Film Club Featurette: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

On Wednesday, 30 March, at 6:31pm, the Phnom Penh Film Club will share in Stanley Kubrick’s timelessly and exuberantly subversive cold-war satire from 1964, *Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb*, starring Sterling Hayden, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, Slim Pickens, and Peter Sellers.  

.

Movies that contain a single iconic image or monologue have an unfair burden in the competition for new audiences, in that many people who haven’t seen the movie have seen the image or the monologue and filled their own movie in around it—complete with their own expectations about what the rest of the film is going to be like. This is bad enough when the iconic image is so consistent with the rest of the picture that people feel they don’t “have” to see it anymore (which see, *Alien*), but the real trouble begins and people really start short-changing themselves when the durable takeaway from the film is wholly non-representative of the rest of the picture.

.

Such is the case with Slim Pickens’ unforgettable, unintentional, un-regretted, but entirely out-of-context ride aboard a recently-dropped nuclear bomb near the conclusion Dr. Strangelove—a vignette parodied so many times that, upon recently showing the original to a friend of mine, he suggested that the filmmakers were copying from someone else. And friends, neighbors, well-wishers, if you hear me say nothing else in these pages, hear me say this: The rest of this movie is nothing like that image, whatsoever.

.

Adapter-director Stanley Kubrick channels the best inspirations of the finest war-epic directors to craft this hilarious social commentary on the absurdity of the Cold War. But he doesn’t stop with war directors, either: From Fritz Lang to Truffaut, Kubrick salts appropriately obscure nods to some of the best choices for characterization and framing at his disposal, borrowing mad scientist Rotwang from Lang’s Metropolis, and the notion of the unseen, through-the-window gunfire from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player—together with countless other examples that have established this picture as a favored re-watch among students of the medium and avid amateur film-buffs alike.

.

Ultimately a character-piece (despite all appearances to the contrary), Dr. Strangelove tells the unnervingly credible story of an Air Force base at which the commander in charge, Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has slipped quietly into madness and, in consequence, ordered a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by his bombers, led by Maj. T.J. “King” Kong (Pickens). When word of the rogue attack-order makes its way to the darkest basement lair of Washington (“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here; this is the War Room!”), the job of breaking the news falls to Joint Chiefs representative Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). All is as we might expect for such a scene, but for the small problem that Turgidson is finding himself distressingly torn about whether or not the government should bother trying to recall the bombers, anyway.

.

In just one of the astounding statements that he made over his tragically shortened career, Peter Sellers grabs this movie by the throat and bashes it against every wall in the room with his coolly resolute fulfillment of not one or two but three completely separate parts—with performances so distinct in character, mood and accent that the same friend of mine refused to believe that they were all the same actor until I proved it on IMDB.

.

We meet him for the first time in the personage of Ripper’s NATO observer Lionel Mandrake, desperately trying to coax the recall codes from his nutty C.O. while army soldiers outside the building are trying with equal desperation to kill the both of them and take the base. Not long after—when Turgidson can finally hang up from the incessant phone calls of his bored and lonely secretary for long enough to sort-out his briefing—the President to whom he delivers it turns out to be Sellers again. Presently Sellers-as-President finds himself mired in an impossible telephone conversation of his own with the Soviet Premiere, who is drunk on the other end and oscillating wildly between not comprehending or believing what he’s being told, and accusing the Sellers character of having been discourteous with him.

.

When Kong and his crew are nearly shot-down by a Soviet air defense missile and their recall radio is shorted-out in the process, the grim reality of the situation prompts those in attendance in the War Room to begin marshaling their resources to prepare for the worst. It is then that we encounter Sellers in his third and greatest role: the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist of the title, a man whose fixation on the subsequent breeding behavior of those few humans who might survive the conflagration serves as a fitting red ribbon on the arabesque appetites and unfathomable defects of these people in whom all of our lives have been (and incidentally remain) continually entrusted.

.

This is, in the end, the simple genius of Kubrick’s adaptation of Peter George’s deadly serious book (itself called Red Alert). To make the film’s message digestible for a fatalistically desensitized, post-Cuban-missile-crisis audience, Kubrick knew he’d have to sneak up on them with the gravity of the situation. And to sneak up on them, he chose consciously to mold the very straight original text into an absurd comedy in which people behaved in ways so wacky and incomprehensible that the grim horror of the thing could hide from our jaded cynicism in plain view. Oh and one more thing: As comedies go, it's very difficult to conjure as successful an example of its genre--in that on top of everything else, it's actually funny.

