Talk about a stretch! Or, better, make that a streeeeeeetch.
Vox has started a new type of movie review in which they take a film and try to correrelate it to current events. Since Vox, like the rest of the MSM, is absolutely obessed by President Trump, it is no big surprise that they will apply their TDS to the reviews starting with the current movie: "Dr. Strangelove." To read the review by Alissa Wilkinson you would think Stanley Kubrick's classic dark comedy should have been named "Dr. StrangeTrump or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Donald."
Wilkinson kicks the movie review series off by informing us that it will definitely be politically motivated. You can guess who will be the frequent target starting with this review:
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Every weekend, we pick a movie you can stream that dovetails with current events. Old, new, blockbuster, arthouse: They’re all fair game. What you can count on is a weekend watch that sheds new light on the week that was. The movie of the week for February 18 through 24 is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which is available to digitally rent on Amazon, YouTube, iTunes, Vudu, and Google Play.
And "Dr. Strangelove" has absolutely no connection to the Trump administration but that won't stop you from making an absolutely absurd comparison.
Political farce is weird: It’s both comedy and drama — or maybe tragedy. Ordinarily funny circumstances are elevated to a kind of desperate hilarity by the seriousness of the matters beneath their surface.
And this accounts for the feeling of apocalyptic hysterics and terror that permeates many current political conversations lately, especially in the month following the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The heights to which this week’s headlines have soared — what with Michael Flynn’s resignation and allegations of repeated conversations between Trump campaign aides and Russian intelligence during the campaign — have left some people feeling nostalgic for the good old days of Mustardgate and disputes about helicopters:
Yeah, because the resignation of a White House aide has me in such a state of apocalyptic terror that I am hiding under my bed waiting for the arrival of the Big Bomb. As for the purported conversations between Trump campaign aides and Russian intelligence, allow me to alter the script a bit to fit your fervid political fantasies:
PRESIDENT MERKIN MUFFLEY: Hello...Hello...President Putin...How are you?...This is Merkin...Yes, Merkin Muffley. How are you?...Merkin Muffley...Sure it is ...Just a second, will you hold on a second?
(To Kellyanne Conway with hand over phone)
PRESIDENT MUFFLEY (continuing): He doesn't believe me. He thinks I'm Julian Assange.
(Removes hand from phone):
PRESIDENT MUFFLEY: You know how we often talked about the need for you to hack our election? Well, could you do me a favor and hack the voting machines in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin? Oh, you'll do that for us? Great and in exchange we will allow you to send your spy ship just off the coast of Delaware as soon as Trump wins the election. ...Thank you, Vlad. And, yes, yes, you certainly do look buff riding horseback without a shirt. Bye, Vlad.
We now return you to Alissa's Political Fantasy Movie Review Theater:
There is nothing particularly subtle about Dr. Strangelove. It’s very funny. But it’s serious, too: The film’s final moments are filled with images of explosions and, presumably, the decimation of the US and the Soviets alike, all due to one man’s insatiable need to show the world who’s boss (and not inform other officials until it’s too late to pull humanity back from the edge).
That’s the terror beneath Dr. Strangelove, and the idea behind the movie is that if you can laugh at it, maybe you can live in the midst of it. The parallels between 1964 and 2017 aren’t clear-cut, of course. And what’s actually going on is still under investigation.
Actually the parallels between 1964 and 2017 are nonexistent. In case you haven't noticed it, Alissa, President Trump is getting criticized by the left for seeking better relations with Russia in order to reduce tensions between the world's two big nuclear superpowers and make it much less likely that a Major King Kong would ever rodeo ride a bomb down to Laputa.
Of course non-existent parallels won't stop you from the Trump comparisons in future movie reviews. I bet you already have your "All The King's Men" review half written with You-Know-Who in mind.
