It's a fine, straightforward, and kind biography of film director Stanley Kubrick, from his birth in New York to his death at seventy at his home in Hartfordshire.
There are plentiful clips from his movies and many still photos. There are more than a dozen talking heads -- fellow directors, old friends, colleagues, school chums. They all go rather easy on Kubrick. There were some "disagreements" between producer/star Kirk Douglas and Kubrick over "Spartacus." "Disagreements" is a carefully chosen word. Douglas is more candid in his autobiography, "Ragman's Son," in which Kubrick is described as "a talented s***."
A head observes that Kubrick was lucky to have had the assistance on "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb," of two of the funniest and most creative people of the era: Peter Sellers, who was allowed to ad lib while Kubrick kept the cameras running, and Terry Southern, a font of madcap ideas, the writer who gave us "PRE-vert." One of the writers points out that in his maturity Kubrick tended to think of his stories in several independent "unsinkable units," meaning blocks of scenes, and then only later trying to link them together in the narrative. It's most obviously the case in the astonishing "2001: A Space Odyssey," but it's also apparent in later works like "Full Metal Jacket" and sometimes the seams show.
It's not usually remarked on but Kubrick's use of music was highly original too. Before "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001," the score was designed to heighten the emotions being displayed. Classical music was used only rarely, and then as a substitute for the usual background. After "Dr. Strangelove" and especially "2001," new vistas opened for the use of music in films. It's almost impossible to imagine "2001" without the Strauss waltz, or the "stargate" sequence without the unnerving white noise of Gyorgi Ligeti. Who had ever heard of Gyorgi Ligeti? Nobody, whereas everyone knows Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, whether they know they know it or not. And of course post-1968 everyone had heard Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra." I remember its being used in TV commercials.
Like most of his mature movies, "A Clockwork Orange" was "controversial." I think the word was first applied to "Lolita." Anyway, some of the media vilified Kubrick and his "excremental vision." At several showings there were violent incidents after the film was shown. I'm not sure his vision should be called that but it's certainly true that as he got older there was less humanity in his work. Nothing -- before or after -- equals the scene at the end of "Paths of Glory" in which a frightened young girl inexpertly sings a simple German folk song and in doing so enthralls the raucous audience of doomed French soldiers, so that they stop shouting and begin to quietly hum along with her. I can't watch it without being moved. Following that, his characters become less and less involved with one another, cooler and more distant.
Maybe his next hard look at warmth and the doubt that lies behind it is in his last film, "Eyes Wide Shut." There won't be any more Kubrick movies and it's the film world's loss, just as it lost Fellini, Hitchcock, and David Lean. I mention them because flâneurs talked about their work the same way. When is the next Fellini movie? What's David Lean's next picture about? There won't be any more questions about these directors and it's too bad because much of what we see on the screen now is barely fit for human consumption.
There are plentiful clips from his movies and many still photos. There are more than a dozen talking heads -- fellow directors, old friends, colleagues, school chums. They all go rather easy on Kubrick. There were some "disagreements" between producer/star Kirk Douglas and Kubrick over "Spartacus." "Disagreements" is a carefully chosen word. Douglas is more candid in his autobiography, "Ragman's Son," in which Kubrick is described as "a talented s***."
A head observes that Kubrick was lucky to have had the assistance on "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb," of two of the funniest and most creative people of the era: Peter Sellers, who was allowed to ad lib while Kubrick kept the cameras running, and Terry Southern, a font of madcap ideas, the writer who gave us "PRE-vert." One of the writers points out that in his maturity Kubrick tended to think of his stories in several independent "unsinkable units," meaning blocks of scenes, and then only later trying to link them together in the narrative. It's most obviously the case in the astonishing "2001: A Space Odyssey," but it's also apparent in later works like "Full Metal Jacket" and sometimes the seams show.
It's not usually remarked on but Kubrick's use of music was highly original too. Before "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001," the score was designed to heighten the emotions being displayed. Classical music was used only rarely, and then as a substitute for the usual background. After "Dr. Strangelove" and especially "2001," new vistas opened for the use of music in films. It's almost impossible to imagine "2001" without the Strauss waltz, or the "stargate" sequence without the unnerving white noise of Gyorgi Ligeti. Who had ever heard of Gyorgi Ligeti? Nobody, whereas everyone knows Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, whether they know they know it or not. And of course post-1968 everyone had heard Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra." I remember its being used in TV commercials.
Like most of his mature movies, "A Clockwork Orange" was "controversial." I think the word was first applied to "Lolita." Anyway, some of the media vilified Kubrick and his "excremental vision." At several showings there were violent incidents after the film was shown. I'm not sure his vision should be called that but it's certainly true that as he got older there was less humanity in his work. Nothing -- before or after -- equals the scene at the end of "Paths of Glory" in which a frightened young girl inexpertly sings a simple German folk song and in doing so enthralls the raucous audience of doomed French soldiers, so that they stop shouting and begin to quietly hum along with her. I can't watch it without being moved. Following that, his characters become less and less involved with one another, cooler and more distant.
Maybe his next hard look at warmth and the doubt that lies behind it is in his last film, "Eyes Wide Shut." There won't be any more Kubrick movies and it's the film world's loss, just as it lost Fellini, Hitchcock, and David Lean. I mention them because flâneurs talked about their work the same way. When is the next Fellini movie? What's David Lean's next picture about? There won't be any more questions about these directors and it's too bad because much of what we see on the screen now is barely fit for human consumption.