Stanley Kubrick RE-poll

Lewis Gilbert secretly Kubrick after a shave in a pair of novelty sunglasses

pretty sure i voted shining in the 1st one, no idea what to do this time

I've been trying to introduce my teenager to black and white films, which he strongly dislikes, but he likes heist movies so we watched The Killing recently (I had seen it several times previously.) He liked it, but we both agreed the scene with the wrestler comes off as corny. Timothy Carey is pretty over the top too. Fun movie though.

I love Carey in The Killing - and Kubrick plainly adored 'ripe' performers (as Calz notes, see also Patrick Magee, or Leonard Rossiter in Barry Lyndon, Aubrey Morris in Clockwork Orange, even Nicholson in The Shining - my vote, of course).

AI

2001 by default

I had 2001 at the top of my all-time ballot for a while there but I didn't love it as much on my latest rewatch. I'd have it below Barry Lyndon and EWS now. I really don't like Strangelove

strangelove is really bad im constantly baffled by people who think it's either good or funny tbh but ive learned to take them as sincere

I haven't seen it in years but my suspicion is that it is very much a product of its time and has aged badly for several explicit and implicit reasons

"Also, lol at my cut and paste error. I hope Bond beats them all."

is this an obscure joke about how he was secretly helping half-blind Claude Renoir with some cinematography lighting issues on the set of that Bond movie?

I like Strangelove, but it's impact on me was when I was young and living in that era before history ended. Some of the comedy material is great, but more Sterling Hayden than Sellers imo.

Calzone - that’s almost exactly right about the Bond film! I think the connection to Kubrick was Ken Adam

Lol at calzone

but more Sterling Hayden than Sellers imo

George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn, and Slim Pickens too. (Scott's my favourite.)

9 masterpieces out of 13 - pretty damn impressive.

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yeah George C. Scott is brilliant as well, love that actor.

It's no stretch to say that Selles is the least impressive of the major performers, or, rather, that once I see him Doing His Thing there's nowhere else for him or me to go.

*Sellers

Still like George C. Scott's performance here, despite all the stuff I read about his out-of-control behavior in various Ava Gardner books.

There are few Scott performances I don't relish.

yeah I get exactly what you mean about PS there, it's as predictable as watching a washing machine doing a cycle.

I kind of get that Peter Sellers's mugging might bother some and that Strangelove has some kind of Big Lebowski-level of quotability that can also be irksome, but I still don't care.

Peter Sellers does kind of bug me in Lolita though.

Does the movie even need him playing three characters?

Love some Xenakis but not into airfix models and actors in ape costumes.

You mean Ligeti, calz.

Peter Sellers does kind of bug me in Lolita though.

He's terrible in Lolita, ruins the film.

Peter Sellers does kind of bug me in Lolita though.

― Ansible Dave’s Killer Breadboard (James Redd and the Blecchs

See, I love him in Lolita! That's one of the rare successful transpositions of a literary character to the screen.

He's completely different from any concept I had of Clare Quilty. Frank Langella was much better.

Probably not. But I like the Mandrake interplay with Ripper and Bat Guano at least. Just thank your lucky stars he knew when he was licked and they had to get Slim Pickens to play Maj. Kong.
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self-clowning here shows how many times I've watched 2001!

fair enough james redd, it's still a million times better than any Nolan movie, just mentioning this because Kubrick sometimes get's the blame!

Ground control to Major Kong.

I'm voting "The Killing" btw.

^good choice!

I've only seen it once or twice and it's stuck in my memory as a really top notch gritty noir

If you really want insufferable Peter Sellers, he sets the bar pretty high here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUZCXaStvnc

xpost
I'm guessing at least some of that grit comes from Jim Thompson (and another plus point for Kubrick - he often picked v interesting writing collaborators).

Sellers' Strangelove is a Goon Show skit, but I think he's genuinely funny in the other two roles ("It's the strings in my legs" - Terry Southern!). Tho yes, Scott is funnier.

He's insufferable in so many movies tbh.

The Killing also has a super-complicated flashback time-scheme which really works well, iirc.

Or maybe it just goes backwards, speaking of Nolan, been awhile.

Lolita is sort of interesting in its own right but as an adaptation always seems to me to be completely miscast, except for maybe Shelley Winters who is almost typecast in that type of role but still.

I’d agree that Sellers isn’t at the top of the pack in terms of laugh-getters for me in Strangelove but I still don’t mind him in it, i can forgive him for being predictable (or w/e) in it because after all its not hard to see the machinery at work with the other performances either tbh, the fact that everyones recklessly mugging is most of the fun.

