Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
It's hard to write one of these little blurbs about one of your absolute favorite movies. When I make a little blog entry about a movie I've seen for the first time I don't hold myself to a high standard of insightful comments since it's more of a first impression and ideas that pop into my head as I'm writing rather than any kind of deep discourse. But when talking about a movie that I've seen several times and consider so perfect and brilliant from so many different angles I'm afraid to say anything about it because that means there's so much that I will end up NOT saying about it.
Nonetheless, I recently selected Dr. Strangelove as the movie to be seen with a small group of friends recently, and I've compelled myself to write about each film here as I have been seeing them. Not only that I want to declare to the world my love for this amazing film. I don't think I have experienced a narrative that is both so extremely hilarious and extremely chilling, both of those aspects being depicted to the core, and the comparison and contrast between them being so perfect either. The closest competitor I can think of would be the novel Catch-22.
When experiencing the performances of Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, and Peter Sellers (all three of them) you must have an affinity with the style of acting that is preferred by Kubrick. If you do, then the performances of these three actors will most likely be near the top of your favorite film performances of all time. And to have them all in the same amazing film, with the incredible script with contributions from Terry Southern, and Kubrick's (the God of cinema directors in my opinion) direction, is a cinematic delight that places this film the greatest of any film genre you could label it with. Ok, I'm getting into hyperbole here, but you can see how much I love this film.
I'm not going to say anymore because my insights have probably been diluted by reading and viewing many different commentaries, and really the film speaks for itself. If you don't get it after watching it, there's really no explanation. Either you are able to see that humor and tragedy can be so linked or not.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."
--President Merkin Muffley
Rating: 10/10