The Shining

Personal preference, but wooden acting almost always makes a difference for me--horror film, art film, 2001. Which is not a knock on Dullea; I think he's fine. I do find William Sylvester a little wooden.

was he heywood floyd? my problem with heywood was he just comported himself in such a way that screamed 1960s. he'd be great on madmen.

also gary lockwood's parents were like out of some betty crocker commercial.

Yeah, Heywood Floyd. Did you mean 1950s? He seems about 10 years out of date to me. Anyway, HAL more than makes up for merely adequate performances elsewhere.

But the acting is supposed to be wooden! Like, it's almost as if the people are supposed to be robotic, and the computer is supposed to be human!

That's a reasonable argument. Sometimes even when I know the filmmaker achieved exactly what he/she set out to do, it still doesn't work for me on a personal level.

yeah the way heywood talks is very 50s, but his mannerisms are like james bond managing the beatles.

re: wooden -- the acting's not very wooden at all! they're just not overacting. but you can tell dave is majorly pissed and frightened at the end.

wooden acting is more like liam neeson absolutely not giving a shit all through phantom menace.

i like when hal says GOOD MORNING, GENTLEMEN and dave who's been in this state of totally anxious horror while committing the second and actually more gruesome act of human violence in the movie snaps his eyes up like WTF

yeah that's a great bit of misdirection

kubrick definitely knew how to get what he wanted out of actors -- he just wanted such weird things. the languid underacting in 2001 makes for a bizarre contrast with ACO, where everyone's running around making gargoyle faces.

Maybe "wooden"'s the wrong word for why I don't like Sylvester; it's that he just seems like an actor reading lines, putting little inflections here and there that are supposed to sound casual but just sound fussy to me. With Dullea, no--I don't feel like I'm watching an actor, but rather exactly the character he's supposed to be.

It's one performance. I could name many great ones in other Kubrick films: Hayden in The Killing, a few in Paths of Glory, Mason in Lolita, etc.

everyone in strangelove's amazing -- weird to think that for a while kubrick wanted sellers to play everyone, including slim pickens.

scott in strangelove is like once-in-a-century good.

had to keep being pushed further over the top, apparently. like nicholson.

What's the best female performance in a Kubrick film? It comes down to Lyon, Winters, Duvall, Kidman...and maybe Berenson. Winters for laughs, otherwise I'd split on Duvall (love her when she's terrified) and Kidman.

Actually, Marie Winsor's great in The Killing.

duvall should get some kind of special endurance award.

i feel like it's her and not jack who makes things like the bat scene insanely upsetting and scary instead of just loljack.

lyon is actually really great in lolita -- it cracks me up when she smirks at her mom with humbert and goes 'ha-cha-cha!'

The staircase scene is Duvall's greatest, I think--just about the best portrayal of complete helplessness and disorientation I can think of in a horror film.

i'm VERY confused!

Do you all think Kubrick cast Cruise and Kidman for the leads in EWS because of their total lack of (ahem) chemistry?

It's Kidman but you guys making a great case for Duval

He was a big fan of Risky Business; Kidman, I don't know, just part of the package.

The Shining is on BBC America right now, btw. With loads of commercials, but still.

Push -> shove, I'm saying Kidman. But George C. "quicker than you can say ... BLAST OFF" Scott, Peter Sellers (Lolita), and the Shelleys Winters and Duvall are also way up there.

You're not supposed to like Heywood Floyd. He's the villan.

I;m off the webs for 36 hrs and look what I come back to.

Calling the first half of Barry Lyndon "triumphant" is just weird.

the dumbest, most laffable theorist in room 237 thinks barry lyndon was boring.

His more central point is that he thinks SK was bored, which I can't imagine.

I don't remember anything about the Kubrick Archives book, sd!

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/film/all/00301/facts.the_stanley_kubrick_archives.htm

man did i identify w jack this time ( :/ ), what w all those dumb questions wendy keeps asking him about his writing. "any ideas yet?" FUCK OFF

YOU'RE DISTRACTING ME

watched the vivian kubrick doc afterwards for the first time in years. "this is how i saw boris karloff mark his lines, and i've copied it ever since. then when i read it I BECOME A FUCKING MONSTER!"

and then all the duvall/kubrick stuff is so uncomfortable. "you've got to look desperate, shelly. you're just wasting everybody's time."

Calling the first half of Barry Lyndon "triumphant" is just weird.

how so? i mean, barry has escaped the army and is a free man, and is about to seduce himself into the aristocracy - it's certainly all downhill for him from there

I take Barry Lyndon as a comedy. I mean the first line is 'There's no doubt that he would've made an eminent figure in his profession...' *gun goes off / one guy falls down '... had he not been killed in a duel.'

The narrator is just throwing out zingers. When Barry sleeps with the farm girl, the narrator refers to her as a castle that has been stormed many times before.

Or like, after intermission, the title card reads something like 'The fall and undoing of Barry Lyndon' *smash cut to wedding*

It's my favourite Kubrick film.

I read the first 50 pages of Thackeray once, the tone is more broadly comic, almost like Tom Jones.

There's never any doubt that Barry is fortune's fool in the long run.

Duvall's isn't even the best performance by a Shelley in a Kubrick film.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8yzgnSQC21r2aoj8o2_1280.jpg

Now THOSE two woulda been a great Jack & Wendy.

Sure ... if you wanted to sabotage everything from the get-go.

well, there are those of us who think that's what the film as is does.

It sabotages Stephen King's The Shining. What you're proposing would sabotage Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

ok with me

My point entirely. In the meantime, I'm going to retroactively recast Edith Massey in every screwball comedy ever made.

You know, to make them actually funny.

we gotta get our Sunshine Boys revival on the boards!

More like the menopause episode of All in the Family.

First half of Barry Lyndon is kind of triumphant for Redmond Barry, in that he's at his peak, but he got there by being a delusional nut with no self-awareness. He'd really have been most triumphant if he'd never gone to war and was just back home screwing his cousin.

How is there even a question of 'most-quoted' when you have the film that gave us "Heeere's Johnny!"

Calling the first half of Barry Lyndon "triumphant" is just weird.

The narrator does note that Barry has finally found himself "at the pitch of prosperity"...

because all the other quotes are also part of the culture in similar ways xpost

this one always seemed pretty big too:

Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.

also this line has a lot of resonance with dlh's reading above: "Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is? Do you?"

Um...

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbn7vkqJSU1rv24bmo1_400.jpg