One of the unfortunate downsides of having Orange Boy as a supreme leader is how a lot of over-the-top satires now look disturbingly prescient. For more than 60 years, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterwork Dr. Strangelove has been hailed as a deadpan, deliciously deranged burlesque of Cold War paranoia. We all laughed when batshit general Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) issues a nuclear attack on the USSR, groaning about commies taking our “precious bodily fluids,” leaving a befuddled president (Peter Sellers) to deal with a war room full of horny, trigger-happy advisers (including the titular doctor/ex-Nazi, also played by Sellers). I’m sure Kubrick and his writers (who included pervy man-of-letters Terry Southern) never thought that one day we’d have a fucked-up White House with gung-ho warmongers (and a bodily fluid-obsessed secretary of Health and Human Services) advising a walking, apocalypse-inducing disaster. Dr. Strangelove proves that a comedy classic can go from funny to sad, depending on what’s going on outside the theater. Visit belcourt.org for showtimes.
June 13-14 at the Belcourt
2102 Belcourt Ave.
