Armando Ianucci's The Death of Stalin

I enjoyed this. A series would have been better, yeah.

I watched The Red Monarch last year, it wasn't too bad. But the Mao Zedong scenes were 100% painful humour-fail. The norn iron guy who plays Soso was pretty bloody good tho!

Great actor.

IIRC they used regional accents in the film 'Gorky Park', I'm sure Ian Bannen and Rikki Fulton kept their Scottish accents.

are we drawing a distinction between accents and language spoken here because fair enough if the film is in the appropriate language but comedy drama school foreign-accented English doesn't seem to have much point to me

I don't know, Mordy seems to want Steve Buscemi et al to learn Russian.

the accents are actually a problem in gorky park -- but that's because i don't think they're being deployed to indicate regionality, as (apparently, i haven't seen it yet) here

(also i don't think bannen does retain his scots?)

it's a pity ianucci feel out with the veep crew, i think julia louis-dreyfus as stalin and tony hale as beria etc could work (i started this sentence as snark and end it sort of believing it)

I liked this quite a lot - think it is very funny and does convey the political brutality and fear.

My main doubt about it was the sense of Khrushchev and Zhukov as, in effect, 'heroes' - I liked them but I was suspicious of the fact that the film needed me to like them, ie: to have some sympathetic points of identification. This felt more like a filmic / narrative need than a reflection of history, but then I don't know the history well.

This felt more like a filmic / narrative need than a reflection of history

Er, welcome to all fictionalised historical movies.

imo the accents, after being slightly jarring at the start, made the film more believable and relatable, not less.

I think when you try and think about the despot and his fun crew of killer lackies as human beings - rather than historical figures it gets quite dark and scary in a truly troubling manner, and if there is humour to be derived from this bunch of fearful jobsworths and genocidal arselickers - I don't think this does it successfully. It needs a lighter more subtle touch, rather than endless overworked zings in series imo. tldr version Iannucci is a total knob and I can't stand the fucker!

xxpost

It's 20 +years since I last saw 'Gorky Park' so my memory of it may be slightly fuzzy. Checking wiki I see that Alexei Sayle is in it too, which I'd totally forgot about, and unsurprisingly what accent he had in it.

(xp) Kinda off the wall here, but I really went off Iannucci when I listened to the commentary on the DVD of "Knowing Me, Knowing You", which was him and everyone else in the cast except Coogan (of course). He didn't seem to understand what parts were funny and what weren't and was constantly derailing amusing conversations between cast members to show that he was in charge and he could do comedy too. Plus smugness.

continuing the gorky park derail (as I haven't yet seen DoS): I rewatched it on amazon prime a few months back, and on the whole it's pretty good -- william hurt at his most charming, a story about idealism and corruption in soviet moscow in its next-to-last days (the novel came out a decade before the end of the USSR, the film a couple of years later)

the accents thing i felt was too half-hearted really to do the job required of it: you don;t get a sense of the vastness and variation of the soviet empire from it, nor really of melting-pot moscow

alexei sayle is reliably terrible: in 1983 people still hadn't realised he couldn't act and had very little craft as an on-screen performer :(

and to pushback-stan for iannucci a little: veep is genuinely great i think (i liked it a LOT more than the thick of things)

Gorky park is bad it's bad

it's no hobbit 3

less hobbits

I think when you try and think about the despot and his fun crew of killer lackies as human beings

Well they were human beings. That's kind of the point.

these takes are getting too hot for me to handle, I'm out

There are a few gears of bad, Gorky park and hobbit 3 may be different gears of bad but that is not much good if one seeks a good movie

the mark s distruster has logged on

Heh if that was in fact a sly reference to hobbit 3s excellence I'm afraid I'm unconvinced alright

xpost We've talked about it before I'm sure, but I know lots of Chinese speakers who have issues with, say, "Crouching Tiger," because the regional accents are all over the place. Or even, more recently, "Black Panther."

Manohla Dargis in the NYT loved it... this post hasn't been updated yet.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4917-the-daily-toronto-2017-the-death-of-stalin

just NY/LA i think

loved this...if anything it was a bit darker than i had assumed it would be, it doesn't really shy much away from Beria's proclivities nor as d-mac noted the suffering of anyone, it just tends to occur at the margins or in the background or offscreen or the fallen bodies are a bit out of focus and so on. the panic and terror of the people before their demises is quite real and the situations are absurd (which is what's played up.)

