The Death of Stalin (2017)

Director: Armando Iannucci

Cast: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It feels like a film I’ve always been orbiting around watching, but kept missing it for one reason or another.

Did I Like It: I remember being very down on Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023) for a myriad of historical sins, the most egregious of them being that not only did every figure depicted speak English, they also appeared to be writing in English as well. Now, this film engages in a lot of the same chicanery as displayed in that film, with a cast that is blissfully content to either sound 100% American or British while they bicker their way to a post-Stalin politburo. Here, I’m fine with it.

Why? Because it’s a damn comedy is why. From all accounts, this is a fairly accurate depiction of a pointedly preposterous series of events. I don’t know what Ridley Scott’s excuse is, but Armando Iannucci is absolutely running laps around him with this one. My favorite gag in the entire film is when the politburo decides to pause mass executions, after which we cut to one final guy getting shot by a firing squad, and the next guy in line realizing he can just walk away. An absolutely perfect depiction, if ever there was one, of the insanity of a government out of control.

I don’t think the film would have hit the same as it did when it hit wider release in 2018. Applying the same sense of open-eyed cynicism Iannucci brought to American politics in Veep and British politics to the horrors of the peak of the Soviet system. We live in a time where it’s easy—and plenty rationale—to be afraid of the faceless horrors of our current system, but there’s more than a little bit of comfort to remember that it’s run by a bunch of childish fools who are just a few moments away from being completely removed from everything they reflexively hold dear.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. You don’t live in the dorms for any stretch of the mid-2000s without taking in all of the Tarantino library.

Did I Like It: This is probably the Tarantino film I’m least inclined to re-visit, but I think I’ve spent more than a few years being unfair in that regard. My memory of the film is that it was always a bit simplistic. That isn’t necessarily a mark against the film. Given the resources Tarantino was working with, the film didn’t really have any hope of being more of a prototype for what Tarantino would eventually have in store for us.

The film is infinitely more complex than my memory gave it credit. Tarantino introduces himself to the movie-going world with the same kind of unhinged, borderline-bonkers plot construction he would later perfect* in Pulp Fiction (1994).

You may be like me and mostly remember the opening diner scene where the characters disassemble Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” or the torture scene complete with a needle drop of “Stuck in the Middle with You.” But the entire story keeps its secrets from us for as long as it wants to, and not a second longer, and only reveals them not when the flow of the ill-fated heist demands it, but when it will mean the most to us in our journey with the characters.

You might be like some of the critics of the age who are irretrievably turned off by the use of language and the violence. The immediate answer to those complaints is that you’re likely to have a devil of a time with the rest of Tarantino’s films, but I would add on to say that every line of dialogue is built to reveal character, even when those characters are helplessly awful. As far as the violence is concerned, I suppose I understand the complaints about violence in Tarantino’s films, but whereas light PG-13 depict violence as bloodless, barely notable events, it is difficult to say that Tarantino treats his violence blithely. Every drop of blood is bled from wounds that hurt, and that means more than finding a character amidst a maelstrom of bullets and blades only to come out with a scratch.

*And subsequently abandon, It’s a little disappointing that Tarantino never really continued his experiments with non-linear narratives, but then one supposes that if you start experimenting, and then perfect it in the next outing, are there really any experiments left to do?

Escape From L.A. (1996)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda

Have I Seen it Before: Admittedly, no. As much as I will spend my time professing love for Carpenter, I’ve had more than a few blind spots when it came to his later work, a set of blind spots I’ve been spending all summer trying to shore up.

Did I Like It: Carpenter proclaims that this is better than <Escape from New York (1981)> , which always seemed like the kind of thing the guy who apparently just directed an entire TV series from his couch would say…

But God help me, he might have been right. It wouldn’t be hard to write this film off as a remake-bordering-on-rip-off of New York, but I can’t avoid thinking about it as a real attempt to make the movie that Carpenter, Russell, and crew wanted to make all along. The original film takes place in a dystopia for the sake of dystopia, whereas the world of President Adam (Cliff Robertson) is an insane Christian Theocracy* that now feels less like speculative fiction, and more like sober reporting on the issues of the day.

Things start off here great stylistically from the opening credits. The cast is pound-for-pound surprisingly great, and Carpenter’s score is back in fine form. Carpenter’s melodies quickly take a back seat to the larger portion of Shirley Walker’s score, but the balance here is certainly better than in <Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)>, and if you’ve got to move away from a Carpenter score, you could do a lot worse than the musical voice behind Batman: The Animated Series.

Sure, there are some flaws here. The special effects are nearly wall-to-wall early CGI, where the original adventures of Snake Plisskin (Russell) were a triumph of practical effects, even in the parts of the film you thought were early, experimental CGI. Also, your individual mileage with the movie will vary directly with the degree to which you might enjoy depictions of surfing in movies, which isn’t really me.

*You know, as opposed to the really reasonable Christian theocracies that are out there.