Armando Ianucci's "The Death Of Stalin"

I haven't seen it yet.

Get back with an opinion once i see it i guess.

Trying to be laconic. There are subtleties, details, additional features, looks, smells, sounds that matter to the insiders. There are basic things that are enough for outsiders to recognize the work of art as true, valuable. 

Basic things are done very well in the given movie. I was pleased to see weak-willed Malenkov, very realistic Beria, smart Khrushchev pretending to be a clown. Zhukov, while not appearance-wise equivalent to real one, is depicted as a tough guy with steel balls, rude, direct and far from being a poet whatsoever. Respect to the Soviet military was fascinating for me. Zhukov was the WWII veteran, WWII hero, after all.

Then the subtleties come in... What the interested people saw first, was the trailer. For some unknown to me reason, somebody has decided that it would be great to put the Soviet National Anthem in the trailer. First of all, as the native person, I think it's a cheap, tasteless idea: quite like using words like "balalaika, Sputnik, Gorbachev", playing the National Anthem of the USSR everytime the USSR is mentioned, looks too cheap. Why not take "Mother Russia" by Iron Maiden? No doubt about it, when SOME current Russians hear this (by the way, the melody of the Russian National Anthem is note-for-note the same) they may perceive it not that well. 

Second, I listened to Jason Isaac's interview. He played Zhukov. I love the character. But what Mr. Isaacs told for interview, deeply disappointed me. He said, "I read Wikipedia page about Zhukov. The man had like 1,200 medals on his breast. I thought, what a d*ckhead would wear hundreds of medals on his breast? He believed he won the war singlehandenly", something like that. Wikipedia shows photos of Zhukov during official events, jubilees, meetings of respective sort. Certainly, he did not wear all those medals every day and night. Sorry, Zhukov was not Ozzy Osbourne, and there was no reality show Zhukovs to get to make a photo of him in trousers with bare nipples. To me as the grandson of WWII veteran who definitely respected Zhukov as the main military commander, calling the war hero a d*ckhead sounds embarrassing. Perhaps, he was narcissistic and the like - come on, people, he was a brave man and a war hero. Nazi Berlin was captured and defeated under his command. Let him have his weaknesses. He became the symbol of victory. The more medals - the greater symbolism. Is there any reason of having a British queen nowadays? The symbolism. Jason's interview once again proved to me that for foreigners the USSR is such an intergalactic otherworldly term, light years away from them. They play their characters, but they have no real feeling of what it all was about. 

Third, it is wonderful that none of the actors imitated Russian. But the pronunciation of a certain word "Zhukov" leaves a lot to be desired. It is not zoo-kov, the first letter/sound is ZH, like in leisure or vision. 

Reckoning such minutiae, I dare not judge those Russians who were somewhat insulted. Among them was the daughter of marshal Zhukov. I dare not teach her on what to like. She is older than me and she is his relative. 

Fourth, as the summary of everything told by me above, all such movies omit the fact that (at least) for those people who were not repressed in those times life was not all about the fear of being imprisoned or killed. It was also the time of enormous enthusiasm, people were optimistic. They knew they were going to build a new, just, prosperous society. There were crooners that sang vigorous happy songs, several comedies were made. Comedians appeared here and there. Lots of former peasants got a chance to go to cities to work in the new factories. Numerous enterprises being built everyday. What the movie shows is one big disaster of everything. The reality was ambiguous and did not consist exclusively of arrests and shootings. Life in the rest of the world was also not cloudless in the 1930s-1950s. 

I love the movie. But I also take into account remarks written in the previous paragraphs. Especially, in the last one.