Saturday Matinee: Dr. Strangelove

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By Rick

Source: Rick’s Cafe Texan

The Cold War was never so outrageous and outlandish than it was in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. A brisk runtime, brilliant performances and a sharp, satirical screenplay make Dr. Strangelove simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.

Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) is part of an officer exchange program and currently stationed at the U.S. military base Burpleson. His commanding officer, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has ordered Mandrake to issue Wing Attack Plan R and seize all civilian radios. Unbeknownst to Mandrake, Wing Attack Plan R is an order to drop nuclear bombs over Soviet targets. Upon receiving the plans, Major Kong (Slim Pickens) is surprised and alarmed. He knows what the plan is. He also knows that he has received orders and will carry them through.

News of the order takes the Pentagon by surprise. No such orders were issued by them or by President Merkin Muffley (Sellers). Holding an emergency meeting, Muffley allows the Soviet ambassador Alexi de Sadesky (Peter Bull) entry into the War Room. This does not sit well with General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), convinced that the entire thing is a Commie plot to destabilize the U.S. and look at the War Room’s “big board”.

Ripper has ordered the strike because the Communists have polluted his “precious bodily fluids”. Mandrake now realizes that Ripper is totally bonkers. He also realizes that, owing to excessive planning, Ripper is the only one with the correct code to cancel the planned strikes. President Muffley orders the military to retake Burpleson. He also attempts to get in touch with Soviet Premiere Dimitri Kissov, who is currently drunk.

General Ripper meets his own end. Fortunately, Mandrake has figured out the recall code. Unfortunately, Colonel “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn) is no help in helping Mandrake reach the President. Finally, all the planes are recalled, and the nuclear attack is avoided. Or so it seems. One plane, disabled and low on fuel, is still flying. That is Major Kong’s plane. Will they reach their target? Will the secret doomsday device that the Soviets have created be triggered, ushering in total nuclear Armageddon? Will the mysterious German scientist Dr. Strangelove (Sellers) help his Fuhrer Muffley in surviving what now seems inevitable? Will we meet again some sunny day?

One of the many elements that elevate Dr. Strangelove is how everyone functions surprisingly fine despite all the lunacy going on around them. Take for example how Colonel Guano stubbornly refuses to help Mandrake get change needed to complete a call to the White House. He balks at giving him change and is extremely reluctant to use his weapon to get change from the vending machine. He eventually does but suggests that vandalizing private property will be the worst part of this ensuing crisis.

Everything about this exchange is brilliant in its banality. One can imagine people having difficulty placing a telephone call when they do not have enough cash to pay. You add the need to call the President. You throw in how this call is what could decide the fate of the world.

The blending of the bureaucratic with the urgent makes so much of Dr. Strangelove funny. Another example is when President Muffley and Premiere Kissov are attempting to locate the rouge plane. They suspect that the target is a facility near the city of Omsk. No one, however, seems to have the facility’s contact information. Muffley, repeating what Kissov is telling him, says, “Just ask for Omsk Information”. That alone, the idea of calling a general service for information at a critical moment, is funny. Add the element of the President being almost apologetic about things, and the moment becomes macabre humor.

Dr. Strangelove has more comedy thanks to the performances. Peter Sellers has a set of three bravura performances in the film. Each of his roles showcases Sellers’ exceptional abilities. Group Captain Mandrake is almost a parody of the stiff-upper lip British officer. He is aware of the mad goings-on yet remains surprisingly unflappable. He does not become hysterical when he realizes how insane Ripper is. Instead, he tries to keep calm and carry on.

Sellers continues his excellent work with President Muffley. I figure that Sellers and director Stanley Kubrick were deliberately evoking then-United Nations Ambassador and two-time Democratic Party candidate Adlai Stevenson. Sellers, speaking with a solid American accent, showed Merkin Muffley to be decent but ineffective and a bit of a bumbler. This role, intentionally or not, also bring back the idea of Stevenson as an “egghead”: bald and erudite, well-meaning but clueless.