I thought it was...weird that they made such a thing of the other politburo members denouncing Beria for his sexual crimes when they sentenced him to death. I'm by no means an expert on the real events, but it seems like that was not a stated reason for his execution at all? As noted above, seemed like an attempt to elicit audience sympathy for the ostensible heroes of the piece. I mean he was obviously a monster, but it felt a little clumsy to me

but tbh I thought this didn't work at all. Although Isaacs was pretty amusing

I don't know much about the exact details either but i feel like I've read somewhere that reference was made to his crimes when he was charged. I could be wrong. I didn't read that moment as a way to garner sympathy, I read it as the other committee members being well aware of his nature and only cravenly turning on him once his power ebbed even slightly, as a way to find a scapegoat, and as a bit of self-preservation knowing what he was capable of doing should he come to increased power.

if you ranked the worst people portrayed in this movie, Khrushchev's legacy might be slightly underrated next to Beria's. He left a mountain of corpses in Ukraine. And post Stalin, he was hypocritical enough to posthumously rehabilitate some of his own victims of his own purges, that wiped out 400000+ people in the 30's, that's before you get onto his role during Holodomor, and there is more!

this movie does a good job of making me want to see it by having a title that reminds me Stalin is fuckin' dead, which makes me happy, I want very much to support the death of Stalin so that more people like Stalin might also be encouraged to fuckin' die fast

time probably makes more totalitarian despots die than shit movies do!

Speaking of communist biopics, we saw “Yung Marx” last night and enjoyed it.

They go to town with all the cameos

This was okay, a few chuckles, it gets by on pacing. Malenkov moaning, "I'm exhausted – I can't remember who's alive and who isn't" could've come from his diaries if he'd kept any.

Such facts would stop the movie cold

You think she's portrayed as being an older teen?

Wasn't as funny as I expected. This hasn't happened in a while to me but I think p much all of the funniest bits were in the trailer (at least the red band one I saw at the theater over the past month). Really wanted to like it and was bummed when it lost momentum and became oddly procedural half an hour in. It also completely died in the packed theater.

the often discerning Michael Sicinski thinks this film is a miscalculation

https://letterboxd.com/msicism/film/the-death-of-stalin/

if I'm a huge idiot with enormous blindspots in european history and comparative politics, will I enjoy this movie?

i think the tone of the film shifts but it does so pretty well. i didn't mind any supposed discrepancies at all. and the funniest moments for me weren't in the trailer, i think the best bit was Molotov carefully trash-talking his disappeared wife to Beria while she was waiting outside as a surprise and him shifting to careful euphoria when she walked in.

i think you would!

imo you don't really need to know anything to enjoy this movie

the often discerning Michael Sicinski

lol, sic batsignal is triggered by someone called Sicinski. I still think he's right about some of the problematic humour of this movie, and how it doesn't really work.

if I'm a huge idiot with enormous blindspots in european history and comparative politics, will I enjoy this movie?

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Thursday, March 29, 2018 2

yeah the apparatchiks are all treated as obese idiots

It was funny at points—Tambor's balcony scene was the best—but the rapid tonal shifts from screwball comedy to mass gulag executions and the serial rape of young girls were too much for me to handle.

Dark comedy usually isn't a problem for me, but why not just set this at Auschwitz? And follow that up with a spoof of Jerry Sandusky?

Also John Ganz in the Baffler presents a more polished version of Sicinski's argument

https://thebaffler.com/latest/as-stalin-lay-dying

"THERE ARE MOVIES YOU ROOT FOR. You want them to be great, and when they disappoint, you don’t want to admit it to yourself or others: you might laugh along with the audience, afterwards you might recommend them a little more highly than you know they deserve."

Maybe Iannucci is just too heavy handed to do a dark comedy set in a genocidal regime (yeah but he already did the USA to many rave reviews ... ba-dum-tshh).

still think he's right about some of the problematic humour of this movie, and how it doesn't really work

yeah, no beef with his personal distaste, he just looks like a dummy when he tries to support it extra-textually

tbh I have never seen the Clinton movie either

What Clinton movie?

Morbs told me TV shows are movies now

Here's an extract from one of Iannucci's movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wnnf6MZL-w

he's worth it even for the fact that he brought new audiences to opera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH18mqCJdDs