Armando Ianucci's The Death of Stalin

most of this was on the level of the extremely dull opening ~20mins of in the loop, but nowhere near the american section; their rumsfeld caricature was realer than the entire politburo put together

(i did see it a second time and wrote this more detailed post which i consigned to my folder of ilx posts i don't post, but i figured i'd dig it up if the thread got bumped)

i saw this again and i don't actually think it's very good? you don't notice at first because conceptually it's such a gimme and the performances range from good to very good. but so much of the writing is SO lame, so disconnected: svetlana/khrushchev on "harm" (agonizing silence @ this and later callback, from otherwise p responsive audiences); khrushchev as funeral director (built up, then immediately squandered as blandly as possible in a scene that compares unfavorably to a bit from woody allen's hollywood ending); pointless "we are russians! in russia" flags (ninjinsky, baku pisshouse); concept after concept that feels like a mid-tier thick of it joke gone totally unaltered. "who puts a lamp on a chair"-- what the fuck was this? stop wasting my time. "maybe he's the milk" / "maybe you're the tit"-- compare this to in the loop's "they're so massive they actually draw in other tits from the surrounding area" / "like you?" for the difference between spending four seconds writing a joke and spending thirty.

sometimes there are little errors that make it feel chintzy and glib if u are a pedantic nerd, like malenkov drawing himself up in pomp to announce he is "the general secretary of the soviet union", or beria the human filing cabinet mispronouncing kaganovich's name, or the titles calling 1953 "the midst of the great terror". and for some reason even tho the movie is a door-slamming farce there are only two scenes set in the house on the embankment! nina khrushchev is in one of them and i kept wanting her back.

surprised myself on rewatch by thinking the nkvd raid scenes were pretty good. the near-wordless subplot about the son who denounces his father weighs more than anything else in the movie (but not as much as the state) and got v grim lols. (the massacre scene is barely legible tho. idk that ianucci's mise en whatever is any better than kevin smith's. would've been better if he'd just pastiched eisenstein.) also good: anything with the central committee formally assembled-- wish there had been more of this, it rly snaps the writing into focus. everyone sitting around waiting for palin's undead molotov to finish torturing a foregone conclusion of power into a just product of soviet principle is exactly the level too little of the movie is on.

i think they should have come back to "are you still testing me?" a time or two. instead of harm.

lose the title cards.

Is there a patreon I can subscribe to where I can see this folder

their rumsfeld caricature was realer than the entire politburo put together

Did you ever hear Kubrick quoted by one of his actors, "Real is good; interesting is better"?

I think my favorite line is "Who the fuck would want eternal life?"

i've read descriptions of stalin's actual moment of death, the deathbed scene where he raised up his hand, that were genuinely chilling and haunting and nothing like the goofy and over-the-top way they handled it here

b-b-but it's a comedy

It's a comedy in the sense that life is a comedy, but it's not particularly funny.

Then it's a not very good comedy.

Comedies don’t need to be all that funny, tho.

heard a lot of that lately and not seen many good comedies in the past few years

compared to Tag i expect it's funny

Stalin doesn't have much confidence in the setting; it could be any corrupt regime perpetuating itself, an idea that absolves the filmmakers of writing jokes to fit the material.

i agree, and i liked that about it

(i have forgotten most of the Soviet history i knew in college)

nearly assuming the audience knows what the NKVD was is plenty confident for this era

the palin committee meeting stuff was actually painful bad and well beliw the rest of it

You didn't need to know anything about Soviet history. Imagine watching a Italian comedy where they talk like Cubans.

"or the titles calling 1953 "the midst of the great terror""
I didn't notice this at the time and I was looking to pick at this thing, cos I can't fucking stand Ianucci's style and the rest.. anyway absolutely fab post there, DLH.

the CC scenes are actually not far from Python's People's Front of Judea in Life of Brian

Imagine watching a Italian comedy where they talk like Cubans.

is this a Scarface reference

Just finished on BBC2, what a piece of pointless crap.

yep. A self-satisfied Iannucci gag fest no less, with some good and bad actors enjoying themselves much more than the poor viewer.

It's not good on many levels but I enjoyed a couple of the performances. I don't much care about movies having a point either but yeah, this is waste, especially compared to Khrustalyov

It was simultaneously too light and too dark and ended up as nothing. Not funny. I grinned once.

It really doesn't work as a comedy

And it definitely doesn't work as a drama, apart from the last 5 minutes.

Plus I'm sorry the bit where Beria has a hissy fit and starts shouting accusations at the other committee members was just a pale shadow of Glenn's "I AM MAN" meltdown in "Rise of the Nutters".

There was an 80's brit tv comedy drama about Stalin that pissed all over this, but I saw it years ago and can't remember the name of it, and then there is the darkest of dark comedy of Khrustalyov My Car which isn't going to be for everybody but goes more into the anti-Semitic "doctors' plot" violence at the end of Stalin's era, which much more interesting than doing shit comedy versions of famous Soviet commissars in *hilarious* UK regional accents. Actually maybe the latter could actually be funny if it was done by anyone but fucking Iannucci.

Having Paul Whitehouse play Paul Whitehouse, Michael Palin play Michael Palin and Jeffrey Tambor play Jeffrey Tambor was a bit lazy.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/dec/14/khrustalyov-my-car-review-visually-amazing-russian-gem-aleksei-german

lol Khrustalyov is the recipient of that highest of movie accolades, a five star P Badshaw review! tbf on him it is a decent little review.

Fuck off back to Georgia, dead boy.

finally watched this. not funny at all apart from isaacs

i mean there's a line of people being shot in the head and then news of stalin's death reaches siberia and the next guy doesn't get shot. that isn't funny and it isn't satire

it's reveling in misery