Despite being the title character, Sellers’ third character of Dr. Strangelove is the smallest of his roles. Here, he has a bizarre not-quite-German accent and a high, nasal tone. However, that lends the character a more unhinged manner. We know that he once worked with the Nazis given that he accidentally refers to the President as “Mein Fuhrer” at least twice. Sellers’ delivery of one line reveals Strangelove’s love of death. As he discusses with Muffley the potential of living underground with a select group of people, he talks about what they would need. “Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered,” extending the last word in an almost orgasmic glee.

As Strangelove begins losing control of his body, Peter Sellers shows how his genocidal inclinations are finding a new outlet. Presumably, Strangelove participated in the Holocaust. Now, he gets a larger chance of worldwide extermination.

All three roles are so brilliantly acted by Peter Sellers. The rest of his castmates are not far behind either. Sterling Hayden is calm and certain as the mad General Jack D. Ripper. He keeps things in an even tone when speaking with crazed certainty about the dangers his “precious bodily fluids” have faced. He tells Mandrake that he discovered this “Commie plot” during, as Ripper describes it, “the physical act of love”. His calm but gruff manner reveals a man totally convinced that he is right, even if he is clearly insane. The two other roles that look exaggerated are not. I would say that Slim Pickens’ Major “King” Kong and George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson are meant to be over-the-top.

Pickens makes Major Kong into a man set to fulfill his mission. His final scene of Kong riding the bomb into certain death, whopping it up like a rider at a rodeo, is simultaneously funny and frightening. Scott, I understand, was hoodwinked into making Turgidson into a clownish figure. However, I think if this is true, Scott did not “understand the assignment”. Turgidson was meant to be an idiot, one more fixated on going back to his mistress than on his job. He is the embodiment of the witless bureaucrat focused on nonsensical minutia than on the big picture, even if it is on the big board. The delight that he expresses when describing “low casualties” of this impending disaster is, like much of Dr. Strangelove, chilling and amusing. Dr. Strangelove also has the good fortune of featuring James Earl Jones in his film debut as Lieutenant Zogg, one of the bomber pilots.

“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say that no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, depending on the breaks”. His efforts to spin this into a positive add the element of the bizarre into an already loony situation. Buck’s obliviousness to those deaths makes him just as crazy as General Jack D. Ripper.

Director Stanley Kubrick drew excellent performances out his entire cast. His filming was also well-executed. The film breaks from a cinematic feel when the troops are attempting to retake Camp Burpleson. Here, Kubrick decided to make it look like actual war footage. It is a credit to him that this break does not affect how the film works.

Kubrick co-adapted Peter George’s novel Red Alert along with George and Terry Southern. The film has a lot of wit and dark humor. One of the film’s most famous lines is, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!”, a line that underscores Dr. Strangelove‘s sharp irony. The film’s closing of the optimistic We’ll Meet Again as nuclear bombs go off all over the world also underscores the black humor mixed in with the terrible tragedy of total destruction. However, Dr. Strangelove is filled with sharp wit and bitter irony. Almost all the characters’ names add to the wit and sarcasm.

Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper. Major “King” Kong. Dr. Strangelove, as in a strange love of mass murder. Perhaps Colonel “Bat” Guano is a bit too much. However, it is not a major factor. It also helps that Keenan Wynn made a good impression in his brief role.

It is to the film’s immense credit that Dr. Strangelove runs a shockingly short 94 minutes. One does not notice how quickly the film goes in terms of runtime. Perhaps brevity really is the soul of wit.

Dr. Strangelove is amusing and terrifying in how it makes the end of the world look almost like farce. Everything in the film works to a brilliant level. Dr. Strangelove can certainly more than walk.

Watch Dr. Strangelove on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/684874/dr-strangelove-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb

Saturday Matinee: Bullet In The Head

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By Basil Baradaran

Source: The Asian Cinema Critic

Hell is both war and other people in John Woo’s epic tragedy.

“It’s war. Everybody loses.”

