Oh well.

Anastasia: Who do you love more, me or Comrade Stalin?

Ivan Sanshin: [without hesitation] Comrade Stalin, of course!

No … probably a farmer. Possibly uneducated and illiterate. Likely as not eaten by a bear in childhood!

While watching yet another Holocaust movie, I'm still waiting for the movie version of Solzhenitsyn's "A Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovitch".

A movie version of Slavomir Rawicz's historically dubious but dramatically compelling "The Long Walk" would also be worth watching.

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-True-Story-Freedom/dp/1558216847

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=303344

Khang Chol-Hwan's "Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag" would make a great movie — told from the eyes of a child.

http://www.amazon.com/Aquariums-Pyongyang-Years-North-Korean/dp/0465011020

Chanrithy Him's "When Broken Glass Floats:Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge" would make a great movie — once again told from the eyes of a child.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Broken-Glass-Floats-Growing/dp/0393322106

Loung Ung's "First They Killed My Father" would make a great movie — here again told from the eyes of a child.

http://www.amazon.com/First-They-Killed-Father-Remembers/dp/0060856262

Pin Yathay's "Stay Alive, My Son" would make a great movie.

http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Alive-Son-Pin-Yathay/dp/0671663941

Cool graphics.

May I recommend Night Crossing? It is a film by Disney, but it is very good, not sappy or silly and the tension is real. It is based on a true story about two families escaping from East Berlin and communism to West Berlin and freedom.

It is a narrative that school age children, from K-college, will not hear often if at all.

In the graphic novel, Norsefire comes to power by popular acclaim. In the parallel universe created by the author, Thatcher's Tories loose to a Labour government that preserves the United Kingdom through nuclear disarmament from the fallout of a Cold War gone hot . In the resulting instability, Norsefire comes to power by popular acclaim. (Note well, that this prediction got the end of the Cold War backwards and upside-down).

In the movie, Norsefire comes to power through a corporate conspiracy (read Big Phara). This critically changes the nature of the regime and the lessons we are to learn from the film (reject media manipulation). It also misrepresents the historical trajectory of rise of fascism in Weimar Germany in a way that the graphic novel does not (Hitler was democratically elected.)

Since the movie itself is a media manipulation of a media manipulation, taking the film seriously would mean rejecting the film.

Make sure you make time and see it. Its flaws are not fatal, and the film is better than most of what is available.

By making The Artist virtuous and The Director vile, Florian leaves socialism open to the Revolution Betrayed defense (i.e., "Socialism is not to blame, Stalin is" for various values of Mao, Pot, Mengistu, Honecker, Ceausescu, Castro, Kim, Kim, and so on and so forth). "If we just had the right kind of people!"

The film is strong, but it could be stronger.

One of my favorite lines from the film is when, after the fall of the Wall, The Minister says, "Only now do we realize what a great thing we had." You could almost hear the open-handed slap in the face of that nauseating neo-Honeckerist nostalgia film "Goodbye Lenin" (Which is actually an effective anti-socialist film. Even with a positive spin seen through rose-tinted glasses, socialism still smells like crap.)

Suggested libertarian film festival: The Lives of Others, V for Vendetta, Serenity, The Lost City.

These are all pretty recent; is it a trend? Are there older libertarian-themed films that are of the same quality?

Any other suggestions? Maybe Brazil?

I have tried so hard to tell people on another link I visit regularly that to have evil it is not necessary for to have evil people, plotting evil thoughts, and commiting evil deeds. All it takes is arbitrary power and stupidity.

Where do we find arbitrary power and stupidity in abundance? Governments, any government.

I haven't seen the movie yet, so my question is purely a question and not a desire to begin a protracted peeing contest.

Florian put a lot of historical research into his screenplay, and it shows. People ~really were~ told to put their hands under their thighs when they were interrogated so that the Stasi could keep a scent sample on file for the dogs. (The Stasi had a habit of breaking into people's houses and stealing underwear for the same reason). There ~really were~ over 100,000 Stasi officers assisted by 200,000 paid informants. (On a population adjusted basis, that would amount to almost 6 million people in a comparable American population. Nazi Germany, with over four times the population, got by with less than half the number of Stasi officers.) East Germany was among the best the Eastern Bloc had to offer, and it was pretty crappy.

The movie is very, very good — possibly even Great — and better than 95% of the other movies out there.

All true, but that also means that the risk of failure is much greater, especially when you consider the sheer number of people involved in making a film. If anyone of them really drops the ball it can turn a great movie into a steaming pile of crap. A tricky business to be sure.

But if we don't watch everyone, who knows what might happen?