was movie review show i'm marilyn campbell and i will be moderating tonight for a show starring our regular panelist bob brown and janet stern and tonight we're going to be few years ago called in the loop which was a political satire and he has also been involved as both director and writer of the t v series veep which is a satirical television series about  with his council members and all of a sudden he dies the death of stone based on a graphic novel actually which is interesting the council members of course scurried try to gain position over each other and the one who seems to be as they said in the in one of the reviews i read the least terrible if it's khrushchev played amazing he perceived bush and he and i would say bury our beriah i don't know how you pronounce it who it is it's like a marx brothers comedy but not that mar review this seemed to me to be even more ferocious than in the loop which was quite for fane among other things and many which in which the stakes are not quite as high as in this where people are being shot left and right and tortured left and right and raped left and right even though this is played as as kind of a comedy what did you think about the tone of the f i thought it was very interesting combination of horror and comedy at the same time it almost shakespearean in that regard because you've got truly horrible things happening and they don't pull any punches while there are plenty of punches and also shots but  when somebody is so part of the head as being sliced open it's done in a very off and way it's almost the cinematography is almost documentary style which makes that combination even more odd but it it enhances a humor to mine and to my mind i would say there was nothing at all fancy about the cinematography and simply based so much on the script scholars have said that one of them said the treatment of burial is in forgive unforgivably work so inaccurate well because he like well the thing is he's already the head of that his secret police weren't even active during this time that this that they were later and so there are inaccurate and akron isms and it but in order to get all the people together sort of like i q you've got to have people together in the film who weren't really at the unlike germany and where hitler you wouldn't find any portrait of well if you went to was russia today hotels would have pictures of so so even though he killed many more people in the gulags and thr he's still kind of a figure well he liked classical music and westerns and so he was he wasn't leaving anything out maybe some people like classical music and like stalin some people like westerns and like stalin but i spent we spent some time in russia and it was told me and this i saw in the film really at really for the first time i really saw it it was told to me that the reason that russian people come across as courson course but abrupt and rude and they do many of them do it's because that they were so afraid of that knock on the door that they ended up trying to be coarse and crude and not intellectual and they gave that away they diminish that in themselves and you know i'm saying they were so afraid of being reported to be intel lect intellectual and refined and they didn't want to be that because those are the people who would be rounded up holed up well certainly that one of the ironies of the movie is that while stalin has some sort of us broke haemorrhage or something of that sort and he still breathing they can find a doctor because if they know that all the doctors there was that there was something called the doctors project where sal and thought that doctors were were conspiring against him the person of the doctors were mostly jewish yes that is because the doctors were mostly jewish and he rounded up most of the leading doctors say and and put them on trial show trial and and kill them off and so this is coming back to bite him because they can't find yes and that's an actual that scene in which that is discussed is what i loved about the dialogue as i recall and i'm not going to be able to replicate it as it was said or as fast as it was say yeah they said well we don't have any good doctors anymore that's ok if stalin doesn't live he won't know that the doctor was bad if he lives he'll think i was a good doctor when when right that's very typical of the kind of dialogue but fast fast fast fast fast it also seems to be that stallin like to have people tell jokes a lot around him and that's why these these to are surrounding him are constantly trying to amuse him in some way and steve buscemi is the most successful at this because he has his wife take down hahaha what did you think about the acting generally what you think it was too broadly do you think it was just about right for what this is i think it was just about right i can't even imagine it being better know and he was the minister of agriculture do you remember when he came to central new jersey and they took him to plains brought to see how the farms worked well i wasn't living in central new jersey town and i just have had i only remember he's wanted to go to disneyland and he would and they didn't want him they didn't allow him because of security reasons that they felt they couldn't see protect him in the museum and park and he was so angry that he went home and and started in send missiles to cuba something actor in the world and that was in australia what is a road on the road oh aren't there is something it was somebody is a sort of a rube goldberg contraption where you bring counties in one hand and they get hooked up to the milking machine it's the scene opens the movie opens at a concert where stella is listening on the radio apparently and then he calls up and he said he'd like a recording of the concert and they have it recorded it  guy in the control damage or something goes completely nuts and tells the people they have to fire back and they have to redo the concert and record it and they're sort of reluctant but he's hysterical he's absolutely  completely out of himself and one of the things he says which i'm sure was not an exaggeration is don't worry come back and no one will be killed can you imagine going to my car ric richardson or any of your i mean it was you know but i