Stanley Kubrick: Classic or Dud?

I'm not convinced by "Clockwork Orange". Faux meaningful book, faux meaningful film. It's so long since I've seen "Doctor Strangelove" that I can't really say anything about it.

"Barry Lyndon" is the real forgotten Kubrick film... anyone got any thoughts on it?

As for Eyes Wide Shut, it's like a David Lynch film in suggesting that behind the cosy everyday world there is a world of surrealism and menace. I'm obviously talking of Lynch films like "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" and "Lost Highway", not "The Straight Story".

My favorite moment is the duel scene...completely breaks conventions with what you are expecting. The rest of the movie I thought kind of slow-running, but perhaps one of his most beautifully filmed.

Only two films were ever credited to Borehamwood Studios. The Young Ones and Summer Holiday.

http://www.qgiftsonline.com/store/media/SPARTACUS%202001-2002.JPG

sorry...barry lyndon is my favourite I guess...is spartacus the one with the celluloid closet scene where olivier offers tony curtis snails or oysters?

with most kubricks they're great but I don't really feel anything watching them, with the exceptions of barry lyndon which moved me almost to tears...the doom atmosphere of the second part of lyndon's downfall, his son dying (music!!!)

did let Peter Sellers do his thang though. Twice.

Stanley Kubrick = the epitome of love/hate???

Totally classic for Paths Of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, The Killing, and Barry Lyndon alone. Totally dud for Eyes Wide Shut, Clockwork Orange, and Lolita.

2001 was the very first movie I saw in a movie theater - as I recall I was five or six years old. Bash it if you must, but I still love it's timeless retrofuture look.

I don't know what people mean by "spontanaeous", but if you any kind of liking for rollicking romping historical drama then you will wuv Barry Lyndon. It is a top film.

i have still never watched clockwork orange, though i now have it on video

I like the story that Terry Southern told him when Eyes Wide Shut was in the gestative state that it should be a comedy. I think he meant an intentional one.

There's nothing wrong with it, I just don't think he expresses it very well.

I mean, yes, I can see where certain aspects of Kubrick have influenced Lynch but by and large I think Lynch is a better storyteller, whereas Kubrick throws too much emphasis on the stylistic interest of his films and doesn't pay as much attention to getting the story told in the most effective manner. I only really like Strangelove, I suppose, but it's not a film I'd actively go out of my way to watch anymore.

Like I said, he's someone that people either love or hate. No one is kind of "eh" about Kubrick.

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)

*

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.

it’s hard to remove one's self from the original experience

Wait.. Dan... Danny?

:)

went with my older sister to see it, she let me choose the film, it scared her so much that she never quite forgave me for the decision

So the guy who directed "Dr. Strangelove" also directed a movie called "Barry Lyndon" and not once mentioned the Daisy ad.

Not explicitly, no, but if you take into account the title and the fact that he also directed 2001 (“Daisy, Daisy”)... it’s up to you to connect the dots

holy crap, it's all been right there on the screen the entire time.

What’s the daisy ad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7SW5aOX2_I

I don't know which is scarier, nuclear war or white people using sour cream as a dip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDypP1KfOU

Is anyone else confused about this thread revive?

At my first Zoom synchronous lecture about an hour ago, several of my film students named Kubrick films and admitted to loving them -- dude, always dudes.

these dude are in the 18-24 range.

Is anyone else confused about this thread revive?

― Alba, Monday, 31 August 2020 23:15 (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was, but looked it up earlier, and it turns out "the Daisy ad" went out (one) in Sept 1964, 9 months after Dr Strangelove went on general release, so if anything the direction of influence is that way round.
Im guessing the revive post was a gag though, so

D'oh I've just realised the Barry Lyndon/LBJ part of the gag.

To spell it out, Lyndon's opponent in '64 was a guy named Barry.

ZOMG

Ha holy shit

yeah, i got that part (Goldwater/Lyndon). I thought the main gag was that Dr Strangelove might have been influenced by an ad that came after it was made

the first part of Full Metal Jacket seemed a lot funnier than I remember it being when I first watched it

saw Eyes Wide Shut again after many years, I was reminded that behind the erotic thriller it is about a relationship in trouble

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

For the record, I agree, #FullMetalJacket is a great film and R. Lee Ermey was amazing, but he might have punched the orange man in the nose for disrespecting Americans who gave their lives so that the nation might live. pic.twitter.com/7H7S2aqt4B

— Matthew Modine (@MatthewModine) October 4, 2024

Was intrigued by "supposed to get the Academy Award"; suprised that Ermey wasn't even nominated. Sean Connery won over Albert Brooks, Morgan Freeman, Vincent Gardenia, and Denzel Washington. I would have voted for Brooks; Pauline Kael would have voted for Freeman. But I would have voted for Ermey over any of them. Trump might have an extremely rare insight for him that Ermey didn't win because he "wasn't part of the establishment, to put it mildly." (Or maybe he just didn't have Academy credentials of something.)

(FMJ got one nomination only, adapted screenplay.)

I recently watched two early Kubricks with my dad, who's more of a film buff than I am and had seen them before: Killer's Kiss and The Killing, made in back to back years in the 1950s, Killer's Kiss was self-financed by Kubrick's family and friends (part of the charm is seeing how he creatively worked around the budgetary constraints) but later bought by United, who also agreed to extend the financing for The Killing. Apart from The Shining, I don't really consider myself a huge Kubrick fan, so that was one reason my dad wanted me to see these. He was right. They are more in my wheelhouse, so to speak, as someone who's a fan of a tightly constructed film noir, without the longeurs that beset many of Kubrick's better known (and much longer) later films. I guess I should probably get around to seeing more of his pre-Strangelove work.

There are days where The Killing might be my fave Kubrick.

what the fuck is trump talking about

I love The Killing and I love this piece of trivia

A while ago, I saw that Rodney Dangerfield was an extra in Kubrick's The Killing. I was told it's a hoax. But now @Criterion's The Killing page & IMDB say it's real. I could not be happier that Rodney has officially joined the cast. https://t.co/2qIez2AtsP https://t.co/kgIiFUnB0O pic.twitter.com/k3UNYqLM70

— the shadow over innschwartz 👻 (@benschwartz_) April 10, 2020

otm

Continuing my series of early Kubrick, I watched Paths of Glory last night. It’s not as fast-paced and fun as The Killing, but I guess that wouldn’t really be the right tone for a war movie. It once again features Kubrick’s talent for incredibly sharp and dramatic close-ups of his actors’ faces. This kind of shot isn’t really possible with color film, so it’s something you only get with early Kubrick. Jim Thompson’s contributions to the script are also something you only get in these two films.

I highly recommend SAVAGE ART: A BIOGRAPHY OF JIM THOMPSON, by Robert Polito which, in addition to everything else, has quite a bit about their collaboration.