That'd be fine if I thought Kubrick's one dimensional characterisation was intentional, but I just think it's a weakness with him. He just didn't seem very interested in people, which definitely wasn't the case with Bresson. Kubrick was fine when he was dealing with quite cartoon-like 'types' (say with Dr Strangelove or A Clockwork Orange) but he was lost when his characters needed a bit more subtlety. The scenes in Eyes Wide Shut between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are an obvious example.

The Last American Virgin.

This movie would have been so much better if they hadnt used that red tint.. also, sighs.. sam jackson.. whats in your wallet?

oh that's definitely on my list. trailer looks awesome. loved antichrist and nymphomaniac, this one is supposed to be in the middle of his so-called "depression trilogy".


is it? see i am not so sure of this. lancelot du lac? that movie is not about people. and au hazard balthazar is about a donkey! (and that girl, yes, i have forgotten her whereas the donkey is fresh in my mind). where bresson is more "personal" is where i like him less, eg. the country priest or mouchette.

on the kubrick end, i keep hearing it repeated about his characters, but what about a clockwork orange or full metal jacket or the killing or paths of glory? (i haven't seen lolita so i can't give an opinion on that).

anyway what i like about the kidman/cruise interaction in EWS is precisely cruise's passivity-- she EATS HIM ALIVE. clearly too much woman for the little man. that works very well for me in that movie--goes with his character who is this "nice," shallow (as in lacking depth), naive man. the thing is when kubrick chooses to have a passive/flat male character and casts accordingly people say he doesn't care about people, but i think his choice is totally valid, as with barry lyndon. same thing for bowman in 2001.

maybe i too have a bit of asperger's.

my least favorite kubrick film is probably the shining because i'm not a huge fan of the horror genre-- though it has great & memorable moments/shots/lines/performances.

kubrick wasn't a shooter of melodrama/theatre though, and i like him the best for it.

How the fuck can you NOT like The Shining? What, did you only see the shitty Ryan Reynolds remake??

please read again, i never said i didn't like it. "least favorite" of one of my most revered directors does not equal dislike. the one i hated was spartacus but i don't consider that kubrick's anymore (and neither did he for that matter)--some unbearably hammy melodrama in it.


i'm too lazy to google that

Marnie.

Not my favorite Hitch but pretty good.

Sure but Au Hasard is a story about the human condition (from a religious perspective) told using a donkey. It isn't rwally 'about a donkey', though. (IMO).

I just think with Kubrick, his emphasis on technical matters effectively treated humans as props. He treated them that way not because he saw people as props (necessarily) but because his directing style couldn't accommodate them any other way.


ACO and FMJ don't have characters so much as cyphers. The most memorable 'character' in FMJ is a cartoon drill sergeant required to do no more than shout for an hour. That's less the case earlier in his career. I'll grant you The Killing and PoG have some very good characters ... but it could be argued that Kubrick hadn't quite become 'Kubrick' at that point.


Then why choose such a dynamic actor as Tom Cruise? Love him or loathe him he's never gonna be first choice if you're going for a 'flat' performance. Harrison Ford is flat, Elijah Wood is flat. Tom Cruise couldn't do flat if his life (or a scene) depended on it.

It's the perfect example of Kubrick's strengths and weaknesses. Technically it's perfect but the main characters are just cartoons. Nicholson just goes from mad to madder in one fell swoop, while Shelley Duvall simply spends the last hour of the film blubbering.

the donkey is god, no? when god is there everything goes well, when god is not, everything goes down the shitter. is it god the father or is it jesus? i don't know. but cmon, alex is a cypher but balthazar isn't?


since he was a chess aficionado, we could call them chess pieces. but i don't think they're the robots you're making them out to be. actually, speaking of robots, HAL turns out to be quite human in the end.

maybe kubrick knew that humans are machines.


pvt pyle's mental breakdown is not human? his friend private joker is not human? yes, i know what you're saying (i think) that none of these characters is going to start breaking shakespearian soliloquies about mortal coils and such things-- and that's my point w/ the comparison to bresson. kubrick doesn't do filmed theatre. and he's certainly not lyrical-- he's not concerned much with inner states-- his stuff is out there on the frame and the shot.

even with "cartoonish" movies like strangelove (turgidsson being the most cartoonish character of all of them) there are some hugely moving moments in that film-- like when the wing commander, who has been acting like a fucking machine trying to drop his nuke as rationally as possible, mounts that bomb on the way down and howls like a cowboy on a wild buck? maybe that was a mockery of american yahooism, or maybe that's the guy who is required to act like a killing machine facing his death with some very human bravado. i choose the second reading (though the first one also applies).