.

I hope everyone will plan to join us on Wednesday for this rollicking yet razor-sharp cavalcade of military-bureaucratic ineptitude and existential statecraft gone horribly wrong. Goodness knows we could all use a laugh or two about those very things, right about now. 

Click Here to Read More...

Film Club Featurette: Swimming to Cambodia (1987)

On Wednesday, 23 March, the Phnom Penh Film Club proudly presents Spalding Gray’s abstruse and enduringly quirky monologue performance from 1987, *Swimming to Cambodia*—directed by Jonathan Demme, written by Spalding Gray, and starring a notebook, a card table, and Spalding Gray as Spalding Gray. 

.

Few creatives in history have proven as polarizing as the man whose set-free, cast-free, prop-free, improvised-from-a-card-table monologues in the 1980s galvanized a usually jaded New York Theater elite. An already-accomplished thespian and improv artist, in 1980 Gray had hired his first venue with borrowed money to present his discursive recitation of travel in a time of love and loss, *India and After*. For one incredible evening, Gray delivered half-remembered yarns and three-layer self-assessments inspired by single words drawn completely at random from a stack of flash cards. The project struck its lucky attendees dumbfounded, even as it flirted thrillingly with collapsing into bush-league poppycock. 

.

Gray essentially woke up the next morning the world’s first hybrid cult-superstar: the lone-wolf champion of an exotic minimalist form that, in his hands at least, could manage to work despite having nothing to work *with*. With his instant bona fides and beguilingly personable charisma, Gray found himself hired in 1984 by Columbia Pictures to travel to Bangkok for a supporting role in Roland Joffe’s seismic tour de force about the Khmer Rouge genocide, *The Killing Fields*. As many will already know, nothing about the production or the shoot would go anything like according to plan. But for Gray this only sweetened the compensation package—by gifting him the anecdotal substrate for his next spoken-word performance, *Swimming to Cambodia*. 

.

This time Gray was able to secure a film crew and a distribution deal with which to set the theatrical performance to celluloid (taking fastidious care to preserve the de-saturated tonalities of the theatrical original) and in the process he of course blew away an entirely fresh collection of eyes and hearts and minds. Most people have never heard of Spalding Gray; a majority of those who have, and an even greater share of those who love his work, know him for this one, paper-thin cinematic rumination on the issue of just how little it really takes to tell a story. 

.

With the benefit of hindsight it all probably seems sweetly archaic and naïve. Many of us, displacing today’s grim reality with today’s often turgid and “spontaneous” cultural outlets, would find Gray’s formula at least predictable and maybe downright cliché. Some of us would find him needlessly pretentious and more than a few of us would bristle at the subversive moxie of his seemingly un-original conceit. 

.

But to appreciate the man, and the art form he essentially invented, one must always endeavor to transport one’s self to a time before selfie sticks and YouTube. One must imagine sitting in a small off-Broadway theater and having no earthly idea just how inventive, how fully-formed, how cinematically enthralling, the act of riffing from a jotted notebook on a card table, could prove to be.

.

One must imagine this.

.

...Or one could simply come and join us Wednesday night at 6:30, and experience it for one’s self. And I really, *really* hope you will.

Click Here to Read More...

Film Club Featurette: Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

All of us have had the experience of being told -- usually as children -- that our confident accounting of reality is importantly wrong. We saw something other than what we thought; the movie was a television show; the friendly uncle was an adopted cousin. Some of us have been disabused in these ways by a much more formalized peer pressure, be it academic or official, and sometimes those experiences crackle in our memory with the photographic resonance of trauma. So imagine the experience of having it strongly suggested that you've imagined the existence of your own child. 

Imagine having this outrage repeatedly implied, insinuated, eventually flat-out told directly to your face, by such would-be authority structures as an august police inspector, a posh boarding school, your landlord and your flesh and blood. Imagine suffering this indignation on your first day in a new country, with little or no mobility, no knowledge of the local custom, no independence and no friends. This, then, is our table-set for Wednesday evening's showing of one of the most ingeniously straightforward suspense thrillers in all of cinema, Otto Preminger's methodical and unforced little potboiler, *Bunny Lake is Missing* (1965), starring Carol Lynley, Keir Dullea and Laurence Olivier. 

