THE DEATH OF STALIN (2017) MOVIE REACTION!
Added 2024-07-19 16:00:14 +0000 UTCAlthough I have seen this a couple of times and loved it, if feels like once a month I get bombarded with requests to watch this movie. So I caved to the pressure, and guess what? I don't regret my decision at all! And I feel like I appreciate several of the actors more now that I've seen it again after I've done almost 3 years of reaction videos. I hope you enjoy the reaction! I certainly did!
Comments
I feel like Stalin keeping all his main dudes in a room every night getting drunk as hell and then making them stay up till 3am watching cowboy movies was largely just a tactic to keep them tired and docile most the time
Spoingus
2025-08-16 08:59:30 +0000 UTCSo I just saw a video on YouTube showing all of Brezhnev's appearances in the movie. I never realised. I just thought he appeared in the end scene.
Captain Cardboard
2025-08-04 20:43:26 +0000 UTCArmando Iannucci is one of the most brilliant comedy writers in modern history. The Day Today, I'm Alan Partridge, Death Of Stalin, The Thick Of It, Time Trumpet, The Armando Iannucci Shows, Veep. All brilliant.
Joe Blakeley
2024-12-20 10:20:47 +0000 UTCRegarding "How have they never seen Jurrassic Park?" ....This is fuckin painful, but remember that film came out in 1993. There are people with children heading to secondary school who were born after Jurrassic Park came out.
Martin Clarkson
2024-09-03 14:30:58 +0000 UTCArmando Iannucci is a cultural genius, when things go badly in UK political parties you'll hear it's like living through an episode of 'the Thick Of It' and in the US he has inserted Veep as not only a. great show but like the UK it's become a term used for pointing out political breakdowns.
Jason Bonner
2024-07-23 10:02:04 +0000 UTCInteresting that you do this at the same time as The Day Today, both from Armando Ianucci. I am not sure you noticed that.
Stephen Morris
2024-07-21 20:51:45 +0000 UTCWhat the barrelling fuck - Im soo stealing that Steve B and Jason I absolutely make this film
Craig McCulloch
2024-07-21 14:28:52 +0000 UTCSo glad you did this reaction...... still mad at you though haha
Craig McCulloch
2024-07-20 11:11:07 +0000 UTCHonestly, as someone who spent many a long year studying this period, the film is as close to perfect as a historical black comedy can be. They definitely take liberties here and there (see my above post about the re-recorded concert and Yudina's note, which definitely didn't happen on the night of Stalin's death and may never have happened at all), but it's always in service of the story, and defendable on the basis that it sums up a broader truth about Stalinist society. And it's balanced out by some real dedication to historical accuracy in other places, like Stalin waking up at 50:30 and pointing to the painting of the lamb on the wall, which really did happen; first time I saw the film I was delighted they threw that true detail in and even made it funny! Also, having originally learned about all this stuff as capital-H History, belonging in the same box as the Romans and the Vikings and the Crusades, it boggles my mind more and more, the older I get, to reflect how close it was to my own lifetime. Like... Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) lived until November 1986 and could theoretically have watched Aliens, Crocodile Dundee, the first three Police Academy films and listened to Madonna's Papa Don't Preach before he died. Svetlana Alliluyeva (Andrea Riseborough) lasted until November 2011, so could have seen every Harry Potter film and listened to Rihanna's We Found Love. Even more incredibly, Svetlana's daughter - Stalin's actual granddaughter! - is living today in Portland, Oregon, where she goes by the name Chrese Evans and is fond of cosplaying as Tank Girl. And fair play to her. https://www.reddit.com/r/UtterlyUniquePhotos/comments/1c4njvq/meet_chrese_evans_a_54year_old_buddhist_antique/
Ian Richards
2024-07-20 01:23:55 +0000 UTCThe whole story about the re-recorded concerto and the pianist Maria Yudina sending Stalin a note (which purportedly said "I will pray for you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country") comes from the Solomon Volkov book Testimony, which itself claims to be the oral memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. But the actual historicity of the Volkov/Shostakovich stories is a bit dubious, to say the least, and if the incident happened at all then it was in 1944, a full nine years before Stalin's death. Elizabeth Wilson recently investigated the story and found no record in Stalin's otherwise well-preserved music archive of a piano concerto from that era with Yudina performing, nor among Yudina's own papers and recordings, leading her to doubt the truth of the anecdote, concluding quite bluntly that if Yudina really had sent such a note to Stalin, then she'd have died for it like anyone else. However, Wilson also acknowledged that Yudina was certainly committed to her faith to an extent that qualified as de facto dissidence against the Stalinist system, using what little influence she had to intervene on behalf of friends and family that came in the regime's crosshairs, and that small defiance alone is probably what prompted Shostakovich (if the anecdote reported by Volkov was authentically his) to imagine some far greater act of dissent and resistance on her part, coupling it with the tale of the re-recorded concerto - which is also apocryphal, but definitely the kind of thing that used to happen under Stalin - in his own mind decades later.
Ian Richards
2024-07-19 22:39:22 +0000 UTC
