Simon Russel Beale is indeed an old hand stage and radio performer over 'ere. His George Smiley in the Le Carre’s Smiley sequence for BBC radio was kisses fingers like a chef but we’ll save that for the radio podcast.
Nice Wolf Hall reference there Tom. Great television. Mark Rylance puts in a performance and a half.
Dingus, I totally agree with you that this is the kind of movie that sits on an end of year list.
@Kelly_Wand, I also agree with you that this would have made my list last year.
I kept thinking that Beria looked like The Penguin.
This was an excellent Totalitarian farce. Jeffrey Tambor and his over-sized suits as the pathetic, groomed successor Malenkov was hilarious, but Michael Palin’s Molotov stole the film for me. His love for all things Stalinism sees him eager to accept any reality, including his own death warrant and his wife returning from the dead, so long as Stalin signed off on it, never stopped being funny. I didn’t realize how much I had missed seeing Palin in movies.
FYI, David Schneider is the physical cartoonist guy from The Day Today and the commissioning editor in Alan Partridge. He’s a long time collaborator with Iannucci on these and other shows.
In case anyone is inspired by the movie and/or the podcast to seek out more Iannucci stuff, I’m happy to advise. He’s a national treasure.
For some reason this episode didn’t show up in my podcast feed. RSS issue?
Hmmm. The RSS feed is correct, but for some reason Apple podcasts isn’t updated: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/quarter-to-three-movie-podcasts/id413229764
I don’t know why it’s different though.
My podcasts on my iPad and iPhone went dumb for me two updates ago. I think Apple changed how the podcasts are sorted. Right after the change I wasn’t getting the newest podcast until I scrolled right to the bottom and chose, I believe, available episodes. That seemed to fix it.
Why are you people still using Apple Podcasts? It’s terrible.
I also don’t see this episode, and I use Overcast. I don’t know how to see what URL it’s using, though.
Shows up fine in Pocket Casts
So @Dave_Perkins noted that this wasn’t the first time that a podcaster has used the same movie for the over and under selection.
I too use Overcast. The app is great, but it must use an Apple podcast API for actually fetching things.
Does this movie have much to offer for someone whose world history class in high school was very much a case of the inmates running the asylum? We called it BC for short because the “teacher” (he was a substitute, or something, that was brought in to teach one class for an entire year because there were more students than history teachers) sported a Bleached Comb-over on his head. There were frequent U-S-A! chants: not with any sincere or ironic intent, but because it was a fun thing to do. I guess we were trolling. Imagine the teacher having as much control over a situation as Professor Frink, or that flailing arms robot from Lost in Space. Crumpled paper fights were not uncommon. A stink bomb was deployed clearing out the entire classroom for twenty minutes. Friends from other classes would stop by and hang out for lengthy amounts of time. For the last day of school we printed up a schedule of “activities” to deploy throughout the period, including an impressively synchronized earthquake drill.
It was truly a magical time, but I learned nothing of history outside of the fact that the band Franz Ferdinand was named after a real guy that had something to do with WWI. Most of my knowledge of WWII comes from Medal of Honor, Schindler’s List, and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I know Trotsky was a person because of Allen Ginsberg. And Stalin? Before looking up this movie I would have put my money on him being Russian, but I wouldn’t have bet very much.
I suppose one important thing I truly did learn was the exhilaration of taking part in a mob. It becomes very easy to take things too far with the support of others. As much fun as my friends and I had, we also did some things at the expense of others. There is a sense of regret and shame that sticks with me, and has hopefully made me a better person. Still know shit about history though.
TL;DR: Will this movie appeal to those who don’t know the source material?
I think it would. The movie gives you pretty much all the information that you need.
I suppose that knowing that Stalin might have a bigger body count that Hitler is good knowledge to have. A significant amount of that body count being his own people.
He had no concern about purging those at the top or those at the very bottom. The Soviets also had a huge domestic surveillance network which was used to help snuff out any potential dissent.
I’ll teach her what a ream is! Jk, I don’t know either.
Yeah, Webb; watch it; it’s choice.
The day I decided history was too annoying for me to take seriously was when I found out the Nazis and the Russians started World War 2 on the same side. Or something. The more you learn, the more you realize civilization’s pretty much just winging it. So memorizing the details isn’t that far removed from Comic-Con. And who wants to pay parking for that?