One of the first films ever to disallow seating after the screening's start, *Bunny Lake* secured the BAFTA nomination for art direction and cinematography, and snagged the Edgar Allen Poe for best picture. Its international box-office success marked the husband-and-wife screenplay adapters John- and Penelope Mortimer as the darlings of 60s-era European psychodrama, working from the 1957 novel of the same name by Merriam Modell.   

As with all Preminger creations, the movie shimmers with taut performances all the way down the cast list to be sure. But special recognition is deserved of the two leads, who nail their competing and at least partially against-type roles with an ease of spirit that gives new dimension to the notion of acting prowess. The thwarted and increasingly frantic Lynley treads water through the murk of a chilly and uncomprehending local social custom, as careful as she can be to respect her outsider's status while repeatedly processing the offense of being told to wait while someone else with prim credentials fails spectacularly to locate her missing child. Meanwhile Keir Dullea is letter-perfect as her earnest and professionally constrained brother, caught between the rock of his sister's exasperation and the hard place of his appearance-driven and politically sensitive career. Indeed it was Dullea's performance in this picture which landed him his later casting, without a reading or audition, to play Dave Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's *2001: A Space Odyssey*. 

I hope everyone will plan to join us Wednesday evening, 9 March, at 6:31pm, for this thrilling little diamond in the 1960s-cinematic rough. It won't change anyone's mind about the primacy of fine film as a hobby, but it will strum every chord of audience appreciation and escape. Sometimes less really is more, and, through the vision of a fevered artisan like Herr Preminger, sometimes less can feel like it was never even really less at all. 

 

Click Here to Read More...

Film Club Featurette: Blow-Up (1966)

In 1964, famed Hollywood studio mogul Carlo Ponti commissioned the most famous and critically important director on the planet at the time, Michelangelo Antonioni, to produce a "second trilogy," after the intercontinental smash-success of L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse. This new trilogy would be in English -- and beyond that one requirement, Antonioni would have near-total creative and editorial control. The third of these films we have shared previously, 1975's *The Passenger*, with Jack Nicholson; on Saturday we turn our attentions to the first of the trio, *Blow-Up*, the film that only Michelangelo Antonioni could possibly have created, and only at that particular moment, both in his personal timeline and in ours. It stands shoulder to shoulder with the most culturally significant pictures we have shared, head-to-head with the most entertaining, and a nose in front in terms of its value as an enduringly challenging summons to contextualize our own comfortably classist prejudices.

Part atmospheric tone poem to the urban art scene, part hard-charging suspense thriller, part withering essay on post-capitalistic intellectual decay, and part British psychedelic triptick, *Blow Up* faces-down all of these potentially muddling narrative agendas with the unfussy confidence and flick-of-the-wrist aplomb that only a genius auteur working at his highest level can compose. Nothing remotely like it had ever been tried before, and nothing since has come particularly close. In the pantheon of cinematic touchstones, few titles are as essential to the oeuvre as *Blow-Up*, and even fewer are anything like as fun to watch. 

It doesn't hurt that the two leads, David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave, somehow manage between them to span the whole of a venn diagram filled from corner to corner with titanic acting prowess, quietly desperate post-colonial elan, instinctive empathy for the director's vision, and spoiled smart-kid sexy cool. And all without ever once seeming to know that there are cameras taking any of it down for later use. Meanwhile the camera movements and compositions are intentionally counter-programmed right along with the performances, deftly undermining our in-the-moment sensibilities with an unspoken message that none of what we're watching is anything remotely like the things that we can see. The colour palette, too, attacks our expectations with warmly saturated invitations to places we surely must not want to go, and coldly stand-offish white-bricked isolation in the one setting where we might expect to feel at home. The dialogue is continually syncopated to our better expectations, the conduct of the would-be sympathetic characters rarely gives us all that much on which to rest our sympathies, and the soundtrack collides with every smooth surface it can reach. The sum-total serves as a subversion not just of our comfortable aspect on the thing, but of our rarely pondered notions of what it means to be the audience at all. 

I hope every one will plan to join us, Saturday 5 March at 5:31pm, for this enthralling and unforgettable jewel of unhurried and unforced cinematic provocation. There really is nothing quite like it, anywhere in all of movie history.

Dave O'Gorman

 

Click Here to Read More...