cruise has energy, but zero depth. by flat i didn't mean a deadpan style, i meant lacking in emotional depths, humanity, nuance. cruise does either cocky smile or earnest chin push forward. that's it. he's pretty, so he looks good on screen, but he's as empty as ryan o'neal was. if you had put somewhere with more "soul" in that role, say someone like willem dafoe, it could never work to conceive of him as a naive fool. tom hanks would have-- he did play a dumbshit in that zemeckis atrocity.

the point with the cruise character is, he's like an overgrown boy, he has no idea what goes in the world, he has no idea about his wife's inner life, and he's shellshocked when the real world is exposed to him. as i said before, kidman eats cruise alive in that movie. she blows him out of the water. she's all instinct and fury and he's... a nice boy... trying to be nice always with his stupid smile, or looking forlorn with his chin and sad eyes. and yes, he's saved because he was nice to someone who could help him but he also has to run back to mama who understands the dark. to me, it fits perfectly.

anyway, speaking of horror movies-- eyes wide shut is one of my favorite horror movies. the thing is i'm not too interested in the supernatural (man possessed by ghosts the little boy can see). it's the natural (power, violence, hierarchy) that scares me shitless. so i read EWS as a kind of that. nature as demon. apollonian boy meets dionysus.

ha ha, okay, anyway. kubrick's chess. not lyrical but epic.

(for melodrama, almodóvar all the way)

--

change of subject: yesterday watched some 60's version of dh lawrence's "women in love". the movie itself was okay, though a bit confusing in the portrayal of gudrun and gerald's relationship. whatever. but glenda jackson! oh mmmm-mmmm! if i had a time machine, ha ha ha.

Your points about Cruise in EWS are brilliant and even as a big Cruise fan, you're right. But you seem to be making Kubrick into some kind of knowing Douglas Sirkian figure, working against the grain of convention. Maybe he did do that, but I don't think it was his intention. His films simply end up that way because his style makes them that way, regardless of content or message. But maybe I'm just not giving Kubrick enough credit in that area.

Kubrick was a NARC

Not sure this matters in terms of his greatness as a filmmaker but an interesting take that I probably agree with

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWJR6SrY5Yc

The first 3 mins of this are also interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjpAl9C-5Zk

malcolm mcdowell's statement is easy to pick apart:

a) he raises the bar for genius (michelangelo yes, john ford maybe)

b) he didn't like kubrick personally

but the thing is, he didn't know michelangelo personally (don't know about him meeting john ford) so he's comparing apples to oranges. fucking ingrate got the best role of his life with kubrick-- what has he done since? bit parts in star trek movies and entourage?

the spielberg video was great-- i watched it whole. ends up with spielberg saying that in spite of all the accusations of not being human enough emotional enough etc kubrick was a man of deep feeling. i tend to agree with that if i judge by the work. was he an asshole in his personal life? probably true if we judge by the abundant accusations. who knows?

but the fact is, there are so many people who are great artists and terrible human beings of some kind. we tend to idealize artists and demand they be superhuman when in fact they are often hurt into art and at some level dysfunctional. i seriously doubt that michelangelo was some all-around supreme creature.

mcdowell was probably pissed with kubrick at the time.

oh wait wait here decades later he mentions him along with john ford and kurosawa ha ha ha

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

Yeah, McDowell's point is disingenuous, and you're right about what he did afterwards. I kind of agree with him in a different way but I don't think Kubrick's personal failings necessarily impact on whether he was a great artist. As if being nice or warm is any kind of pre-requisite for greatness. I've read things about Michelangelo that certainly don't make me think he was a nice man but who cares. The humility's in the work. Disney can make me cry on sight but he was the biggest cunt on earth.

None of that matters. It eventually just comes down to personal taste, based on what's up on the screen. My favourite directors tend to be those whose films show a real interest in and affection for people, regardless of their actual personalities. Fellini, Renoir, Cassavetes, Dreyer, Ford, DeSica, Tati, Pasolini, Scorsese, Almodovar, etc. They can border on sentimental but that's fine, cos I'm quite sentimental, too. So they're great filmmakers to me. I do also like some 'colder' directors: Lang, Antonioni, Welles, Bergman, Bresson, Sirk, Tarkovsky, etc. Although with them, it's perhaps more of an admiration than a love. And I'd say, even they were still very interested in the human condition, just in a rather more distant, analytical way.

Kubrick, on the other hand, I see as a great technician, along with the likes of say Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Greenaway and Godard. Master filmmakers in a purist sense but ones that I struggle to connect with on any emotional level. But again, that's just me, and what matters to me. It's purely a matter of taste/personal psychology. Other people might not need or even want that emotional connection so might well find some Ford, for example, almost unbearably corny. Equally, they might find an emotional connection with say Hitchcock, that I just don't.

