End Credits #314 - September 27, 2023 (El Conde)

This week on End Credits, we get a jump on Halloween month with a vampire tale. But lest you think this is some horror movie like Last Voyage of the Demeter, it's got a very pointed historical and political point of view. We're going back to Netflix to review the new political satire El Conde, and along with that, we're going to discuss other similar satires.

This Wednesday, September 27, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss:

Satire Power. So this week we're talking about a political satire, but that doesn't mean a laugh-out-loud comedy. No, sometimes a political satire holds up a dark mirror to the audience and makes them confront a certain reality under the veil of jokes and silliness, and sometimes it borrows from the occasional silliness of our politics and takes it to the extreme. For this week's show, we will talk about some of our favourite satires, from the silly to the serious.

REVIEW: El Conde (2023). Director Pablo Lorrain has done a couple of very stylistic bio-pics with Jackie and Spencer, but those were a warm up for the creative license taken with El Conde. You may think that Augusto Pinochet died in 2006, but in this movie we see the "reel" Pinochet, a 300-year-old vampire in hiding with his greedy family, ungrateful wife, and Russian man servant Fryodor, who's also a vampire. It's a bit weird to take the (after)life of a brutal dictator and turn it into a Universal Monster Movie, but is Lorrain able to make that shot, or will it bounce off the rim?

End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.