It’s certainly not unfair to say that people familiar with the works of legendary Hong Kong director John Woo tend to think of his films as being loaded with stylised action, generally designed around the idea that gunplay is cool, and must look as such. It’s been his shtick for decades now so it will no doubt come as something of a shock to watch his oft-overlooked 1990 epic Bullet in the Head and see a different side to fire fights and bloodshed.

Bee (Tony Leung), Fai (Jackie Cheung) and Wing (Waise Lee) are three friends and gang members in the 1960s, who often clash with a rival gang. After Fai barely escaped a mugging on Bee’s wedding day, the two of them get their revenge, accidentally killing gang leader Keung. Along with Wing, they flee Hong Kong to Vietnam (currently in the middle of its American War), hoping to work for local crime lord Leung (Chung Lin). They meet hitman Lok (Simon Yam), and while attempting to rescue singer-turned-prostitute Ching (Yolinda Yam), they end up facing countless harsh realities, navigating the terrors of a country currently ripped in half and under invasion. In a place where morals are meaningless and it’s everyone for themselves, they fight not only for their own lives, but to keep their brotherhood alive.

On the surface, Bullet in the Head might sound like your typical John Woo film, but watching it is an entirely different experience. While even the most basic action films of his have these themes of brotherhood, loyalty and betrayal, nowhere are they so strongly represented than here. It takes a bit of time to really get going, though, which is probably its biggest flaw: The film has a lot of characters and relationships to establish and it’s not always done with a tonne of finesse. By the time of the big shootout in the nightclub, you’ve forgotten why Lok is out there risking life and limb for these three bozos he barely knows. Thankfully you’re not dwelling on these moments too long: the chemistry between the four leads is strong enough to carry the film by itself, and features riveting performances from everyone, but especially from Cheung as the innocent Fai who’s forced into increasingly horrible situations, and Lee’s Wing whose inner conflict and change throughout the story is perfectly executed.

The setting is extremely rich for storytelling purposes. In a way the basic skeleton of the plot could have been applied to any time period and setting, but 1967 Vietnam is a unique setting, one that allows for a level of lawlessness and tension that would otherwise not be possible. The political strains in the country, and in the world at large, are the biggest antagonistic force in the picture, putting our heroes in increasingly terrible predicaments they have no way of escaping unscathed.

In this world, even the strongest bond between friends is put to its breaking points, and the prisoner of war scenes are some of the hardest to watch in Woo’s entire filmography. Violence is very infrequently glorified here; it’s a horrible act that might be tense and exciting, but for far different reasons than when Chow Yun Fat slides down a banister dual-wielding pistols. Those looking for that high octane Woo action will be pleased, but those who think his stuff is often too blasé about gunfights will enjoy the weight that each shootout has.

It’s a heavy movie that questions morality itself, and what is right or wrong when survival is on the line. It’s an extremely hostile period in Vietnam and Hong Kong’s history, and this is reflected in the lives of our heroes. No one leaves war without scars. Some physical, others psychological. But as Woo makes brutally clear during the movie’s final acts, some bullets leave longer, deeper impressions than others.

Verdict: Arguably Woo’s heroic bloodshed masterpiece, Bullet in the Head is a heart-wrenching story that will surely leave an impression on you once the credits roll.

Saturday Matinee: Black Zombie

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By Peyton Robinson

Source: RogerEbert.com

Depicting otherness is instrumental in crafting horror. There must be an us and them, an in-group and out-group. Monster movies used to be the genre’s bread and butter, making it easy to pick sides. From Universal’s depictions of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creation to non-humanoid terrors like King Kong and Godzilla, the zombie may seem meager in comparison. But something magnetic about it endured, appearing far more regularly than its counterparts across the decades and tapping into something latent in our fears and cultural sensibilities. Maya Annik Bedward, in her newest documentary, “Black Zombie,” traces its origins and explores the impact of Haitian spirituality on Hollywood’s primarily white fear.

