Старик Хоттабыч (The Flying Carpet), 1956

Старик Хоттабыч, 1956
(source: Russian Film Hub)
no copyright infringement intended

Lately I started to take a particular interest in all kind of flash ghosts and other things like that. You'd say I got crazy, but it's not that simple.Anyway, here's the thing: after watching the movie of Parajanov, Тіні забутих предків, nothing seemed to be as it had been anymore. I watched then on TV Black Swan, the movie with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, and I felt the doppelgänger coming to me, you know, that stranger insinuating in yourself till she or he becomes your double, your harbinger of bad luck. That was not good, not good at all. A bit of relief came when watching Aladdin, as Will Smith played there with style and demonstrated to me that flash ghosts can be very nice sometimes, especially when you don't abuse them. Well, I had already learned this lesson, again from Will Smith, playing that time in The Legend of Bagger Vance. However, something remained like a nasty thought, very uneasy: this guy Will Smith was a bit too sympathetic, to be fully trusted. What if the doppelgänger was, well, a doppelgänger?

And along came Wassily (or rather Vasile Ernu) with a Facebook page mixing the devil, the angel and the djinn, three personnages issued in the Soviet literature of the thirties. And from these three ones, it was the djinn that solved my troubles, as he sent me to a movie that I had watched in my childhood. I watched it again with great joy. Here you go:

Старик Хоттабыч (The Flying Carpet), 1956
(video by LFV)

And you can read a copy of the book, in English translation, by clicking here:

The Old Genie Hottabych

(Russian and Soviet Cinema)