Harold Camping , the 89-year-old evangelist and serial doomsayer , previously announced that the Rapture would occur on May 21st. He has since said that he was mistaken and that the Rapture is actually now scheduled for October 21st. So the third annual Doomsday Film Festival and Symposium this weekend at 92YTribeca couldn t be timed any better, really.
It s an event dedicated to the apocalypse, and this year s line-up of screenings and panels includes a couple of standout titles, like the spectacularly deranged God Told Me To and the uniquely awful Lifeforce.
And yet no other film at this year s celebration of End Times matches the hopeless vision of gloom and impending doom on display in Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Stanley Kubrick s mighty adaptation of co-adapter Peter George s novel Red Alert will screen this Sunday at 2 p.m. The film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring such talking head luminaries as Time Out New York film critic Keith Uhlich and The L Magazine film editor Mark Asch.
Dr. Strangelove towers above the rest of Doomsday s slate thanks to its uniquely bleak and hilarious vision of a man-made, world-ending disaster. Kubrick and co-writers George and Terry Southern tease viewers with a hypothetical scenario in which military protocol and inane niceties are the only things left to prevent the extinction of all mankind. They perfectly skewer the political factionalism that defined the film s Cold War setting by trivializing the event that triggers Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Dr. Strangelove works as well as it does because it s a silly movie about a deadly serious situation. In it, the fate of the world is decided by politicians, uniformed officials and diplomats who obsess over precious bodily fluids, the Coca Cola Company and a possible mineshaft gap. Once seen, you can t forget the film s concluding montage of overlapping mushroom clouds. Vera Lynn s iconic ballad We ll Meet Again adds a haunting sense of irony to the scene. This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with an involuntary fit of giggling.
Events begin to spiral out of control in Dr. Strangelove after the power-mad General Turgidson (Sterling Hayden) enacts Wing Attack Plan R, a military protocol in which U.S. fighter pilots bomb the Russians on their native soil. Once Wing Attack Plan R is initiated, Turgidson is the only person who can stop the bombing since he s the only one who possesses the three-digit recall code.
But Turgidson is stark raving mad, a fact that only the cowardly Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers in one of his three roles) is privy to. Somehow, the fate of the world was entrusted to Turgidson, a man convinced that the Russians are secretly adding fluorine to everything from American water supplies to children s ice cream in order to sappen and impurify our precious bodily fluids.
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