Bedward’s documentary is more of an anthropological study than a highlight reel, focusing less on examples of portrayal and more on the monster’s origin. On the surface, zombification is about the loss of humanity: a body without a soul. Reduced to violent gluttony, it is the embodiment of hacking death to the very worst end. But underneath the sinew, it is rooted in the culture of Haitian vodou and the history of enslavement. Zombies are victims. To become one is to be put back into slavery for eternity, depersonalized and unable to cross over to the afterlife.

Saint-Domingue was a French colony (now modern-day Haiti), often called “the pearl of the Caribbean” because of the wealth it generated through sugar production. However, it was also called a “powder keg.” From 1659 to 1801, enslaved Africans outnumbered white colonists about 17:1, and the fear of their power in numbers resulted in extreme measures of brutality to keep them repressed. From this cruelty and overwork, the zombie was born: a person robbed of spirit and will, toiling away with unfocused, soulless eyes, living in a shell of humanity. Both a physical and spiritual imprisonment, the mythical zombie is synonymous with the robbery of autonomy.

Ironically and yet unsurprisingly, this Haitian spiritual belief was itself colonized, both proving the principle of the zombie whilst villainizing the figure and overall culture behind it. The first use of the word “zombie” in the English language was by author and occultist William Seabrook, who introduced the concept to the Western world. Yet he viewed their existence not as tragedy, but as monstrousness, and wrote a novel, White Zombie, that posited the fear of its contagion onto innocent whites. The film adaptation of the novel marked the birth of the spiral, where zombies and vodou become synonymous (though a vodou priest himself tells us the opposite: they are, in fact, the difference between possession and dispossession) and are equated with villainy.

“Black Zombie” does stop short of the zombie canon, mostly concluding with 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead.” This feels like a supreme omission of other notable areas of opportunity, like Nia DaCosta’s claim on the “28 Days Later” franchise, or even Michonne in “The Walking Dead,” who, in addition to being a Black female protagonist, is first introduced walking in the woods with literal Black zombies trailing behind her by chained collars. Concluding the film at popular culture’s most familiar starting point, rather than using extra run time (at only 90 minutes, they could afford it) to contextualize modern depictions, is simply disappointing.

The wealth of interviews ranges from researched to random, featuring figures in Haitian vodou practice and Slash (who, despite having a pretty basic zombie fandom growing up, doesn’t contribute much). The spiritual leaders are far more interesting and involved, describing their relationship with the faith, culture, and its sensationalized dissemination (not only through media, but tourism to cities like New Orleans). In one clip with priest Erol Josue, he tells the filmmakers, “I want to trust you.” This active apprehension about whether his testimony will be given credence or blanket voyeurism is an integral moment to the ethos of the film—will “Black Zombie” be a good faith dossier on the co-opted and colonized Haitian history, or another exploitative, bloodthirsty side show?

Bedward’s film is thankfully the former, weaving together a thoughtfully constructed anthropological history. While modern-day blind spots burden the film, “Black Zombie” stays true to its motivation: lifting the cloche on the erasure and exploitation that founded one of horror’s most iconic figures.

Watch Black Zombie on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16772982

Saturday Matinee: Obex

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By Zachary Lee

Source: RogerEbert.com

Projects that primarily center on characters’ isolation and the respite they experience from hiding themselves behind a screen land differently in the post-lockdown era. Director Albert Birney’s “OBEX,” though set in 1987 (denoted as such by TV adverts for “Nightmare on Elm Street”), feels seeped with such proximate anxieties. It is sympathetic to the ways we’ll migrate to digital worlds to escape the hell of embodied living, but it sweetly and gently reminds us about the beautiful inconvenience of community. Even though we can pick our flavor of digital numbing, Birney brings his DIY mentality and a host of collaborators who are in sync with his sensibilities to craft a project that shakes us out of the tempting lull and urges us to live life as an NPC. 

The first section of “Obex” focuses on the daily rhythms of its protagonist, Conor Marsh (Birney), who lives in his Maryland house with his dog, Sandy (played by Dorothy, who gives fellow horror hound Indy from “Good Boy” a run for his money). His only communication with the outside world is with his neighbor and proto-DoorDash driver, Mary (Callie Hernandez), who kindly delivers him food but is never invited into his home. We spend much of the film watching Conor and Sandy go about their lives in an unremarkable fashion; Birney plays Conor with relatable contentment. He has his dog and three TVs … what’s there not to like? 

