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Eyes Wide Shut

Leo Goldsmith — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:58:29 GMT

Kubrick – Expecting Kubrick to do for the erotic thriller what he had already done for science fiction, the war film, the period piece, and the horror movie, spectators were instead greeted with a film of no determinate genre. Maddeningly deliberate in its pace, and adapted (sometimes verbatim) from a largely unknown 1926 Viennese novel, Eyes Wide Shut struck many as outdated in its sexual mores, questionable in the authenticity of its authorship, and even socially conservative in its message, its sexiest scene involving the rare sight of a married couple having sex.

Full Metal Jacket

Rumsey Taylor — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:21:52 GMT

Kubrick – Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie. Period. It’s no less idiosyncratic than his other conceptions of pure genre, and as such exhibits his sensibilities with perhaps greater transparency than his other films. This is to say that Full Metal Jacket is a menacing, incendiary picture, so calculated in its brutality that you’re more prone to endure its depictions of suffering than you are to enjoy it.

The Shining

Jenny Jediny — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:56:43 GMT

Kubrick – Stanley Kubrick’s fascination with the male ego continues with The Shining. We’ve witnessed Humbert Humbert’s masochistic, self-induced humiliation at the hands of a nymphet, General Jack D. Ripper’s quest to preserve male bodily fluids, and later, Dr. Bill Harford’s emasculation at his wife’s mere contemplation of an affair. Whatever one’s complaints may be about Kubrick in regards to his underwritten female characters, the men in Kubrick’s films are a wealth of insight into insecurity. In turn, Jack Torrance, armed with his “duty” of caring for the Overlook Hotel, joins the ranks as a terrifying, homicidal father.

Barry Lyndon

David Carter — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:50:55 GMT

Kubrick – Barry is a rogue and will garner little sympathy from most viewers—the easiest viewpoint to take is that he has no one to blame but himself. But a deeper analysis reveals Kubrick’s true motives. Barry Lyndon contains subtle critiques of British manners, aristocracy and empire—the defining characteristics of 18^th century England. Kubrick’s goal is to show the hollowness beneath the gilded veneer typically found in period dramas.

A Clockwork Orange

Ian Johnston — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:45:52 GMT

Kubrick – There’s a sense that Kubrick lost control of his material because of his loss of the necessary critical distance. This is literally embodied in the many production stills you can find of Kubrick with his handheld camera sticking close to the rape and mayhem, appearing as one more droog in Alex’s gang. After establishing the narrative perspective as that of Alex, Kubrick’s treatment of his victims is the next inevitable step, whether he turns them into grotesques or implies that they’re to blame for the violence meted out to them. In the total collapse of Kubrick’s artistic project, there’s nothing left for him but to end the film with a piece of knee-jerk cynicism (“I was cured all right!”)—pathetic, gratuitous, and unworthy of the great film artist that Kubrick undoubtedly was.

White Dog

Ben Ewing — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:48:28 GMT

Sam Fuller was frenetic. He was wiry and tough and ready to pounce on you with jittery enthusiasm. And in case you don’t know it, Martin Scorsese will tell you: If you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema. Or at least you don’t understand it. Sam would hold a cigar in his teeth, then quickly swipe it out to start fast-talking, ready to thrust a lens on one of his protagonists’ faces at any moment, anxious to sweep himself and his viewers up in the pleasures of over-the-top B-movie intensities.

Based on Romain Gray’s autobiographical novel, Fuller’s controversial, late-period film White Dog begins with its attention on Julie Sawyer, a young actress who takes in a stray white German Shepherd she has accidentally hit while driving. After a few of the dog’s manic outbursts pile up, Sawyer and the audience realize that this is no ordinary dog but a perversely trained one: a white dog, taught to attack black people. Disturbed by the pathology of her otherwise gentle new companion, Sawyer seeks the help of a professional dog trainer. When he deems the dog’s state deadly serious, uncorrectable and cause for putting the dog down, in steps his partner, a black man named Keys, who insists, with an almost evangelical fervor, on undertaking a dangerous and likely futile attempt to retrain the dog.

White Dog is an allegory about racism perhaps too obvious and close to its subject to be properly called an allegory at all. Yet its social message never grates as overly simplistic precisely because Fuller and his viewers are too caught up in the piercing stares and violent emotions of Sawyer and Keys – not to mention the dog’s snarls, clenched teeth, and coat of fur so white you simply can’t look away – to possibly checklist analytic quibbles or missed sociological nuances. In characteristic Fuller style, White Dog is an unflinching, irony-less presentation of one heightened emotion after another. It reminds us of what it’s liked to be sucked into a film despite ourselves.

