There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!
Comedy, unlike drama, demands surprise. You can't quietly and thoughtfully enjoy a comedy.
Governments are different, and philosophies are different, but when it comes down to it, a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher. A butcher is a butcher is a butcher. We are people. And we are far more common than we ever imagine.
This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.
I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.
We are struggling with the global war on the truth. And if what we used to think of as the domain of the Soviets, the kind of celebration of lies and press as propaganda, that now we realize is not something that is unique to the Soviet state. It's within ourselves as well here in the West.
