By Steve Sailer
03/14/2018
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:We Don’t Airbrush, We Photoshop by Steve SailerRead the whole thing there.March 14, 2018
The most amusing aspect of the impressive, if not particularly comic, new comedy The Death of Stalin is that Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), who earns most of the film’s laughs as Malenkov, the Soviet dictator’s sad-sack nominal successor, saw his face Photoshopped out of the movie’s poster for #MeToo reasons.
Ironically, one of Malenkov’s first acts upon achieving nominal supremacy after Stalin’s demise in March 1953 was to have Pravda publish a clumsily airbrushed photo of himself with Stalin and Mao from which he’d excised all his colleagues, such as Khrushchev, Beria, and Molotov. But Malenkov had overlooked that Stalin didn’t memory hole his rivals until after he’d killed them (nobody loved murdering Communists more than the arch-Communist Stalin), while Malenkov’s peers were alive.
And peeved.
The Death of Stalin is the latest satire about foulmouthed political staffers from Italo-Scot Armando Iannucci, creator of The Thick of It, In the Loop, and Veep (which is basically Elaine from Seinfeld as the first female vice president). In Iannucci’s works, craven underlings stab one another in the back over great questions of state and, more urgently, over who gets the best parking place.
Here’s the trailer (language, of course, NSFW):
The deleted scenes are funnier than the final cut:
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