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Jacobin Radio

Michael and Us: In Soviet Russia, Game Plays You

Jacobin Radio

Jacobin

Socialism, History, News, Left, Jacobin, Alternative, Socialist, Politics

4.71.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Did Tetris bring down the USSR? That's the implication of TETRIS (2023), a highly fictionalized account of the beloved video game's journey from the Soviet Union to your phone. We examine what anti-Communist kitsch looks like in the year 2023. PLUS: Russian coups, disappearing subs, and further thoughts on the movie on everyone's lips, The Flash.


Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Happy Holiness!

0:13.9

Welcome to Michael and us. I'm Will Sloane, here it's always wow.

0:16.5

Like savage, welcome back everyone.

0:18.5

We had that one person write a review saying that we seem not to like each other,

0:22.8

which, first of all, is not true. Luke and I are very close friends.

0:25.9

see for yourself. And yet we continually start these episodes immediately after we've

0:30.9

just had an artistic argument over what the podcast should be, you know, some conflict

0:36.2

of vision. This is happening almost every episode. We went to the studio and then had to

0:41.3

come back because let's just say conditions there were not conducive to a good recording

0:45.6

session. Right. So we're already in a bad mood. It wasn't well as fault to be fair,

0:49.2

but we're already in a bad mood. And then, and then, you know, Lenin and McCartney start

0:54.5

bickering with each other. Within a year, this podcast is going to be like the second

0:58.6

side of Abbey Road. It's like, yeah, it's brilliant. But it's just kind of like, we're

1:02.4

just doing our own things, you know, it's just bits of songs that are unfinished, stapled

1:06.9

together. So, you know, you'll be ashamed of that happened to this podcast. Yeah, you'll

1:11.4

just hear like, you know, five minutes of me, uh, ranting about, I don't know, like

1:15.6

whatever. It'd be almost as if there was like the film guy and the politics guy. Yeah,

1:19.6

it'll be like, well, you'll hear me just, just going full like, I'll be like, oh, yeah,

1:24.6

Democrats of, oh, and then Amar Bergman. And then you'll be like, ah, so I was thinking about

1:29.3

Bruce Lee impersonators. Anyway, there was a coup attempt in Russia. Yeah, yeah. So I

1:35.4

didn't follow it that closely, but what I did see was the meta discourse around it, which was

1:39.8

I saw, I saw two kinds of things. One of them was, ooh, I bet all you people talking about

...

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