DVD 'Dr. Strangelove' has again become timely

The classic Cold War film has been re-released for its 40th anniversary.
WASHINGTON POST
Stanley Kubrick really wasn't trying to be funny in early drafts of "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." But the movie's deadly serious premise (based on Peter George's novel "Red Alert") was so depressing and so absurd, it was laughable: that mutually assured destruction could follow the launching of one fired missile between the United States and the Soviet Union, even if it was fired in error. And with Terry Southern (the satirist who also wrote such '60s comic novels as "Candy" and "The Magic Christian") collaborating on the screenplay, there was little hope of the movie's being anything but lethally funny. It's also, quite possibly, the greatest comedy of all time. And it has been re-released on its 40th anniversary in a new print.
There isn't space to describe the movie's many qualities, including Peter Sellers' immortal performances in three roles, as American president Merkin Muffley, group captain Lionel Mandrake and the sinister scientist Dr. Strangelove. But it bears repeated viewings and is extraordinarily timely, given the war atmosphere that permeates the world right now.
Eerie reminders
Watch the movie's hilariously terrifying war room scenes and tell me you didn't think of Vice President Dick Cheney as you watched Sellers' wheelchaired Dr. Strangelove talking about global doom, or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when George C. Scott's Gen. Buck Turgidson attempts to play down the Soviet response to an all-out strike by the American military on their homeland.
"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops, depending on the breaks."
Whoa.