Review: Olympics ceremony, like Russia, is super
Grandiose pageant's charms outweighed its glitches
Really big country; really big show.
You probably already knew that Russia, host of the Winter Olympic Games, is an incredibly large country - but in case you didn't, NBC and Russia's Olympic organizers spent much of Sochi's often dazzling opening ceremony Friday emphasizing the point. Everything was super-sized, starting with the huge floating chunks of countryside that launched the proceedings, and the endless flow of chatter from hosts Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira.
In overall approach, the Russian ceremony reflected that now-standard Olympian blend of Cirque du Soleil, The Ed Sullivan Show, Game of the States, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and a tableau-laden historic pageant. In scale, it took a grandiose approach more common to Summer Olympics openers than to their usually more laid-back cold-weather cousins, but in tone, it went its own earnest way, with less bombast than Beijing and little of the tongue-in-cheek undertones of London.
It didn't go off without glitches. (In case you're wondering, people have already made up T-shirts featuring that balky snowflake that refused to become an Olympic ring.) But the effects that worked - the flying light horses pulling a sun above a cracking field of ice; the creation of St. Petersburg; those twirling Swan Lake mushrooms - far outnumbered those that didn't. The remarkable 3D projections on the floor of the stadium were worth the price of admission all by themselves, or at least the price we paid. Whether they're worth the billions NBC paid, only the ratings will tell.
Where else could you get, as Lauer told us twice, 'a thousand years of history in just three minutes'? Not that all of the historic images made sense - certainly not to us, anyway, and probably not to everyone anywhere. (While no one can question New Yorker editor David Remnick's expertise, we're not required to share his confidence that every single Russian can identify the ballroom scene from War and Peace.) But sometimes you just have to give yourself over to visual splendor and the joys of out-sized, color-rich kitsch.
Unusual images were the order of the day. People in seemingly radioactive coats formed a human Russian flag. Athletes turned into constellations. Soviet hammers and sickles floated above writhing Soviet bobby-soxers. The Olympic flame set off a barrage of fireworks, amid its own dancing fountain. (Among the things NBC didn't let us see was the Russian Police Choir singing Daft Punk's Get Lucky, the kind of ham-fisted omission that makes people clamor for live coverage.)
Even the parade of nations was given a new Sochi twist: The athletes came out of the floor though a projected globe, emerging from a shroud of light like an Olympic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Still, some old-fashioned Olympic pleasures remained, like the ever popular sport of mocking outfits. This time around, they ranged from goose down dull to the downright bizarre (flip-flops, Grand Cayman? Slankets, Taipei?), capped by our own apparent attempt to extend Ugly Sweater Season beyond its Christmas limits.
Initially it seemed that NBC had fallen too deeply in love with those sweaters; once the American team came out in them, the network stopped showing the other entering athletes. But that's one of the advantages of tape-delay: After a commercial break, NBC was able to cut back and show the countries we'd missed. (The disadvantage, of course, is that all those commercial breaks made it feel like the Russians were adding another thousand years to their history.)
Now let's hope the network continues to spread around that global Olympian love for the next two weeks. We want to see all the best athletes, not just our own.
It's a big world out there, NBC. Just ask the Russians.
One of the Olympic Rings fails to completely illuminate during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.(Photo: Phil Noble, Reuters)
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