Best Stanley Kubrick movie

considering we're surrounded with ppl who routinely rank Kid A over OK Computer, I'm betting Barry Lyndon will win this poll.

-- Stevie D, Thursday, April 5, 2007 3:06 AM (5 hours ago)

as it happens, a student told me this morning that his Euro history professor showed POG last week and the class was devastasted when it ended.

i'm pretty sure i've said this before here but kirk douglas' slow burn in paths of glory is my platonic model of how these things can be done. i would love to know the conversations he had with kubrick about it, how much they collaborated on the emotional structure of his part (if at all), and how tricky it must have been to correctly modulate given that they were probably shooting a lot of stuff out of sequence

I don't know if Douglas' autobio has much on the playing of Dax, but it has Kirk's infamous anger w/ SK

http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums/index.php?topic=8851.0;wap2

the way Kubrick keeps the audience's righteous anger at a rising boil is pretty masterful.

Stanley Kubrick and his partner, James Harris, the man who put up money to develop the script, went ahead to Germany to prepare PATHS OF GLORY. When I arrived at the Hotel Vierjahrzeiten in Munich, I was greeted by Stanley and a completely rewritten script. He had revised it on his own, with Jim Thompson. It was a catastrophe, a cheapened version of what I thought had been a beautiful script. The dialogue was atrocious. My character said things like: "You've got a big head. You're so sure the sun rises and sets up there in your noggin you don't even bother to carry matches,"And "And you've got the only brain in the world. They made yours and threw the pattern away? The rest of us have a skullful of Cornflakes." Speeches like this went on for pages, right up to the happy ending, when the general's car arrives screeching to halt the firing squad and he changes the men's death sentence to thirty days in the guardhouse. Then my character, Colonel Dax, goes off with the bad guy he has been fighting all through the movie, General Rousseau, to have a drink, as the general puts his arm around my shoulder.

I callled Kubrick and Harris to my room. "Stanley, did you write this?"

"Yes." Kubrick always had a calm way about him. I never heard him raise his voice, never saw him get excited or reveal anything. He just looked at you though those big, wide eyes.

I said, "Stanley, why would you do that?"
He very calmly said, "To make it commercial. I want to make money."

I hit the ceiling. I called him every four-letter word I could think of. "You come to me with a script written by other people. It was based on a book. I love THAT script. I told you I didn't think this would be commercial, but I want to make it. You left it in my hands to put the picture together. I got the money, based on THAT script. Not this shit!" I threw the script across the room. "We're going back to the original script, or we're not making the picture."

Stanley never blinked an eye. We shot the original script. I think the movie is a classic, one of the most important pictures--possibly the MOST important picture--Stanley Kubrick has ever made.

from Morbs' link

Interesting tidbit about a director who has written or co-written, with an exception, every film he's made:

Stanley is not a writer. He has always functioned better if he got a good writer and worked with him on a concept.

makes sense if you think of Jim Thompson, Terry Southern, Arthur Clarke, Frederic Raphael, but afaik SK did the adap of Lyndon himself.

apparently he also tossed the Nabokov script in the ashcan; it was very long and unfilmable.

Yeah, I knew that. For BL and ACO (also a solo credit) I think I read that he followed the Huston method for The Maltese Falcon: ask a secretary to re-type the novel in script format, then he'd edit it.

we should do this again. i imagine Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut would place much higher now

Yeah i was surprised how low EWS (my number 1) was. Looking forward to watching it again over the season; soooo Christmass-y.

Barry Lyndon on TV klaxon (BBC4, Sunday at 9pm)

— Hardcore for Nerds (@HC4N) April 27, 2019

Can't believe I am finally going to watch this, unless the snooker is amazing

On a schoolnight?

knock that fucking billiards on't head - it's an alltime great movie!

It's how I roll.

Xp

Yeah I know...I've missed screening after screening of this. But ya know Trump and Ding could be serving up a classic tonight.

Filmworker is on Film4 at 00:30 tonight. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6851066/

https://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03174/barryl_3174963c.jpg
so many good performances in BL but Patrick Magee's turn as The Chevalier is exceptional.

Probably one of the most well-designed and photographed of films. The one-track coldness that Kubrick deals in really works to temper down the iffy (twee) source material.

it is fucking gorgeous.

Patrick Magee's turn as The Chevalier is exceptional.

I don't think I've ever seen Patrick Magee be anything less than exceptional in anything.

have to see Barry Lyndon again, I think I will really appreciate it, but also don't think it will replace 2001 as my personal favorite film of all time

Gotta say it's the first one of his I've seen where I get what ppl are on about wrt Kubrick.

I don't think I've ever seen Patrick Magee be anything less than exceptional in anything.

*Looks at wiki* How much Hammer horror have you seen?

Magee only appeared in one Hammer film, the fairly obscure Demons of the Mind. He's in a fair few horror movies from Hammer's UK rival Amicus, tho.

Yes, he did a lot of crap but he's a magnetic presence. Not exactly what you'd call a naturalistic actor, lol.

Cool it was striking to see someone in a few amazing films and then contrast with horror (I called it hammer only bcz of seeing discussion of their output on here is the extent of my knowledge) which I assume won't have as many demands placed on your actorly skill set (again another assumption)

Don't get me wrong, I love Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and all that guff.

Clockwork Orange was showing at my local cinema and I missed out on seeing it. Been very long since I originally saw it, and I've never seen it at the cinema.

I love Barry Lyndon.

I had Patrick Magee and Henry McGee confused in my mind for a minute there. Now that was a wild ride.

Benny Hill or Sam Beckett, both bring the LOLs, for sure.

up on iplayer (along with paths of glory and 2001)

Cool it was striking to see someone in a few amazing films and then contrast with horror (I called it hammer only bcz of seeing discussion of their output on here is the extent of my knowledge) which I assume won't have as many demands placed on your actorly skill set (again another assumption)

One of the things I like about Magee is that he is giving exactly the same kind of performance in a Kubrick film as he is in a Freddie Francis film or vice/versa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OarsvZbhds&list=PL2AA217275C6F6CF0&index=7

Yeah thanks that was good.

This, from an interview with Vitali about Kubrick's soundtracks. His films through the 70s were mixed for the narrow frequency range of Academy Mono. There was an art to it. Optimizing them for digital adds lows and highs that were never in the original. It's akin to colorizing. pic.twitter.com/aemS2JmyXF

— Eric Dienstfrey (@SignalsToNoises) June 8, 2019

Surprised Barry Lyndon doesn't have its own thread.

Mrs. America used some of BL's score tonight (prominently) during an awkward first meeting between Phyllis Schlafly and Jill Ruckelshaus (Republican, but very pro-ERA). Not sure what the meaning of that was (beyond the obvious, that it's 1976).

Sorry for spamming but can’t figure out which thread this is best on: http://www.ianwatson.info/plumbing-stanley-kubrick/

This is overdue for a repoll:

Stanley Kubrick RE-poll

Great article James!

“If the Labourites ever get in,” he vowed, “I’ll leave the country.” He feared being ruined by tax-the-rich policies – though he never did quit Britain, doubtless because New Labour, finally elected in 1997, no longer bore much resemblance to a socialist party.

It's funny because Emilio's memoir goes to great pains to dispel the myth of SK as the eccentric recluse (but just as much a demanding pain in the ass) maybe the truth of it is somewhere in the middle.

Seems like there is a documentary as well, S Is for Stanley.