The only thing that bugs me about Sellers in Strangelove is that he's clearly riffing on Bob Newhart as the president and I cant help but imagine Newhart doing it & being funnier

I can just tolerate James Mason as Humbert Humbert if I somehow think of that performance as a piece with some of his other roles such as in Bigger Than Life or North By Northwest but I’d much prefer somebody else who could play a louche Continental like, say, George Sanders pretending to speak German in Man Hunt.

Ah, interesting point about Bob Newhart.

by the time I saw Strangelove I was already familiar with Python and the Goons and despite having also seen 2001 and Clockwork Orange, I was still expecting to see something with much broader humor in the satire, so I was initially a bit disappointed. These days I find the movie more unsettling than funny which I think was the intention. Sellars is goofy as the title character, but his other two characters are very good I think.

I think if Bush/Cheney and Trump had never happened, Dr. Strangelove would seem more dated than it does

ICYMI, Jemaine Clement's imitation of David Bowie here is actually 2/3 James Mason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8f_XCH3zmM

The only thing that bugs me about Sellers in Strangelove is that he's clearly riffing on Bob Newhart as the president and I cant help but imagine Newhart doing it & being funnier

I've noticed Sellers doing this in other films, he was obviously a brilliant mimic.

I also love Mason and (esp) Wilson in Lolita.

Wilson? From Castaway?

*Winters

Peter Bull gives Strangelove's funniest performance imo

https://t.co/O6jCB0HORZ pic.twitter.com/AMMNOtuQFo

— Jacob Oller (@JacobOller) September 5, 2023

Hmm.

Right, so parsed that wrong at first, thinking it was saying Mambo No.5 was a big culture war issue. Which, my first reaction was surprise that I hadn't heard about that, but not really surprise at the idea.

Which says a lot abaot society imo

That was my thought too. And, yeah, that is a totally plausible scenario circa 2023

Need to hear King’s thoughts on “It Wasn’t Me” post haste

Also, I suspect Orange is getting harshed on this thread a bit cos ppl are embarrassed at being into it as edgy youths. I do understand the implulse but imo it stands up better than most things I was into at 16

enjoyers of mambo no.5 welcoming ilxors eric h. and bananaman begins into the only fandom that counts:

https://the-take.com/images/uploads/screenprism/_constrain-1080w/178763.jpg

Ha!

We all mambo down here

Apparently the question prior to that one in the tweet was about "Rich Men North of Richmond," about which King only said: "I haven’t heard the song yet, but I’ve seen pictures of him. He’s got a beard and he’s got a cool guitar."

there's a definitive "my life before and after seeing 2001" - so that.

orange is p good, mid-pack, prison section fairly dull, non-mcdowell performances certainly a choice (one choice, by one guy), when i was an edgy teen i thought it was an act of criminal irresponsibility (the worst kind of edgy teen)

i don't know why i said mid-pack; it's still down there actually.

I finally watched The Killing and loved how tight and ugly it was. I've already mentally paired it with Pick-Up on South Street and I'm not entirely sure why as yet.

Also, there is a guy who goes in my local who is so clearly Timothy Carey's doppelganger I'm going to have to ask him if he has seen this film.

Michael Fassbinder was a pretty good robot David, but I feel like he would have been better as David Bowman, mostly because he has a good laconic teeth-grinding expression to wear for most of the movie. Frank Poole: for some reason I'm thinking John C. Reilly.

God, the scene where Timothy Carey tells off the parking lot attendant in THE KILLING is so brutal and heartbreaking

Wait the culture war part wasn’t about “Mambo No. 5”?

Re A Clockwork Orange, the book not the movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-yk2el2b8k

rewatched The Killing and as much as I enjoyed the film it's hamstrung by one of my pet hates - the voiceover

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Suspicions more or less confirmed, held against the prior poll. Also, good job ILX

not sure what you mean about suspicions confirmed, or "held against the prior poll", but there were a lot of votes

my eyes wide shut-heads are once again the most correct

Glad Clockwork got nothing. The Killing and Paths of Glory are, I think, on the short-list of greatest American films of the '50s, but that's just the nature of click-polls that they'd sink to the bottom.

agreed, i grew up in a TCM household and rarely anything caught my attention - it wasn't until seeing films like those that i wanted to go back and revist the era.

I don’t think Paths or Glory or The Killing’s positions would necessarily be that much higher in a ballot-style poll, fwiw. The only sig change would probably be Strangelove moving up a spot or two

Agree on Paths of Glory; it seems to have fallen away over the years. But I think The Killing would finish ahead of Full Metal Jacket, and possibly even ahead of Strangelove in a weighted poll.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8_tJ6rVPyM