Then there are the anomalous filmmakers, like Kenneth Anger, Howard Hawks, Michael Mann, who, according to what I've just said, I shouldn't like at all but I somehow find myself loving, for reasons I still can't quite work out. Equally, I should love Chaplin but don't.

I agree with you that, objectively, Kubrick's attitude to people has no bearing on his standing as a director, but I can't agree with any attempt to humanise either him, or his work. It's not what he was or what he did. But none of that has anything to do with if he was a great filmmaker or not.

tldr? I love Steinbeck, hate Delillo, but wouldn't want to say who the better writer was/is.

Could it be the person's flaw becomes the artist's flaw?

---

Kubrick started as a photo-journalist, no? I see him as trying to present this disinterested gaze on the scene, no moral judgement or subjective viewpoint. Just the cold facts. But that doesn't really work. You can drain away the morality, I guess, but it's still a point of view. And it's not realism, anyway. Nearly all his films seem to take place in some weird alternate universe. And he dicks around with the audience plenty. I'm not sure what rules he's playing by, but it seems like cheating. Gotta say, most of his flicks leave a bad taste in my mouth.

And nearly all of them are a tad boring. Most could lose 15, 20 minutes pretty comfortably. An 85-minutes Eyes Wide Shut might really be something exciting. Hell, you could cut Shining down to an absolutely thrilling one hour. Maybe pick up the pace on Strangelove to make it actually funny.

@ demoño- taste! of course. i love all those directors you mention, except for sirk whom i don't know yet (i think i haven't seen anything by him, or if i did i don't recall his name). don't get me wrong, i love a good drama too, and fellini has been my favorite director for a very long time. as for melodrama, fuck yeah, good stuff.

as for other "cold" ones: buñuel is cold as fuck, but often hilarious; godard is brilliant but often just trying to prove a theoretical point (my favorite movie of his is la mépris ((contempt)) = because it's probably the most visceral. tarantino is pretty fucking cold beneath his violence porn-- he can be really good though but if we wanna talk about cartoons he makes some good ones.

where i draw the line is not in coldness, but more than that, cynicism. which is why i can't stand harmony korine. also a lot of broken people whose names i can't recall because they aren't worth a fuck, ha ha ha.

eisenstein maybe he was cold or maybe he was doing something else? i totally love his early stuff with th emphasis on the social away from the lone hero. it's a different mode of cognition and i appreciate it.

but if you like melodrama, damn, check out einsenstein's "que viva mexico" (unfinished, but wow, beautifully shot, but manichaean as fuck--i still like it though). a lot of propaganda films are melodramas (eg "moscow doesn't believe in tears") so... i think good melodrama works and bad melodrama stinks of dead rats-- it's a risky thing, that genre-- too manipulative.

damn, these posts are getting long and i could write many pages. if you are ever near new mexico we should get plastered, eat pig or beef, and discuss movies.


hhaaa haaa haaaa... i get your point

i don't like steinbeck much (it was over the top as i recall) but he was more important because at the time he wrote books mattered much more. nowadays literature is peripheral to the culture and writers know it. so it's a kind of endgame literature. only people making documentary films think they can still change the world. and nonfiction writers, the poor fools.

-----

ps- this is how much an asshole i am. remember that movie about the brazilian kids searching for their father? i can't remember the name--late late 90s it was-- anyway, midway through the movie i couldn't stop laughing, for fucks sakes. it was too fucking much. ridiculousness. my friends were crying and i had to bite my tongue. CENTRAL STATION. jeezus fucking christ. won a ton of awards. it was way over the top and i hated it.

Big Lebowski, always a pleasure.. Alien.. shit this first one was good, how did 1978-1984 movies manage to be better stories about the future than our contemporary sci-fi ?? Last nite watched Hot Shots Part Deux and motherfucking shit I haven't laughed that hard in forever

If you haven't seen Sirk I reckon you'd like him. Written in the Wind, All that Heaven Allows. Think of Fritz Lang directing an episode of Dallas.


Generally agree. Le Mepris is my fave Godard, too, although I'd say he's made more visceral films - just not as beautifully photographed, or with BB's bum.


As you say, great for what he was. He's obviously the patron saint of film studies programmes everywhere, but Potemkin isn't something I'd turn to for something to watch in bed, curled up with a macaron. Agree about Que Viva Mexico, though.



Was never much of a fan of his 'big', more moralising books, like Grapes of Wrath, but I love his small 'in every sense' stuff like Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. More poetic, less social comment.