Who could put it better than Sam himself, in his cameo in Godard’s Pierrot le fou: “Film is like a battleground … love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!”

2001: A Space Odyssey

Adam Balz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:59:58 GMT

Kubrick – The film’s bizarre structure, which has undoubtedly contributed to its reputation as an indecipherable cinematic puzzle, is a cycle in which seemingly irrelevant moments, images, shapes, and statements reappear, albeit slightly evolved, to create a sense of cinematic déjà vu. The bone used in the film’s first section to commit violence becomes a nuclear satellite circling Earth—one piece of technology becoming another, one weapon becoming another.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Timothy Sun — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:57:15 GMT

Kubrick – The bomber crew led by Slim Pickens’ Major Kong is constantly going through checklists and communicating via technical jargon, making sure they hit all the correct steps in bringing about an orderly end to the world. Like the cavernous War Room set that dwarfs the people in it, the picture that emerges is of a vast, endless bureaucracy coupled with a monstrous, deific technology that humans were smart enough to invent but powerless to control.

Lolita

Katherine Follett — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:34:55 GMT

Kubrick – Lolita is famously considered unfilmable—but not for the scandalous reasons the tagline suggests. This is because the book is so dependent on language; almost all of the weight of the novel falls in the gap between Humbert’s written observations and the horrifying truth that seeps through his words. But if anybody could film Lolita, or could at least make the best effort, it would be Stanley Kubrick.

Spartacus

Evan Kindley — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:58:32 GMT

Kubrick – Despite the assured auteur status he gained in the sixties, Kubrick didn’t really share the scrappy protestant spirit of the Italian neorealists, the French New Wave, or their later American inheritors, all of whom rejected the historical epic out of hand as obsolete or irrelevant. Kubrick wanted not to abandon but to renovate the epic, to hold on to the grandeur and sweep of the big studio picture without retaining its outworn conventions. Spartacus, then, is where Kubrick cuts ties with the documentary tradition that had informed his early work, and starts learning to craft his own kind of spectacle.

Paths of Glory

Sam Wasson — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:59:27 GMT

Kubrick – There are nascent proclivities here, but none is more pervasive, or upsetting, than the thematic strand connecting Paths of Glory to Dr. Strangelove—futility in the face of cold-blooded savagery. Looking at the iniquities of war, with its bloodsoaked barracks and Kafkaesque bureaucracies, there seem to be only two reasonable responses: one can either scream in horror or laugh in disbelief.

The Killing

Evan Kindley — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:20:44 GMT

Kubrick – Where later Kubrick films are notable for their exploration of enormous, often mysterious edifices (militaries, monoliths, haunted hotels, secret societies), The Killing focuses relentlessly on the little stuff, the nooks and crannies, rather than the grand achievement itself. It’s a movie about the pleasures and frustrations of planning and execution (in both senses of the word).

Killer’s Kiss

Leo Goldsmith — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:00:55 GMT

Kubrick – Here, Kubrick once again reworks images and ideas from “Prizefighter,” his 1949 photoessay for Look magazine and the basis for his first film Day of the Fight. But with its catchy and utterly nonsensical pulp title, Killer’s Kiss expands upon these earlier works considerably, matching images of gritty gutter-realism with increasingly lurid scenarios, and garnishing its narrative with an array of visual witticisms and a swirling sense of chronology.

Fear and Desire

Cullen Gallagher — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:23:03 GMT

Kubrick – While watching the crucial first step into the world of feature filmmaking for the director is like demystifying a piece of cinema mythology, it is neither a lost masterpiece nor an easily dismissed blunder. Instead, it is what we have come to expect from Kubrick all along: a skillful, atmospheric, and visually expressive drama, one that wears youthful ambition on its sleeve and promises much for the future.

Stanley Kubrick’s Early Documentaries

Cullen Gallagher — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:06:10 GMT

Kubrick – It is tempting to want to look back at the early films of Stanley Kubrick and search for hints of the greatness that was to come, to find the seeds of a style that would germinate into the distinctive, inimitable aesthetic of his later films. This not only puts undue pressure on his first films – qualitative and formalistic expectations that can hardly be met – but also denies Kubrick the room to experiment, to succeed, and even to fail.

