Yesterday I watched the movie The Death of Stalin.

I liked it a lot. Very funny in a very dark, mad-capped farcical manner.

I will say that it seems to parallel the track taken by the HBO series Chernobyl (which is also extremely, extremely good in a very different way) in depicting events in the Soviet Union without having its actors use East European accents. So you get Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev sounding like Carl Showalter from Fargo and yet....it works.

But I couldn't help but think of the movie after watching today's press conference from the Madman where he brought up crony after crony to insist that he was very calm and composed at yesterday's meeting with the Democrats.

It's just fascinating how people in the authoritarian mindset demand to hear sycophantic praise from their underlings and how willing those underlings are willing to give that sycophantic praise.

And in that movie, that sycophantic praise continued even beyond the leader's death.