Review of Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013) by Walter M — 08 Jan 2014

What the documentary "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer" does extremely well is going beyond just the facts of the case of three of its members, Maria Alyokhina, Ekaterina Samutsevich & Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, of the title punk band who were jailed in Moscow on charges of hooliganism after a protest song in a Moscow cathedral.(Nadezhda's father is an early front runner for the coolest dad of the 21st century.) That starts with there being not only more people involved in that fateful protest than just those three, but in others in and around Moscow, which also includes the ever popular of kissing of police officers, all the while wearing colorful balaclavas, in response to Vladimir's reelection/stranglehold on power. After which, they returned to their secret headquarters to plot more hijinx.

To its credit, "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer" also captures the anger from the other side of the Russian Orthodox Church which also manages to hang itself with sexism from about the 13th century in its referencing witches and demons that goes beyond just having a problem with the band's name.(Admittedly, though, if you are going to exile them to an island, then Manhattan's really not a bad place.) All of which is in a modern day Russia which only creates disorder by keeping order by force(as one band member put it, the state lost by winning and bringing so much international attention to the case) and that really has to find a better way to balance religion and state for once which was the whole point of the protests in the first place.

On another note, I am definitely warming up to Pope Francis the Cool.