Kubrick

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:15:52 GMT

Stanley Kubrick’s rigor, formal consistency, and well-cultivated mystique has ensured the critical treatment of his work as something that is itself monolithic; in some ways, this view of Kubrick as an auteurist’s sacred cow, whose perfectionist vision merely requires some time to sink in, has hamstrung critical appraisal of his work. In this feature, our aim is not to once again dance around this monolith like so many awestruck apes, but to pry it open slightly, the better to discern its contours and occasional fractures. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be looking at each of Kubrick’s films – from his early documentaries to his majestic late works, and beyond – in an effort to not only to reinforce the internal coherence of his oeuvre as a whole, but also see past the looming shadow of Stanley by examining each film as its own distinct entity.

Days and Nights in the Forest

Ben Ewing — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:19:40 GMT

Onward from the first scenes Days and Nights in the Forest is full of comic moments, and a careful selection of music (often diegetic) keeps the film from tipping too far toward ominous severity or empty pleasantry. The cool tone makes the few bursts of startling emotion feel simultaneously restrained for their brevity and infrequence. Like Mozart, Satyajit Ray gave us more – and more humane – insights, when pretending to give us fewer.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Ben Ewing — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:00:29 GMT

The film’s achievement is both formal and philosophical: a unity of sweetness and sorrow that scarcely diminishes either. The most poignant moments suggest the mutual dependence of these polar emotional states by juxtaposing lyrical beauty and visual delicacy with painful emotions that song persists through but cannot cover up.

Wise Blood

Ben Ewing — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:33:36 GMT

Picture John Huston’s characters walking: a British consul drunkenly ambling through the congested plazas and down the open boulevards of Mexico; dust-clad treasure-hunters climbing the hills of the Sierra Madre; an upstart, black-hatted preacher whose body moves along the sidewalks of Taulkinham, but whose piercing eyes are in another space and time. If for Max Ophuls, master of the elaborate dolly shot, movement reflects life, for Huston, movement reflects characters – his individualist men and the restlessness they feel as they tread their loner paths.

Adapted from a novel by Flannery O’Connor and released last year on DVD by the Criterion Collection, Wise Blood is an underappreciated gem in Huston’s oeuvre. In Southern Gothic style – replete with such grotesques as a beggar-conman feigning blindness, an obese whore, and a shrunken mummy – the film follows the existential crisis of Hazel Motes, a young army vet who arrives in the small southern American town of Taulkinham. Boyishly good looking with a thin physic, angular jaw and black top hat, Hazel is quickly mistaken for a preacher. Hazel seizes the opportunity, but the gospel he attempts to preach is neither a huckster’s plea for money (as is the word of others he encounters) nor the message of a Christian zealot. Instead, Hazel founds the Church Without Christ, unloading his theological baggage (which is partly elaborated through brief flashback dream sequences in which the young Hazel is subjected to the stern sermonizing of a terrifying elder) by denouncing Jesus as a liar and rejecting the idea that mankind needs redemption.

Restlessness, a theme so prevalent in Huston’s work, is a helpful concept for orienting one’s way around Wise Blood. As the story unfolds, Hazel’s fiery sermons and intense disbelief reveal themselves to be the Janus face of a puritanical Christianity whose stronghold Hazel cannot shake. Wise Blood’s profundity – and its insight into today’s fundamentalists, whether they be the partisans of religion or science (e.g., Ditchkins style atheists) – is in its suggestion that extreme belief and extreme disbelief are close as can be: both are manifestations of a psychological blocking off of deep and restless uncertainty.

Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow

Leo Goldsmith — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:24:40 GMT

Having grown up, as it were, on Sesame Street myself, I can attest to my own treasured memories of watching friendly humans and monsters of diverse colors peacefully cohabiting a quiet urban block. But more indelible still are my recollections of the many incidental shorts and cartoons, made by likely dozens of largely anonymous filmmakers and animators, that found inventive ways of helping young viewers distinguish which things are not like other things, recognize the building blocks of words, and count to twelve in a funky way (with help from The Pointer Sisters). One of these animators, Al Jarnow, is now the subject of an extensive DVD package from Numero Group, which samples not only from the over 100 short films he created for Children’s Television Workshop shows like 3-2-1 Contact and Sesame Street, but also from the vast and varied body of personal films and experimentations he created in his Northport, Long Island, home.