Armando Ianucci's 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

This was surprisingly good - not vs. reviews or ILX opinion but it seemed to be meandering a bit in the middle then the shift in tone hits perfectly. My only complaint is that I could have used even more Jason Isaacs.

yeah for real - if this had been a TV series, his arrival would have tilted the narrative balance & made him a breakout star 💯

petitioning for Malenkov biopic

I fancy him.

No Zhukov. That's who I fancy.

the Horniburo

I would kind of like to see a film about Malenkov's later years

In 1961, Malenkov was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled to a remote province of the Soviet Union. He became a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Ust'-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan.[19]

After his exile from the Party, Malenkov fell into obscurity and suffered from depression due to loss of power and the quality of life in a poor province. However, some researchers say that later Malenkov found this demotion and exile a relief from the pressures of the Kremlin power struggle. Malenkov in his later years converted to Russian Orthodoxy, as did his daughter, who has since spent part of her personal wealth building two churches in rural locations. Orthodox Church publications at the time of Malenkov's death said he had been a reader (the lowest level of Russian Orthodox clergy) and a choir singer in his final years. He died on 14 January 1988 at age 86.

He became a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Ust'-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan. After his exile from the Party, Malenkov fell into obscurity and suffered from depression due to loss of power

ambiguous wikipedia sentences

lol!

This ruled

Late to the party, but wanted to say I really liked this. It is hilarious, and it has succeeded in making me interested in Russian history, which has always seemed dauntingly vast to try to comprehend. Maybe I'll pick up a book on the subject later this year when I'm not so damn busy.

haha, number none that is too funny! :D

i loved how AI stuffed genre characters into the political allegory, largely indicated by the accents. Stalin as mob boss, Stalin's kids as 1920s minor aristocracy, leader of the army as no-nonsense Yorkshireman etc. It felt like the film was a vague allegory concerning now, as opposed to about the actual death of stalin. At one point, Beria was threatening a guard and came out with a malcolm tucker style "rip off your head and shit down the neck" quip, and it wasn't funny because Tucker won't actually rip off your head, while Beria has probably done that today before breakfast. In using standard AI farce with a collection of monsters, it kinda illuminates how monstrous our current political animals are - malcolm tucker would be head of the secret police in another life.

Although a bit of a kolbasa-fest, I really liked this and how stage-y this was. That's usually a criticism of poor cinematic adaptation of a play, but I really liked the intimate production - it probably didn't need any of the wider shots of Moscow, parade, etc.

i really enjoyed this. really funny, solid performances, and some genuinely unsettling moments. especially liked buscemi who i thought put across khrushchev's slow transformation really convincingly. the only thing i didn't much like was the portrayal of stalin himself. even tho he doesn't get much screen time i still felt he should have felt like a shadow kind of hanging over the entire movie, like you should have FELT the characters' terror of stalin and their lingering fear that he might just walk back into the room. and 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. still liked it overall and would prob watch again.

Stalin came off stupid and bumbling, which, uh, he was not

Iannucci repeating Trotsky's mistakes :-O

Stalin came off stupid and bumbling, which, uh, he was not

He's at the end of his life, pretty difficult not to appear bumbling when you're having a heart attack.

this was okay. geeked out to it of course but it left a lot on the table and only beale (definitive, so far) really approached his role as a role. tambor did the thing he does. buscemi did one of them. both were funny.

biggest laughs for me kept coming from stuff that was totally indistinguishable from veep: "switch with me, we can make it look like part of the ceremony", buildup+payoff of malenkov and the little girl, etc. pretty good but pretty generic. (i get that being generic is to some extent the Point but eh.) an exception was when palin's molotov, orating, got stuck a while on the word "unwavering": this was a joke about the soviet union. (so was "i've had nightmares that made more sense than this", but that was in the trailer.)

svetlana and beria's vibe was wrong. even as a little girl she feared and hated him, couldn't stand to be around him (which because her father was, she always was: being picked up, dandled on knee, etc). showing this-- even just w body language, which in their first scene together (everyone racing to hug her) i thought for a second they were doing-- would imo have made the occasional references to beria being a serial child rapist feel less... is the word really "awkward"? better-integrated into the movie. (btw yes i am fairly sure this did come up at his "trial"-- yezhov's porn stash certainly came up at his.) but they don't do that really. nevertheless beale was, again, vivid, great.

they should have used patronymics. it would have been funny every time.

this was a joke about the soviet union.

another good one: "hey, polina's back!"

This was OK - banality of evil and all that - but it was too long for a farce.

This was fine. Almost as funny as In the Loop and of necessity a smoother and handsomer production.

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)