Bear?! As in Neroon 2.0, Listkeeper Bear?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WOW
Because of your avatar, I just flashed on an image of Josef Stalin busting through the wall of the Kremlin (where he's entombed) and yelling "OH YEAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Though I guess "AKH DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" would be linguistically more correct.
Watched it and if you remember the sequence in Pulp Fiction where a panicked Travolta has to drive Uma Thurman to get an antidote, you'll have an idea of what this film is like. Seriously, the film is like a 2 hour version of that scene. It's not bad, but not terribly engaging, either. I found myself wanting to know more about many of the minor characters than I did the main ones. Another thing which just kept yanking me out of the film is that many of the cars were completely wrong. There's a sequence where some Soviet soldiers drive off in a late 30s Citroën. WTF is that doing in the USSR? The Soviets slavishly copied Packards from that era, so even if the producers couldn't have found a Zil, they could have used a Packard and few people would have known the difference. (And when I say "few" I mean fucking few. Think the number of folks who know the exact Panotone code for the color of Kirk's safe, and then divide that by half.) Also, there's a scene where a Soviet officer pulls out his side arm and shoots someone. To me, it looked like a 1911. Whatever it was, it looked nothing like what Wikipedia says was standard issue at the time.
I used to say that "Stalin died of natural causes after he was poisoned". The response was always "That's not natural causes". I said "Dying after being poisoned seems pretty natural to me".
It's an entertaining movie. The pacing and dialogue definitely felt like a stage play, which kept it interesting. But that's very typical for an Armando Iannucci movie (almost an Aaron Sorkin style). Great set of comedic actors too. I don't think they were necessarily going for historical accuracy with it, so don't watch it for that reason. If you enjoy Veep, In the Loop, or The Thick of It, you'll enjoy this movie. And if you enjoyed this movie and haven't watched those shows and movie, go check them out! In the Loop is a quick movie to watch, whereas Veep and The Thick of It have several seasons of content.
Saw it on the plane to Japan last year. Thought it was pretty great, very funny and illustrative of the horrors and absurdities of Soviet communism. It played a little loosely with historical facts (e.g., the massacre of people coming to Moscow didn't happen, nor was Beria's execution carried out as shown) but was reasonably accurate. The bit about Beria villifying the unconscious Stalin, only to grovel at his side when Stalin briefly regained consciousness is, apparently, factual. A Russian friend of mine insists that the more horrific aspects of Beria's tenure are way overblown.
Yeah, watched it a while back. Pretty good - only loosely based on actual history but gets the spirit and most importantly, the tone right.
The funniest part for me was when they are having that meeting and are voting on various things and every vote is unanimous because everyone is afraid to vote otherwise.
I started watching it, expecting good things, but it just wasn't gelling for me. It's hard to explain, but it's one of those movies that sound good on paper but I just wasn't feeling it once it began. But hey, that's art!
TIL that the folks behind this missed out on a golden opportunity. Guess who was Stalin's personal chef. Vladimir Putin's grandfather! Oh, sure, we didn't know that Pootie-Poot was going to turn out to be a total war-mongering fascist at that point but by 2016 (when it would have been in production) we weren't exactly big fans of his. It wouldn't have been too difficult to have someone make an off-hand comment on the subject, even one that was relatively neutral as to what kind of war-mongering fascist Putin would turn out to be.
