The level of anticommunist bullshit you could just fabricate whole-cloth before the internet was truly on another level. In this obituary we get the following claims/fuckups:

• "Stalker portrayed the Soviet Union as a mass concentration camp" ???????
• she makes up an actor in Stalker who as far as I can tell does not even exist: "Ivan Laptev"
• an assertion that the principal character and whatever character would be played by the fictional actors "represented the country's conscience" and WHO is the country's conscience you might wonder? That's right ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSN!!!! and antinuclear activist Andrei Sakharov
• it was apparently so obvious that these characters represented these two people that the film was banned in the USSR (it wasn't)
• it was based on Picnic on the Road by Stanislaw Lem and came out in 1980 (actually based on Roadside Picnic by The Strugatsky Brothers and came out in 1979).
• because the Strugatsky Brothers wrote such a reactionary script they struggled to find publishers after the release (they continued to publish until Arkady Strugatsky's death)
• similarly, the principal actor Alexander Kaidanovsky couldn't get any more acting work in the Soviet film industry (he continued to work in the Soviet film industry until the collapse of the USSR)

I'll stop here - it's genuinely impressive how densely packed the fantasy is here, an interesting document of how free to lie anticommunist expats were before the internet.

At least one of the cast members is pro- Palestinian activist (Liam Cunningham) which at least makes me hopeful it'll be decent.

I hate it when this happens multiple times a week

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature this year (which it won't win), it's about the Belgium/US coup of Lumumba in 1960.

The jazz aspect is kind of tangential and mostly just serves to give the film a distinctive propulsive rhythm (though I didn't realize Abbey Lincoln was that cool). Mostly it's about decolonial history.

It's a movie made for us, since in my experience it's principally leftists who are familiar with decolonial history. It's got all the players: , , , , , Sukarno, Nehru, Hammarskjold, Alan Dulles, to the point where I was wondering how a person not already familiar with the history might make sense of it all.

I asked the guy sitting next to me who loved the flick despite not knowing anything about decolonial history, he said there was enough there to help him put it all together.

Anyways, banger flick y'all should check it out.

Went for brunch today at a plant-based joint and ordered the shakshuka - it came with two poached eggs that when you cut into them the yolk poured out and honestly tasted just like actual egg yolk. I was shocked. My partner ordered the benny and had the same poached eggs.

The albumin was ok, kind of rubbery but not bad but holy smokes eggs have really made it to another level now.

I do understand that for some people realism with respect to flavour and appearance is not a plus, that it reminds them of animal suffering in a way that they'd rather just eat a bean. Respect if that's you I love a bean making two different types tonight. But it's great to have such a rich set of options to be vegan in a way that used to be so much more constrained.

Better living through chemistry!

https://web.archive.org/web/20240915173553/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/world/europe/tramdriver-competition-frankfurt-tram.html/

I would 1000% go to this

https://xcancel.com/TrueAnonPod/status/1522930462607364096#m

Was chatting with a bud about whether the Trump 9/11 tweet was the best tweet of all time and reread this thread for the first time in a while. So many banger lines when dude is on he is on.

I never read his responses to his reply guys before I missed those.

Watching El Golpe Blanco (1975) right now about the attempt for a parliamentary coup by reaction in Chile before the military coup. Flick opens with a shot of Langley and a voiceover from UK journalist and defector to the GDR John Peet where he just shrugs off "CIA headquarters in Langley near Washington: one of the instruments of US monopoly capital in its global strategy of counterrevolution." Like there's no bullshit, no both sidesing, just plainly calling a spade a spade so refreshing.

It's hard to find but you can get links to it here https://www.umass.edu/defa/film/9642. Also, the free streaming service Kanopy has a ton of DEFA flicks to work your way through, all you need is a library card.