Stanley Kubrick: Classic or Dud?

it is pervy not at all

I chalk it up to Kubrick's confidence. There's an air to every film he did, something I can feel come through the screen. I think I've said elsewhere that my definition of a good film is one where the director accomplished what he set out to do. Kubrick's films always meet that criteria for me - he knew what he wanted, and he shot it.

I haven't seen Lolita or Barry Lyndon, but of the rest, the closest to a dud is A Clockwork Orange, even that's occasionally great.

detractors expect too much of it.

(it was about him getting access to Kubrick's archives. The man was so anal, he even designed his own archival boxes. V. interesting)

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I haven't seen some of the most important films: Lolita, 2001, Strangelove, but the ones I've seen follow a very odd pattern, in that, in my opinion, the first halves seem to be brilliant, particularly the openings, and the second halves poor. The films strike me as getting more and more conventional as the story unravels, for some reason.

The first half of "A Clockwork Orange" is full of extraordinary imagery, for example, but the plot dies a sudden death the minute the McDowell is arrested and his menace cancelled. The opening of Full Metal Jacket - the drill sergeant and the recruits, is mesmerising, but the later stuff, so obviously filmed among old British warehouses, is dismal, particularly the fight against the female sniper, her femaleness seeming to me irrelevent: a sniper's a sniper. The Shining sets itself up grippingly, but goes too over the top, for my money, later on. Barry Lyndon is beautiful at first and then gets remarkably slow and dull, though I agree that Rossiter is extraordinary as the dancing piper. Eyes Wide Shut - well the relationship stuff interested me at first, but then the whole culty thing became risible - and, once again, slow.

But Kubrik's INTERESTING, no two ways about it.

If you haven't seen Dr. Strangelove, I'd think you like it. It's hilarious from the beginning to the end. Definitely Kubrick's best flick. Lolita is in my opinion underrated, perhaps because it's kinda different from the book (though the script was written by Nabokov) - it's more of a black comedy, and the power relations between Lolita and Humbert are reversed.

Eyes Wide Shut on the other hand did just seem a little slow for me. The pacing made it tense, but it also made it hard to be passionate about.

I like the second half of FMJ better than the first. The first is easier to enjoy - lots of quotable lines and laughs, and the setup is so familiar in an anti-military way. But the second is darker and has such a surreal aura (the movie crew, the general, etc.), and the way it doesn't just play out as an anti-war movie is great.

About the sets - sometimes I hear that it looks just like Vietnam, some people claim it looks like a UK location. Having never been to either, I couldn't say. (They could be one and the same - what were Vietnamese colonial-era cities like?)

that was the reading i learned in school, anyway. i buy it. it's a fucked up sense of humor and a boring movie if you're not focused on "getting it", though.

Well, Dr. Strangelove is a comedy, and "should I be laughing at this? what's wrong with me!?!" is exactly what it's about. I guess Kubrick should've done more comedies, perhaps his nihilism would've suited that genre better.

sigh

arendt was fascinated by satellites - she thought it was funny that we'd send up this thing INTO SPACE and we were all so excited that it was IN SPACE and we'd make such a big deal about SPACE, yet the whole time the thing was just staring back at the earth. y'know how 99% of space shuttle photographs show the earth, either in the background or as the subject.

so for her the space programs and science fiction are funny because they're not about outer space, they just reinforce or explain our relations to the earth and ourselves. heidegger wrote extensively in the same vein, though about technology and nature.

the heidegger/arendt part = we send man INTO SPACE to confront a GIANT ALIEN MONOLITH and he basically he ends up confronting texas instruments. in the meantime, there's not really anything to do but stare at photos from earth, eat packaged earth food, confront yourself in the form of endless mental and physical exercise. sort of deflates romantic sci-fi.

again, not entirely vacuous but not so great as to decisively redeem the hour-and-a-half space sequence.

Um, I have to disagree. Kubrick took his films rather seriously, the black humour is just one aspect of them. I'd say only Lolita, Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange were "driven" by Kubrick's humour, though some of the others have comedic moments as well, obviously. Still, it's hard to imagine someone calling Paths of Glory, or Barry Lyndon, or even Eyes Wide Shut "comedies".

(Incidentally, i'm aware it's based on Thackeray's 19th c. novel)

this seems to me to be a pretty subjective reaction, because i dont find any part of the film "still and lifeless"--sometimes the characters themselves are, but the film itself never is. the docking sequence is beautiful, and the strauss is perfect because the machines are dancing.

eg the day she, sistrah becky, me and becky's boyf aplyed DESERT ISLAND DVDS and i sighed audibly when 2001 was mentioned and wz quite korrektly taken to task

psi have now seen clockwork o. (as in "o dear")

Accusations of "no sense of humor" several years xpost: fucked. "A clod with dialogue"? Strangelove is one of the most quoted films ever, and when his characters say banal things, it's quite purposeful.
(except in Spartacus, in which he had no script input)

Barry Lyndon is a smarter, subtler film about desire and violence than A Clockwork Orange.

by sense of humour i meant the actually funny kind

I used to love Kubrick in my revering great artists phase but right now the only films i can imagine sitting down to watch again are Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut (which really is a comedy i think in the classical sense, much like Fight Club, another film often taken too seriously.)

it doesn't QUITE rescue ews for me but if a film can cause a book that good, well done film

there were a lot of really enigmatic moments though, that were hard to incorporate into the story and which made me wonder what else was going on

Two friends and I covered Kubrick's whole career in these monthly Zooms we've been doing. This one's split into eight parts, the kind of thing you can pick up wherever. Generally speaking, I'm a fan, Steven (for the most part) isn't, Scott's somewhere in between, I think we got a little tired the farther we got into it. I followed up by reading Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece--obsessively detailed, made me want to watch it again (I'm an arm's-length admirer), but wow, a lot of the descriptions of what they were up to were so abstract for me. I just didn't understand a lot of the technical stuff.

Fear and Desire - Spartacus
Lolita - Strangelove
2001
Clockwork Orange
Barry Lyndon
The Shining
Full Metal Jacket
Eyes Wide Shut

nice! looking forward to watching at least some of these.

Thanks, J.D. For all my befuddlement, recommend that book, too. I'm at least clearer on some of the film's most basic plot points.

inspired by Blank Check podcast’s Kubrick series, watching Spartacus for the first time

not to state the obvious but goddamn what a great movie. I love this epic stuff.

Fascinated to read this about STRANGELOVE:
https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/my-coffee-with-stanley-kubrick.html

So the people behind the Filmworker documentary have completed another Kubrick-related documentary called SK-13, and some interesting information about Eyes Wide Shut being edited even after his death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZE_IfSz1qI

I thought that it was known from the beginning that the film wasn’t entirely finished when he died