Stanley Kubrick: Classic or Dud?

Barry Lyndon is so good.

Barry Lyndon really does grow on you. There's been a lot of talk about music the last few posts; I think the Chieftans stuff in Barry is as good as soundtrack music gets.

the first theme in The Shining is the "Dies Irae," right? You can hear it at the better funerals.

The real question: has anyone seen 2010? The one with John Lithgow and a female computer named SAL? We rented it out of morbid curiosity and I loved the "making-of" feature - the director said something like "it was hard to get the sets together, because Kubrick wanted the original sets destroyed, since he didn't want any bad B-movies to be made with them", totally deadpan, no hint of irony

the first theme in The Shining is the "Dies Irae," right? You can hear it at the better funerals.

yeah, but i think it's specifically coming from berlioz's "parody" version here. maybe i'm making that up cuz it's Evil, i'm not sure.

The real question: has anyone seen 2010?

I remember when I saw it thinking "this is way better than 2001". But I was young and might think differently now.

'Alien' without the laughs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJYAa8Qd1iM

barry lyndon: left no impact the first time i saw it but really blew me away on a second viewing last year. it's a damn near perfect film. kubrick's icy view-of-god perspective on humanity never worked better. i find the ending oddly tragic, even though barry is pretty unsympathetic throughout

otm

2010 wasn't terrible, but I'd rather Wes Anderson remake 2010 than 2001 (with Bill Murray in the Keir Dullea role)

2010 was pretty good, it only suffers in comparison to 2001 and the fact that stanley kubrick is one of the great directors and peter hyams one of the worst. basically it's saved by the cast, FX, and the story.

so actually it suffers from more than the comparison. but it's still better than you'd think!

it's better than a stick in the eye, or The Shining.

for years i had this memory of whatever actress played the russian commander making an "interesting" impression on me when i was 9 years old and recently i realized it was helen mirren.

2010 isn't bad if you accept that it's a sequel to clarke's 2001, not kubrick's.

yeah 2010 only suffered because the original was so great...I mean it's B-/C+ level besides that, but it was just weird seeing Dave and references to HAL since the way the movie was directed was so much different and more conventional

that said, it's definitely the type of movie that Kubrick destroyed the sets to avoid

for years i had this memory of whatever actress played the russian commander making an "interesting" impression on me when i was 9 years old and recently i realized it was helen mirren.

Yeah, first time I saw Mirren in anything as well, I would have been thirteen. Think I next her via Greenaway...

Yeah, Cook/Thief/etc was my very O_O intro to Mirren.

2010 isn't bad if you accept that it's a sequel to clarke's 2001, not kubrick's.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, April 6, 2011 3:42 PM (16 minutes ago)

V. good point

this is making me crazy:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/05/leon-vitali-on-the-barry-lyndon-aspect-ratio-issue.html#comments

yeah it's pretty nuts

it's been back-and-forth w/ J Wells and Kenny all week.

So has anyone seen this Kubrick exhibit in Paris? It's going to LA next year.

http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/expositions-cinema/kubrick/

nrq, if you check the Wells blog, Kubrick approved a 1.66 laserdisc of BL, so...

that's what i mean about it making me crazy. i dimly remember something about the kube being quite pragmatic about home-viewing versions. on the other hand there was some crazy story about a letterboxed tv '2001' with, um, spattered white bits on the black bars or something.

white flecks representing stars. this was in john baxter's biog iirc.

Kubrick didn't care.

Kubrick is so boy.

Kubrick, on the Barry Lyndon set:

http://mycoffeelounge.net/pixup/36809-6862.jpg

looks more like Patrick Magee

he was pretty assiduous about framing in theatres but with tv it's another thing

I know I've already said this on this very thread, but it always seems like the easiest way to resolve this is to just include multiple versions of the film on the disc. Watch it in whichever aspect ratio you prefer!

Just rewatched 2001 in a theater, coincidentally. Totally forgot about the super-draggy post-monkeys moon section, but the rest still pretty much rules.

i think the first time i watched 2001 was the starred-up letterbox version, kind of annoying when the spaceship seemed to just disappear into midscreen.

xpost I (very briefly) read that as saying everything after the monkeys is boring.

I only know Glenn Kenny from The Girlfriend Experience (I know, I know), so it's fun to combine this interview of him with his face/voice in that movie.

http://i.imgur.com/1OSuU.gif

:D

awesome!

Just saw Barry Lyndon for the first time. Now there's an odd duck.

happy birthday!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0yVoxUQ7Q8

Saw Spartacus tonight. Not for the first time, but the full "roadshow" treatment with overtures, intermission, and Super Technirama 70. Was Spartacus commonly seen by critics at the time as a stand-in for MLK? I'm looking around online and don't see anything specific--it seemed obvious to me, but maybe my timeline's off, and his public profile wasn't yet large enough to attempt such a message when the film was being shot in '59. Anyway, very good. My dad's cousin Nick Dennis stars; Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier are in it too.

Annoying/amusing anachronism, hearing Peter Ustinov refer to Woody Strode as "the Negro" in that one scene. Was that the result of circa-1959 political correctness on the screenwriters' part? or did they think that calling him "the Ethiopian" or "the dark-skinned one" or something similar be too unclear for audiences?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3zzgX6UUNQ

i didn't realize it before that clip but jack nicholson would have made an awesome wolverine.

http://en.ce.cn/entertainment/photo/200704/07/W020070407526461648806.jpg

A lengthy, rewarding Barry Lyndon analysis:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2011/10/the-conversations-barry-lyndon/

i recently watched the new blu-ray of Barry Lyndon and it's as great as ever. for me at least, it's an overwhelmingly dark movie, but oh so beautiful. i just wonder if that beauty is supposed to be vacant and as flat as a painting or something cosmically or spiritually redeeming.

slant magazine article is great, thanks for posting

i do like the reading of the final duel in that piece. it always felt almost like a joke. it's practically the first redeeming thing Barry does, and then he pays for it in the most brutal fashion.

His love for his son, as the Slant authors suggest, is redeeming, and then his mercy toward the creepy stepson is unrewarded.

oh yes i forgot about that. actually, i've always found that relationship hard to figure out. i wonder if it's Barry genuinely loving someone or more like a mini-Me kinda situation. again, i guess it straddles that line like so much else in the movie. I really hope this makes a showing in the upcoming Sight and Sound poll because for me it's clearly Kubrick's best, most moving, most beautiful movie.

i love this movie