$20 on their cheap Thursday, two rows from the front. It was perhaps half to two-thirds full. I had a mediocre dinner at a bright vats-out-the-front Indian nearby on King St. after a pleasant but unsensational coffee at Ferah's Turkish. Gould's has reopened down that way, and it is so strange to be browsing books on shelves; the wall of obsolete Australian political books is heartbreaking. All this after an afternoon at Sydney Uni where all (OK, most of) the libraries are now "learning labs".
I went along despite Jason Blake's review, and as I suspected, he got it about right. The actor playing Stalin took his cues from Christoph Waltz's effort in Inglourious Basterds. It's an attempt to draw humour from the USSR stone, cf The Death of Stalin; there's no message in the script, and a willing cast is not going to make up for that. Dave Kirkham as landed gentry reminded me of A Gentleman in Moscow. I got a bit bored, which is surprising — John Hodge was the scriptwriter for Trainspotting.