbling for a grasp. Malish tries again and again to climb back up, dizzied by the drop below, but can't make it. Kit tries to swing round to him and fails. Meanwhile I was expecting the rope and/or the crumbling rock outcrop to get sawn through at any moment, as we get repeated shots of the strain...
Kit, still dangling helplessly in thin air, collects himself to make a rousing speech in an effort to put heart into his companion (at some point in this dialogue the episode title, "The Taste of Meat", occurs, although I couldn't make out the context) and speaks of freedom. Then he makes the next logical choice, and manages to get at his knife. He has no wife, no children, no apple orchard waiting for him back home... and there is no point in them both dying here. If Malish can't make it back up the rock face on his next attempt from the tiny foothold on which he is balanced, then he, Kit, is going to cut the rope between them so that the other man can live instead.
Malish insists that they will both survive this or neither, but he still can't make the climb -- and Kit frees the dead weight of his hamper from the straps across his shoulders and lets it fall to the loose rock below (is there going to be an avalanche? Not quite...) And then he sets his teeth and deliberately cuts the line to plummet down that same crippling fall himself, as the stones gather and slide around his rolling body.
Long shot on his crumpled form below, as Malish, freed from the hopeless drag of his companion's rope, shakily makes his way up the cliff face to the relative safety of the outcrop above. Then Kit groans, raises his head, and manages to squint upwards to see Malish disappear over the edge as the music soars. He halloos, and the other, disbelieving, puts his head over the rocks again to call joyously back. Their wordless shouts of triumph echo around the cliff face, until Kit, grinning, instructs his comrade to 'think up some way to get me out of here before I start to cry from boredom' (от тоска)... and I breathed a long sigh of relief and was finally able to stop watching ;-)
So by this point I'm clearly *very* much emotionally engaged in Kit's story, whether because it's an excellent lead performance or a compelling production overall (based on promising source material)!
Created a new tag, because we're obviously going to need it :-D