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Toma's Review Of: The Death of Stalin (2017)
Short Summary Of My Review
The Death of Stalin is a hilarious movie using both comedic wit and normalized excessive violence to tell a (suprisingly) historically accurate story. It has beautiful camera work, music, and has turned me onto Armando Iannucci as a director. I don’t need another director to deep dive, so for that I’m giving the movie (1)0/10.
Full Review
The Death of Stalin has a brand of comedy I’ve never seen before. It’s very smart and a lot of jokes have multi-scene setup, but then there are also random one liners that aren’t nearly as setup but equally funny. So easily saying “go kill them” with no affect when three people see you dragging a dead body is somehow funny. It’s able to stay funny in this violence because it’s not very gory. The most gory part (opening Stalin’s head) isn’t related to killing. This small bit of gore combined with a totally removed view from the people of Russia of the main characters gives a “this happens a lot, so it doesn’t matter” view of the murders of civilians in this movie, allowing it to remove the sad factor and just be very funny.
It also has amazing directing. You can tell every shot was thought about for 10 hours and then scrapped when Iannucci got an even better idea to ponder. The shots of the ginormous fortresses these soviet leaders had were beautiful. The music fit every scene perfectly, elevating but never distracting from them. The scenes with tons of people had me questioning how he had that, which is the magic in movies. “How did you do that?” is probably the best compliment you can receive. On top of all that, the runtime is under two hours so it moves very fast. Iannucci more like Imadeagoodmovieucci, 10/10
