Burl reviews Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb! (1964)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here, living it up on Condition Red! Yes, I’m here to review one of the best movies I can think of, a fine work from Mr. Stanley Kubrick, the maker of pictures like The Shining and Full Metal Jacket! Of course I’m talking about the great Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, a movie I’ve seen many times! It’s one of my father’s two favourite motion pictures, the other one being Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings!

Do we all know the plot of this anti-war satire? Ha ha, of course we do: it’s more or less the same as Fail Safe, the movie in which Henry Fonda was inducted as President In Movies For Life! In Kubrick’s movie, it seems that General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden from such marvelous pictures as The Asphalt Jungle and The Long Goodbye, has gone hot bananas and decided to start World War III by sending impossible-to-countermand orders to his in-flight bomber pilots! Ha ha, he’s worried about precious bodily fluids and whatnot, so naturally global decimation is the only solution!

Peter Sellers, whom we know from Down Among the Z Men and Being There, plays three roles in the movie: a visiting British officer stationed at Ripper’s air base, and morally tasked with trying to talk him out of his mad plan; the American president, Merkin Muffley, desperately trying to convince his Soviet counterpart that the nuclear firestorm shortly to ravage his country was not delivered purposefully, or at least not purposefully by him; and of course the good doctor of the title, the cartoonish ex-Nazi Strangelove!  

George C. Scott from Exorcist III plays another manic general who indulges in a little fighting in the War Room, and makes the odd comment to his pal Jack Creley from Tulips; and, back at the air base near the end of the picture, Keenan Wynn from Piranha and The Dark and Herbie Rides Again appears as the blockheaded Colonel Bat Guano! In the airplane, our third major location, we find Slim Pickens from This House Possessed and White Line Fever and a young James Earl Jones from The Hunt for Red October! It’s really a pretty incredible cast, ha ha!

And there’s not much else I can say that you folks don’t already know! It’s a precision satire machine that scores strategic hits on an array of targets! It’s a beautifully shot, designed, directed and acted picture that might lean a little heavily on shticky gags here and there, but doesn’t ever stray from its noble, hilarious course! I love the picture and so should you, and I have to give a special mention to Sterling Hayden and his marvelous performance! Ha ha, I give Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb four deviated preverts!

Burl reviews The Shining! (1980)

He-e-e-e-ere’s Burl! Ha ha, it’s me, back finally with another review of a horror classic! I have a long history with the story of The Shining, since before the movie was made even! My schoolteacher in some very early grade, perhaps four, perhaps five, read the book to us in short installments over the year! I remember really enjoying it, though I’m not sure about the rest of the class!

Famously, of course, Stephen King was mighty disappointed in the movie, calling it “a big beautiful Cadillac of a movie with nothing under the hood,” or words to that effect! I can understand his chagrin, to a degree anyway, but I think he was too close to his own novel to be able to distinguish the book from the movie as clearly as might be required to fully appreciate Stanley Kubrick’s effort! Ha ha, I’ll bet he started to appreciate it a little more after Firestarter and Children of the Corn and The Lawnmower Man came out, though!

But Kubrick, famous for movies like Killer’s Kiss and Full Metal Jacket, undeniably took some liberties with King’s novel! I can only imagine how crushed the poor bearded author was when he saw Jack Torrance leap out with that axe and nail poor Dick Hallorann right in the parka! Or when he realized that the hotel’s frondescent threat would be a simple hedge maze and not ambulatory topiary animals! Or when Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, appeared well on his way to crazy right from day dot!

The maze, I think, was an improvement over the book, and the living hedge creatures would likely have been too much for the trick effects teams of the day, even the team Kubrick would have assembled! Ha ha, it was certainly too much for the makers of the TV movie remake, and they even had CGI capabilities! But I was very sad to see old Dick Hallorann buy the biscuit! I wanted Kubrick to show them all relaxing at the pool in Florida at the very end, just like in the book!

I’ve seen this picture a few times now, ha ha! What really struck me this go round was how impressive the sets were! Boy oh boy, those must have cost a pretty penny to make! I can’t blame Kubrick for wanting to shoot fifty or sixty takes of each shot, although I have heard that he wore out poor Scatman Crothers at one point, and that I can’t condone! He was getting on in years at that point, but at least he hadn’t made that rat picture Deadly Eyes yet! That was still in his future!

I’ll just say that I think this is a really fine adaptation of a book I also like, and I for one am content to have two very different takes on this story! The movie has great photography, a really brilliant use of music, great performances all around, even from young Danny, and many creepy scenes! Those two girls sure were eerie, ha ha! Come play with us, Danny! I give The Shining three and a half crash zooms into Redrum!

Burl reviews Killer's Kiss! (1955)

The door opens to reveal… Burl! Yes, I’m here to review another Stanley Kubrick movie, this time not a late-period movie like Full Metal Jacket, but one of his earliest productions, Killer’s Kiss! He made this one for a pittance way back when, after he’d only done a few other pictures, mostly short documentaries!

But he’d already had lots of experience behind the camera – the still camera that is, as a photographer for Look magazine! That’s probably why Killer’s Kiss looks so darn good! The fellow was just born with a good eye, I guess!

