Badlands Story Hour Ep. 188: The Death of Stalin
Chris Paul and Burning Bright take on The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci's 2017 satire of the power struggle that followed Stalin's death, with Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, Simon Russell Beale as Beria and Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov. Chris admits he turned it off years ago without getting what it was doing, and now calls it a brilliant takedown of the collectivist administrative state. The two dig into why the English and American accents work, letting the film glide past grim material for laughs while landing as a commentary on any regime. From there the conversation widens into what the…
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