Mileage may vary about whether or not you enjoy getting what amounts to an extended house tour, but Birney and his crew have put in the work to make Conor’s house the type of oasis that would warrant such sedentary. The production value is rendered in such hypnotic detail that I found it a joy to simply be lost in the lo-fi, analog space. It is befitting of the theme, in that Conor has created his home to be a place of such alluring safety and comfort that it becomes nauseating to consider leaving (or any form of disruption).

Pete Ohs (who most recently directed quirky nightmares of his own with last year’s “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick” and “Erupcja”) serves as the cinematographer and co-writer, and the film thrives on his and Birney’s surreal wavelength. Even though Conor is comfortable, the film’s visual language is anything but. We often see Sandy and Conor framed from an object in Conor’s room; as we peek at their lives from the perspective of a toaster or keyboard, these grainy shots, dreamy in their ambling compositions, feel as though they’re probing for dysfunction. It feels like we’re seeing Conor’s and Sandy’s lives from the perspective of a benevolent spirit, watching and curious about how someone seemingly well-adjusted can be so lonely. It feels less like a movie we stumbled upon and shouldn’t be seeing, and more like a project that’s eerily being filmed, where we’re trying (and failing) to locate the cinematographer.

The sound design is worth saluting, as Kevin Hill, the re-recording mixer, and Matthew Giordano, the post-production sound designer, work to create a hypnotic soundscape that chillingly unites disparate elements. Josh Dibb’s score, with its spectral and techno-piercing wavelengths, is unsettling in and of itself, and it’s particularly fascinating to see them work in the context of the rest of the film’s audio. The buzzing of cicadas outside Conor’s home is a common audio fixture, but it gets remixed with the hissing of the tea kettle in Conor’s kitchen, the hum of TV static, and the downpour of a running faucet, so that these sounds become indistinguishable from one another. Try as he might, Conor’s digital life is bleeding into his physical one.

That theme comes more into the fray after the film’s inciting crisis. Conor later sees an ad for the mysterious, state-of-the-art computer game, OBEX, which allows you to scan yourself into the game, where you have to fight the demon king, Ixaroth. Conor plays the game but quickly gets bored, and later finds that Sandy has been abducted by Ixaroth. He then reenters the game to liberate Sandy from her digital captor, all the while being forced to grapple with the uncomfortable truths about his family history and how that trauma informed his tendency to self-isolate. 

The world of OBEX, while free of keyboards and printers, is just as painstakingly realized as Conor’s physical world. There, he meets Mary in real life (Hernandez, riparian in her ability to oscillate between earnest and farcical, is a delight even in her small scenes) and encounters a traveling companion with a TV for a head (Frank Mosely). There’s a humor in seeing a scruffy, ’80s equivalent of a tech bro bring his white button-up and Spirit Halloween-coded sword to battle against humanoid cicada soldiers (Ixaroth’s lackeys) and Birney mines all the earned laughs from this mash-up between high fantasy and reality. 

In many ways, “OBEX” works best when it embraces its roots as a fairy tale of sorts, even as it feels rooted in its contemporary tenderness about the human condition. This framework helps recontextualize earlier dialogue scenes in which characters can state the film’s central provocation out loud (“Someday we’ll all live in computers because life outside is too sad,” Conor says at one point), because characters in fairy tales often speak so overtly. 

To some extent, it’s impossible to fully unplug from the ways technology and virtual worlds are enmeshed with our lives. Everything from the algorithms designed to keep us hooked on certain platforms to the addictive nature of blue light makes it far easier to ignore the world around us. Pointedly, Birney never lambasts Conor or others for whom this retreat is a reflex. But his film, like all the best art, is an invocation: not merely reflecting a despondent reality and world we know, but reminding us that there’s more to life than just the screen.

Watch Obex on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16210459