The tale is a pretty basic one! It seems there’s a boxer, Davy, who is cursed with an eternal glass chin! He fights Kid Rodriguez for the title and loses, falling to the canvas like a stumblebum! No matter how many times he shakes his head to clear it, he can never quite get his mojo back! Ha ha, in the world of the sweet science, he’s naught but a clumsy lab assistant!

But he lives in a dingy apartment with a view of the other dingy apartment across the courtyard, the tenant of which is a beautiful lady named Gloria who turns out to be a taxi dancer at a hall owned by a greasy mustachioed gangster-ish fellow, Rapallo! Well, Rapallo, who has feelings, is in love with his employee and visits her one night anxious to make l*ve! But Davy hears her screams, rushes to the rescue, and though Rapallo has gone, he manages to provide some comfort for the weepy Gloria! The next morning they put on the day, exchange tales of woe (Gloria’s involves a lot of ballet dancing) and begin very tentatively to fall in love!  

Of course love never runs smoothly in a noir caper like this, and when Gloria tries to quit her dime-a-dance career to join Davy on a trip to Oregon, Rapallo’s thugs are waiting! In a case of mistaken identity they put a fatal punching on Davey’s fight manager, and then they kidnap Gloria! Davy tracks her down and then there are some ferocious fights – brittle-chinned Davy is of course knocked out easily in the course of one of them – and a nifty rooftop chase! The grand finale is famous for taking place in a mannequin warehouse, and it ends with a gruesome transfixion and a pitiful dying scream!

Ha ha, this is a great little movie, if probably not the one Kubrick was most proud of! It would certainly make a terrific double bill with Blast of Silence, which is just as good and even grittier and rougher, but unlike Killer’s Kiss was not the start of a legendary directing career! Kubrick’s picture has got some flaws, sure, like the weak story, the narrated flashbacks that are obvious narrative bandages, the rushed and improbable denouement and the fairly obvious techniques used to cover the fact that there is no audience and no auditorium in the boxing scene; but on the other hand almost every shot has some visual treat in it!

On balance, and though I admit my opinion is coloured somewhat by the film’s pedigree and the fact that I just like looking at shots of New York in the 50s, I’m going to give this little noir three soon-to-be-neglected fish!  

Burl reviews Full Metal Jacket! (1987)

Hi, it’s Burl here, standing tall before the man! Today I want to talk about Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket, which is a dilly of a picture! Kubrick had made war pictures before this, most notably Paths of Glory, and when you factor in films like Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove you get a pretty good idea of how the man felt about armed, organized human conflict! He thought it was ridiculous, ha ha!

Full Metal Jacket almost plays as a comedy at times! The bandy-legged, leather-bound drill instructor, Sgt. Hartmann, is so outrageously over the top that I think if I was one of the maggots under his tutelage, I’d have reacted to his rants like Private Pyle does, with a hard-to-conceal smirk! Ha ha, I’d have certainly received a punching or two from that beef-jerky of a DI!

Allow me to digress for a moment! Ha ha, I saw a special advance preview screening of this movie back when it was released in 1987, and I was so excited to see the movie that I got there early so I could catch the regular feature that had been double-billed with this one! This was in the days before the Internet, remember, so most everyday people had no idea the movie was coming, or what it was about, or anything! And maybe that’s why the theatre people decided that Full Metal Jacket should be paired up with none other than Ernest Goes to Camp! Ha ha, the theatre was full of families who were there to see the big-screen debut of Ernest, and who liked the idea of seeing a second mystery film for free!

You could sense the confusion from the audience as the seemingly endless shots of the recruits getting their heads shaved went on and on! They’d been primed to laugh by Ernest’s antics, so there was plenty of tittering, and more once Sgt. Hartmann started his profane bellowing! Ha ha, he was always threatening to poop on people’s necks, that crazy Sgt.! But one by one, as his threats and insults became more graphic, and the atmosphere chillier and less recognizably human, the families began to drift away! All except one devoted dad and his two eight-to-ten year olds! They stayed for the whole show, and I often wonder how he and the kids described their evening at the pictures to Mom later on!

This movie was a part of the great Vietnam Surge of the late 1980s, and initially I thought Platoon was the better movie! Platoon is hardly a bad picture, but, for me anyway, it’s become apparent that it’s more just an exercise in surface impact, and has less thematic follow-through than the Kubrick picture! There’s a generic feel to all the jungle creeping and yelling of Platoon, whereas Full Metal Jacket is and always will be its own unique thing!

A few random thoughts: The whole cast is great, but Dorian Harewood is especially good in the picture! He plays Eightball, and I thought he did a standout job! Also, that Colonel who shows up, the one who asks of his soldiers only that they obey his every command as they would the word of God, is Bruce Boa, the Waldorf Salad guy from Fawlty Towers! And whatever happened to Douglas Milsome, the cinematographer? He did a great job, and you’d think he’d have been set for a career shooting prestige pictures after this one! But the next thing you know he’s photographing killer Rumplestiltskin movies and Jean-Claude Van Damme direct-to-video cheapies! Weird!

Anyway, this is a singular picture and an extremely entertaining one! It’s brutal and funny, and even though you’re always conscious that it was shot on a backlot in England and they never went anywhere near either Parris Island or Vietnam, it has a thematic and emotional effect that bonks most other Vietnam pictures over the head! I give it four reach-arounds!