Following the Oct. 20 killing of ousted Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi, who was cornered in a sewer ditch by rebels blocking his escape from the town of Sirt, this week’s Couch Potato is all about dictators and — in most cases — their demise.
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The Great Dictator
Charlie Chaplin’s classic 1940 satire of Europe’s fascist demagogues remains as current now as it was then — especially Chaplin’s decidedly un-satirical, humanist monologue at the film’s end.
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Last King of Scotland
A portrait of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin through the eyes of a young Briton who ended up briefly in employ, Last King of Scotland leans heavily on the performance of Forest Whitaker as the megalomaniacal Amin. Whitaker’s Amin is charismatic yet cruel, clever yet delusional, driven by a mythic sense of historic purpose, yet is ultimately a nasty, brutish thug. Driven to exile in Saudi Arabia, he met a kinder fate than Gaddafi.
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The Sun
Directed by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov — of Russian Ark fame, you know, that period film that is one interminable baroque shot — The Sun dwells on the humbling of Japanese Emperor Hirohito as his nation falls to U.S. bombs and then occupiers. The final installment in a trilogy of dictator films — Moloch, 1999, about Hitler and Taurus, 2000, about Lenin — Sokurov is kinder to the Japanese emperor, humanizing a man who once trained to be a marine biologist.
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Downfall
We’ve recommended this film before — and you’ve probably seen a scene from it, in some viral meme or the other — but Downfall remains the classic film about the fall of the Third Reich and a chilling insight into the personalities of a genocidal maniac and those who would stay with him till the bitter end.
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Lion of the Desert
This early 1980s epic boasts an impressive cast, amassed in part through the oil wealth of none other than Muammar Gaddafi. It tells the tale of Omar Mukhtar, the early 20th century Libyan rebel who resisted Mussolini’s imperial advances until his execution — or martyrdom — at the hands of the dastardly Italian general Graziani. See it for the wonderful depiction of squat, gesticulating Mussolini. And for the small, now ironic suggestion at the end of who may have assumed Mukhtar’s revolutionary, emancipatory legacy.