This month’s film forum was focused on the classic film “Dr. Strangelove” and the modern relevance it poses on today’s world events. Students, faculty members, and people from the community come once a month for a movie and food to participate in the discussion.
A regular at the film forums, Jason McDonald, a sophomore from California studying psychology, mentioned briefly what he liked about going to them, “I’m a big movie fan. I’ve always liked film. A big part of the fun for me is discussing it so I really like the idea of being able to watch movies with a group and then we talk about it afterwards.”
Regarding the film, “Dr. Strangelove,” he said, “ I loved it. It was terrifying, it was funny, and I think very relevant to our situation,” as he referred to the movies plot taking place during the Cold War in relation to America’s current relationship with North Korea.
On why they chose to show “Dr. Strangelove,” Brother David Beus, a professor of humanities and film said, “We thought with ‘Strangelove,’ it seemed like with increasing concerns about nuclear weapons and talk going on about developing nuclear weapons it would be a good time to show it.”
Another audience member, Colin Carlson, a sophomore from Laie getting a degree in web design as well as theatre, said this was the first film forum he’s been to. “It was pretty great, but it would have been better if there had been more people who attended.” Expanding on what he thought was great about the event, he said, “I think it’s really great to get a bunch of people together and watch a movie and talk about it and how important it is. That’s what I do with my family all of the time.”
Brother Beus, and his wife, Visual Arts and Communication Chair, Sister Yifen Beus, started the film forums at the beginning of this year. On the purpose of the film forums, Brother Beus said, “We have a new film minor and we thought the two would just go together. We wanted to just make more cultural events open to students.
“The goal is to expand it. If there’s enough interest, we’ll probably move to two a month. We want to model it after the BYU international cinema that they’ve done for years. It was the best thing about BYU-Provo when I was a student there. There’d be three or four international films every week. We don’t have many students, but we do have an international student body and a pretty big international community, so we wanted to reach out and show relevant movies. We do want to get a variety of films for sure. We want to show more international films.”
According to the audience members who participated in the discussion of “Dr.Strangelove,” one member said, ”I thought it was a hilarious satire on the Cold War...on the whole craziness of how we got ourselves into this competition with the Russians to see how many times we could blow the earth up-thousands of times over.”
Brother Beus, who moderated the discussion, shared, ”Something that occurred to me watching this movie is fascism is on the rise again, and it seems to just keep coming back ... People are actively celebrating the fact they’re nazis in public.”
Close to the end of the discussion, a professor in attendance gave his input on the movie. ”The part where one of the characters was trying to get the soldier to blow off the block on the coke box...well I think the director, or whoever wanted to really emphasize that the way to push the buttons of people in the military with whatever they’re trying to do there, is to tell them, ‘Well you’re going to end up not being very well employed. You’re going to get demoted.
”You’ve got this contrast in scenes where you have the giant war room full of men and it’s detached in the way they’re talking about things versus the very personal close up moments of the people who are actually making the decisions.”