Scoop ! Margot and Greta's 2024 Movie
Margot and Greta's 2024 movie takes on dictators, and inspires hope - and action.
30 August 2023
They don’t know it yet, but in 2024, Margot and Greta will make a movie for our times inspired by Chaplin’s Great Dictator:
Released while Europe was at war but while the US was sitting on the sidelines (31 October 1940), Chaplin’s movie ridiculed Dictators and highlighted the need to stand up to them.
Right now there seems to be a pincer movement from left (In Australia- Keating, Carr) and right (eg US - Trump, Hungary - Orban), to accommodate and appease dictators (Putin and Xi).
It’s time to wake people up. I mean the entire globe.
Who could do this ?
Maybe not.
Margot Mashes The Dictators…
….nah, not like that,…. metaphorically, in the style of Chaplin's “Great Dictator”, perhaps, as a musical.
We’d need Margot as Raisa Gorbachev.
Perhaps Stephen Fry as Mikhail Gorbachev.
Margot as Putin’s first wife Lyudmila
Margot as Putin’s daughters
Margot as Putin’s lover, Alina Kabaeva
Who as Putin ?
How about Rowan Atkinson ? or Sacha Baron Cohen ?
Volodymyr Zelensky ?
The real one would be ideal to play himself, but is a bit busy right now. Ryan Reynolds maybe ?
Who to play Mao, Deng, and Xi ?
I vote for Chow Yun Fat, just please get him and all his assets out of Hong Kong first.
He’s a great actor,
appears to have freedom / democratic sympathies, and
has no children and
plans to donate all his wealth to charity after his and his wife’s death.
This gives him freedom from CCP coercion, should he choose to exercise it.
While I prefer the idea of an Asian actor in the roles, I can’t help thinking Rowan Atkinson could be mischievously funny as Deng Xiao Ping.
In order to fill these roles we probably need to find someone with a terminal disease1 who has just enough time left on earth to make the movie.
Peng Li Yuan:
As much as I’d like to cast Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh might be a more realistic bet. This is not a movie that will play legally in China, and Yeoh seems to be doing better outside China than in China right now anyway, so she might be persuaded to give it a go.
Of course, after making this movie, she can never go to China (or any country with an extradition treaty with China), so there are some career and life implications to consider2.
Same actress has to play Xi’s mother and Jiang Qing (“Madam Mao”) and Tsai Ying Wen, as well as Peng.
Script Outline:
Opening Scene:
The movie opens with Raisa Gorbachev explaining Perestroika3 and Glasnost to Nancy Reagan over tea at the White house in the 80’s and segues to the break up of the Soviet Union.
Then shift scene to China at the time, including Gorbachev’s Beijing visit and later Peng Li Yuan singing for the troops after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. Assuming this is a musical, she could start with “March of the Volunteers” or The East is Red4 and part way through, turn it into T Rex’s “Children of the revolution” perhaps with altered words.
Next illustrate the rise of Putin, starting with with a drab scene during his time in Dresden as a KGB operative. We could show him getting angry at “99 Luftballons” and other subversive capitalistic propaganda. Have a scene where he is pointing a gun at angry crowds while East German secret service agents (Stasi) burn files5.
Core Elements:
The movie should illustrate Putin’s wars6, key moments in suppression of dissent, arrogance, greed and brutality.
At some point we need a song about the dissolution of the Soviet union being what Putin called “the worst thing that happened in the 20th century,” perhaps using the music from “Bohemian Rhapsody” with different words. This could be sung during a meeting with Xi, since this quote features heavily in Chinese propaganda including “Silent Contest.”7
Shifting back to China, we should briefly illustrate the lunacy of the Mao period, commencement of Deng’s reforms, the temporary relative openness of the 80’s that died along with the victims in the June 4 massacre, suppression of Fa Lun Gong, crushing of minority rights and elimination of dissidents like Liu Xiao Bo.
The movie should deal with the rise of Xi, threats to Taiwan and militarisation of the South China Sea. This would provide the prompt for a song related to the promise at the White House to Obama and the world, that China would not militarise it.
Maybe adapt “Faith” by George Michael.
Conclusion:
As we wind the movie up and bring it to the current day, the Xi / Putin “No Limits Partnership8” - needs a Putin - Xi duet.
Adapt and darken Pit Bull and Zac Brown’s “Can’t Stop Us Now”, even though the point of the movie is to harness global public opinion to do exactly that.
Let’s stop them now. It won’t be easy but uniting is the start.
If you want to see this movie, sign and share this petition:
No Limits Partnership - The Musical
Because the CCP’ll kill them, that’s the kind of people they are.
As above.
Social and Economic Restructuring - Perestroika, Glasnost was “transparency” opening up, a part of Perestroika.
Another revolutionary song but not the National Anthem. for more on this try:
Turns out Russian propagandists have cast this shameful episode as Putin’s heroism, and he was outside the KGB building, pacifying about 18 people, not a horde outside Stasi buildings as sometimes claimed. (Dresden showdown / Putin Myth)
Putins wars: Transnistria, Abkhazia, Chechen 1, Chechen 2, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine. Excludes covert / mercenary (Wagner and others) activity primarily in Africa.
Silent Contest is a Chinese propaganda documentary depicting “Peaceful Evolution” of dictatorship as some kind of US masterminded plot, rather than a reasonable expectation for a nations successful self initiated transition, based on past successful experience in other former dictatorships (Brazil, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan etc.) who managed to grow their economies, reduce social friction and systematically choose to become more free and democratic because it was in their personal and national interests. Silent contest appears to have been primarily for party members rather than the general public, and assists them to harmonise identical opinions among party members that they can then spread through Chinese society to manage public opinion.
Basically in early 2022 Putin and Xi appeared to have thought they could work together to intimidate the world, and somewhat succeeded. NO LIMITS PARTNERSHIP