 "1964 Kubrick film." | 2009-10-07 |
| - Reviewed By User: ASJ54MITON1NO |
| Filmed in Black and White, about a possible nuclear war scenario, plays as a black comedy, with Peter Sellers, playing several roles. The camera work and editing is slick, the pace of the film is quite fast as well. More of a social satire, than just a straight drama/comedy. |
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| "Dr. Strangelove has not diminished with the passing years" | 2009-09-15 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3E8QZY9Y3UQQY |
| I first saw Dr. Strangelove in Aberdeen, Scotland in the early 1960's Peter Sellars still shines in his three different roles. My favorite tongue-in-cheek scenes - Slim Pickens swatting at damaged B-52 bomb door circuitry with his cowboy hat and, best of all, when the Soviet ambassador and the Air Force General start fighting in the war room, the US President (Peter Sellars) says incredulously "You can't fight in here, this is the War room." |
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| "Dr Stragelove on BlueRay" | 2009-09-11 |
| - Reviewed By User: AOPM5F8RMFMFR |
| Great! absolutley the best remaster I have seen in a black and white film. The razor shapness and brightness brought about by High Def Blue Ray makes viewing this movie better then ever! |
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 "****BLU RAY SPECIFIC REVIEW**** A Great Film gets a problematic BD..." | 2009-08-13 |
| - Reviewed By matthewweflen |
The Film:
Kubrick's best film? Tough to say. 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Spartacus are pretty darned good. One of the best dark comedies of the 20th Century? Easily. Probably the single best. Consistently, some times uproariously funny, "Dr. Strangelove" is an indisputable classic. It expertly weaves the paranoia and fear of the period with phenomenal comedic performances, to both funny and chilling effect. Peter Sellers is absolutely stunning in this film, as is George C. Scott. The nuclear farce escalates and escalates throughout the 90 minute run-time, ultimately culminating in... well, I won't spoil it.
Simply put, this is one of those films everyone should see before they die.
The Blu-Ray:
This is a tough disc to review. The movie is so incredibly good that it might be blinding to the flaws in the presentation. And flaws there are.
The first one that will strike anyone who's seen this film before on home video is that this film is not presented in the 1.33:1 "academy ratio." Instead, it is cropped to a 1.66:1 ratio which is very close to today's widescreen TVs, with *very* slender black bars on the sides.
Now, I'm as big a fan of widescreen images as the next guy. But I'm an even bigger fan of seeing everything the director intended me to see, i.e. the original aspect ratio of a piece of film. If Kubrick had decreed that this was the proper aspect ratio, that might be one thing. But Kubrick is dead. And as I compare this Blu-Ray to my DVD of the same film, I notice that there is a fair amount of information being cut off at the top and bottom of the frame. Is it the most revealing, story-critical stuff? No. Indeed, on the 1.33:1 DVD, there is a consistent black haze at the top and bottom of the frame, meaning the film was cropped a bit more towards widescreen from the outset. But real information is lost in this cropping, real set dressing, real props. So it kind of smarts to know it's gone. I wish the cropping had been done at a ratio a bit closer to "academy." I could have happily lived with wider black bars on the sides of the screen in exchange for more movie.
Another potentially problematic aspect of this transfer is video noise. I am a big proponent of film grain being presented realistically in a HD image. I don't want it scrubbed away by excessive "noise reduction." But this image strains my tolerance. Static backdrops and human faces positively swim with noise, much of which looks more "digital" than true "analog" film grain. I truly wonder whether a projected film print would have this kind of noise. Again, some sort of happy medium should have been achieved.
OK, bad news out of the way, I can still say that this is a highly watchable transfer. Blacks are much more solid than the previous DVD, and detail in some scenes is good (but not great). For a 45 year-old b&w presentation, this looks pretty good. It's not at the level of the recent "Casablanca" or "Seventh Seal" Blu-Rays, but it certainly holds its own.
Audio is presented in a 5.1 channel mix, as well as the original mono. The surround mix is pleasant, splitting some of the info (such as gunshots or airplane noise) out into the rear surrounds.
Extras are mostly carried over from the most recent DVD edition, with one new documentary included, and the film trailer tragically absent. It was a GREAT trailer, very 60's modern and cool. Really sad and kind of inexplicable that it was left out. The docs are presented in 480p, which is kind of lame. The "commentary" is a combination text overlay/video interview trivia track. Unfortunately, the text overlays pretty much half of the screen, making it tough to catch important parts of the film. The videos are interesting enough, but they talk over some key parts of the film, and some of the truly outstanding performances are obscured. Overall, the track is more irritating that it's worth, and I would have preferred a new 1080p documentary to it.
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If you don't already own this, buy it. Just buy. Don't think. It's amazing, and an absolute must-own. Any of the above issues will not really matter to someone who doesn't own another edition. This one will do just fine.
If you do already have the more recent DVD edition, this is a tough recommendation. The picture quality is certainly better. There is more detail, better black levels, and fewer artifacts such as jagged edges and edge enhancement. But you're going to get a cropped image that may not square well (so to speak) with your recollection of the film you've seen before. And you'll be missing out on the classic trailer, in exchange for yet another superfluous documentary. So it's not really an upgrade. It's more of a lateral move from the DVD.
I still give the disc 4 stars. The film is 5-star material all the way. The BD presentation has some serious flaws, but it still is highly watchable and has a fair amount of value. |
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| "Dr. Strangelove - THE best Stanley Kubrick movie of all time" | 2009-08-08 |
| - Reviewed By User: AVYLIUIQ8NWJM |
| I regard Dr. Strangelove as THE best Stanley Kubrick movie of all time. Peter Sellers triple role is amazing. George C. Scott actually agreed to do this movie to make an attempt at comedy in his career. I believe he pulled it off quite well as Gen. Buck Turgison. Sterling Hayden's portrayal as Col. Jack D. Ripper is unbelievable. I think one of the best scenes is when Ripper is in his office and asks Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (one of three Peter Sellers roles) to make him a drink of grain alcohol and rain water. Then he lights up this huge cigar and inhales a massive drag of smoke and looks into the camera with the smoke curling around his face. THAT was Kubrick's money shot right there, and then of course we the audience, find out exactly how stark raving mad Ripper is when he rambles into his diatribe about the massive commie plot to sap and unpurify his precious bodily fluids. I have watched this movie hundreds of times, and each time I laugh just as hard. The lunacy of it all and to think that Kubrick was laughing in the government's face in 1963 when this film was made ! Right smack in the meat of the Cold War, and this movie comes out. I remember my Dad was in the Air Force then, and this movie was actually BANNED around the WASH DC area where we lived at the time. Now THAT is a statement on Kubrick's art and mastery as a film maker. I love this movie, and wish more film makers had the balls Kubrick did in '63 when this was made. |
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| "I've Learned to Love It" | 2009-07-29 |
| - Reviewed By User: A239PPUVV8O0U0 |
I love political satire and it doesn't get any better than this! Having Peter Sellers in the mix (in three roles no less) just makes it that much better. I knew he was funny and could pull off a foreign accent in the Panther films but to pull off British, American and German? The man's a genius! One of my favorite lines of the film is when he tells the General and Russian Ambassador:
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
The supporting cast is stellar as well; George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden are excellent as the war crazed and psychotic generals. Slim Pickens is outrageous as he rides his bomb to oblivion. The innuendo throughtout is quite amusing because you have to be quick to pick up on them, like the names of characters, phallic images and so on. The idea of "nuclear armageddon" has aged little with the passage of time, even after the Cold War has ended. The way this film holds up today is incredible (and judging from our current relations with North Korea, couldn't be summed up better than with this). |
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