With you on both counts.

Although even cynicism is ok if it's done intelligently. That's where I draw the line. Cynicism without insight or anything intelligent to say, which is Korine's problem. A lot of film noir could get cynical but the filmmakers were usually able to treat it intelligently. Cynicism that's lazily defended by certain filmmakers as 'hey, I'm just saying how things are' bores me and annoys me in equal measure. I'm not especially sympathetic towards emotional retards justifying their own limitations as some kind of universal truth.


Deal. Pig and beef, though.

love that ending though....

also my favorite part

*sees coyote*
"stupid gato"
*gets shot by arrow with morphine tip*
"stupid indians"

Speaking of gangsta azz movies watching Menace II Society, this is the best of the 90s "gangsta" movies because it didn't try to be hopeful, it was a caricaturization but sadly it is almost a "based on a true story" for the more extreme elements of late 80s early 90s gang related life.

I prefer Don't be a menace.

Maybe I spent too much of my youth hanging out with gangstaz, dealerz, and car thievez.. come to think of it I did... like pac said, "I only hang out with the criminals and drug dealers, I love ninjaz cuz we comin from the same place."

Wow yeah, Menace II Society, nostalgia for another time. Remember my chavy wigga sister watching that and Friday, seemingly on rotation. She even got the soundtrack album (and she never bought albums) just for that MC Eiht song at the end. Played it constantly. Good times. I have such good memories of that movie I don't wanna see again, in case I start finding things I don't like about it.

hell yes. carnitas + steak then.

and here something cool, just posted up 2 days ago i found reposted on sploid:

http://vimeo.com/112129153

Watch it, you wont be disappointed. Its better than you remembered. Of course it got me kinda depressed remembering all the drama I had.in the 90s for keeping such bad.company. of course I also got nostalgic for all the fucking fun I had knuckleheading around getting.caught up in various degrees of crimes and dumbshit with my homiez

oh, and mike nichols died

what a classic song that is

Absolutely brilliant, and in its way Kubrick-esque - in the sense of Kubrick that I like.

Been thinking about Gasper Noe's apparent obsession with him. He seems to draw out his good side too.

He always made intelligent films for adults that were actually about something. Looking at his filmography, I'm shocked to see he never made a shitty movie. Quite an accomplishment.

After the Kubrick discussion it's worth noting there's nothing especially technically stunning in a Nichols film. I mean, he didn't have a unique style, and I can't think of too many striking images from his films on par with, say, blood pouring from an elevator. But apparently there are more important aspects of good direction because, like I said, none of his films sucked.

i think you like filmed theatre more than film, which is fine if that's what you like; and nichols was a fine actor and theatre director, but honestly i looked up his filmography and while there are gems (the graduate, who's afraid of virginia woolf) he also made some shit. (i haven't seen catch 22 so i can't talk about that which could be a gem i don't know).

looking at his filmography, i once tried watching "postcards from the edge" and couldn't get past the first insufferable 10 minutes; "closer' was a disappointment (natalie portman as a stripper and what was it about?), "charlie wilson's war" was okay but mostly because it was a sorkin screenplay, "the birdcage" was a direct copy of a much better (funnier, earlier, braver) french film, "working girl" was fun but very forgettable. i guess i could say the same about a lot of other movies he made. i remember people talking about "wolf" when it came out but i don't hear anyone talking about it today. i just also realized i've seen "primary colors" which was like a funny tv show.

not trying to shit on a man who's not even yet buried, but come on, don't use him to throw shade on kubrick.

yeah, plus Charlie Wilson was just a really awful story. And, he was married to Diane Sawyer, how the hell does one do that:eek:

Wow. You guys are fucking evil. No wonder you enjoy soulless films. ;)

YES.

I thought Charlie Wilson was a better movie than Argo.

Mike Nichols made a lot of films that bored me shitless.

I copied all your comments and posted them on his daughter's Facebook page.

I wasn't really talking about the quality of the movie Charlie Wilson, more actually about how repulsive the story was

I hate the whole filmed theatre argument. Nichols was great at directing actors for the movies, which isn't the same as directing them for the stage. He had the intelligence to know how to use the medium to tell the story he wanted to tell, the way he felt it needed to be told, and had enough confidence in his vision and ability not to let the medium become an unnecessary distraction.

when i mentioned his death i was hoping we'd talk about the merits of mike nichols instead of engaging in a "nichols vs. kubrick" cock contest. of course i took the bait-- i always do. which caused me to be unfair to make a point.

"the graduate" was one of the best things i had ever seen when i saw it. in retrospect it seems a monument to boomer illusions, but i still think of it as a landmark film.