think that was sort of the tragedy under the comedy was it is so imbedded in people the fear was so much a part of them that they would say things like that because it was true yes or of the many parts in apologizing i know i'm going to protect you don't do it but by the end of the film he's telling it get out of here and do what i say and it's you can see that he's taking he is coming into his own will right which is the specialty  this guy i mean both in the loop and and veep are also these sort of in people with absolutely no morals are in charge of our political system and that they will and that the whole point is getting power and not doing anything in particular for anybody else especially the you know cattle like populists who you can just move about and use to your own will that the guy the mill gibson film about the american revolution i never saw where he he's he's the one that it's shooting people for no particular reason but he was that and he was i thought amazingly funny in which his think it is his and one member of his family is dead and the other and he's seeing a psychiatrist about this and the other half of his life that  comments about why they didn't attempt russian accents and there were some reasons there are good reasons after well but i had a reason that i thought was interesting but it isn't true because the director didn't say that just wasn't there but i thought it was because there were so many really these council member poll of your members had come from all over the net all the different soviet republics and so they would have different accents in russian yeah well the other thing is that if it were i should say their russian would be very different wouldn't have let me write they would have different accents while speaking russian yeah but i think that that would be lost on an english speaking audience if they try to do a different sort of russian accent get their english or to do as they've done sometimes in shakespeare plays whether clownish and characters have a lower class you know like a cockney accent in the upper class characters and an upper class accent i don't know that that would work in this hair and i mean the interesting thing was that zuko who is probably who's playing in general would have had i would have thought a more standard english accent but in fact they use someone with a very liberal even verging into the north of england was accent so what was that everything ride and what was a director's he said that he didn't want the characters to be thinking about there at the address to be thinking about their accents it would just you would trip them up because you can see how how fast they play off each other and he didn't want them to have to worry about that right so they're make sure that the pianist at the concert at the beginning is actually a ukrainian actress or model actress but she is i think the only but it didn't work out yes and he worked with hero to his oh yeah purposes oh well let's stop discussing there and just go around and talk about a few other films are you saying bob and i both went to the trenton film festival we had those people before the festival to encourage you all to go and i think we both could report that it was a very interesting theory is that there were lots of short narrative films short documentaries and from all different countries some of the ones from around and from other countries were very interesting there were a lot of films on women's issues which i thought was interesting there were a lot of films about filmmaking or films about filmmaking they had a lot of filmmakers common talk which was interesting bob yeah yeah i i  the narrative shorts i only saw half of the narrative shorts on sunday afternoon but i and these things were like maybe ten fifteen minutes at the longest twenty minutes notice yeah but i was impressed with th technical quality of these things and the imaginative plots or whatever they come up with is an idea for a story my favorite was  on a pad and as she's writing the scene shifts to the characters in this setting who are playing it and they're kind of going along with whatever's on her pattern sometimes when she gets completely frustrated starts scribbling and the characters kind of struggling along with her when she's got a block they're kind of frozen in midair waiting for the the scene to be to be for that along that was his and that was one of my favorites so we also also want to tell  in the in the local area in the princeton area that the princeton public library's environmental phone festival is starting april eighth and it goes to april fifteenth and they're feeling lots of films they're showing a for an academy award for best foreign film as was his previous film i can't remember his name but leviathan as bleak as the death of stalin was in terms of that this was ten times worse and it's an allegory about russia really today is it's a very deep insight into russia but also into this life of this poor little boy who his parents are fighting and it's also about social media and how that has made everyone lose compassion and empathy just like russia  that sort of baseline of horror and that makes you think twice about laughing while you're laughing but you have to also say that you know that it's really become vulnerable in the loop there's a baseline of hard to do if you lived in yes that's true and it's true this is about the lead up to the war in iraq and it's got civilized people blair and bush but it's pretty horrible yes because because everyone is sort of like in the evil in war there would be some character would be bumbling around and go somewhere and come completely unprepared and there was that kind of character in the loop as well who's trying to do the right brooke hate writing to do the decent thing and he is he's completely cut off in every possible way well thank you all for joining us on a fistful of popcorn and we encourage you all to go out and see all the not only films in the multiplexes but all the wonderful resources we have in this area or festivals for specials at the garden and the four specials at the public library all the kinds of ways you can see films that are not mainstream films and they're very very enjoyable and different to say thank you very much