IHAO on ... Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Love The Bomb - READER REQUEST

Requested by Melanie Jessel

Ah, Stanley Kubrick.  What an individual to talk about, here on a blog where I review film and other such things.  The original OCD extreme director.  The man whose vision was the most important aspect of his craft.  The man with a bunch of big ole important movies to his name, like The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Lolita, and other stuff.  And a man I have found in my film viewing to be incredibly overrated.  I do not care for this man.  But, with a request to do, especially one from my wife, I had to give it a shot, and I will ALWAYS give a film a fair chance.  So what did I think?

Meh.  Actually, a little worse than "meh." I actively found this film to be of no consequence.  There was nothing in it that I found to be noteworthy, exceptionally good or bad, or even just entertaining.  It isn't shot in any particularly interesting way.  Hell, I would even say it isn't shot in a good way.  It is just shot.  It is like looking at a scrapbook when you should be looking at a professional photographer's portfolio.  There should be skill here, but it is just ... look at a thing.  The film badly needed an editor and some other shots to fill things out.  But what is it about, beyond just the fact that it just isn't made great, or even good in my opinion.

Ok, so it's the Cold War.  A bomber gets sent a message to take down a Russian city with its nuke by a general who went stir crazy.  Then you watch as the higher ups all try to figure out a way to stop the bomber.  They don't, but it does bomb a different target, which causes the war to go for reals and everyone dies.  Oh, and the pilot of the bomber is the texan with the cowboy hat who is in all the famous pictures of the film.

The worst part about this movie is that it tries and fails to be a comedy.  Or darkly humorous.  Or even humorous at all.  There are points where they were trying to be funny, like the long drawn out conversations on the phone between the president and the Russian prime minister who is insecure ... but it just doesn't work.  It just doesn't do what it is supposed to do, which is put a humorous or even satirical spin on the cold war.

The movie just ... is.  It merely exists.  It is trying to do things, but nowhere near hard enough to actually come anywhere close to succeeding.  I don't hate this movie.  I don't like it either, mind you, but I don't hate it.  But it isn't anything I could call good.  It doesn't fail, getting the big F from me, merely because it isn't incompetent in its storytelling.  It is just uninteresting.

Grade: D