Thanks to FilmMaker Magazine for making us aware of this excellent homebrewed homage to our man Stan!
Showing posts with label Kubrick ephemera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kubrick ephemera. Show all posts
Thursday, August 13, 2020
Monday, February 10, 2020
GET YOUR OWN 2001: A SPACE CHAIR AT AUCTION, THIS WEEK!
Check it out: Chiswick Auctions is excited to present two iconic chairs, the design of which was chosen by Stanley Kubrick for his classic 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the Design sale at Chiswick Auctions this Tuesday, February 11th, 2020. The Djinn chairs were designed by Olivier Mourgue in 1965, while he was working for the French manufacturer Airborne International, and epitomise ’60s ‘futuristic’ design. The design has gone on to take a place in interior design history. The chairs were not designed specifically for the film, but were chosen by Kubrick and his team to create a futuristic scene in the movie, when Dr Floyd walks through the Hilton lobby of Space Station Five on his way to the moon.
Friday, June 21, 2019
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
DOUGLAS RAIN, VOICE OF HAL-9000, DEAD AT 90
Canadian stage legend Douglas Rain, the actor and entrepreneur who co-created the world-famous Stratford Shakespeare Festival and was most famous for voicing the murderous computer HAL-9000 in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey -- as well as Peter Hyams' 2010: The Year We Make Contact and a number of remarkable SCTV parody sketches -- passed away at home of natural causes at the age of 90.
Most people aren't aware that Rain was only hired after principle photography was completed, with HAL being voiced by veteran actor Martin Balsam of falling-backwards-down-a-staircase infamy in Psycho. During post, however, Kubrick found the gruff Balsam's voice was “too colloquially American,” and cast the Canadian actor after hearing his narration in the 1960 documentary Universe (which itself was a huge influence on 2001, particularly in the special effects department). In a letter to a colleague, Kubrick remarked that Rain's voice, “is neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish. Despite this, it is interesting.”
UNIVERSE (1960)
SCTV 2001 PARODY featuring Douglas Rain as HAL-9000
Friday, May 11, 2018
KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ MAY 11, 2018
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Music and art act Tom and Hebron have put together a tribute song/video to celebrate the half century anniversary of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's gorgeous. Enjoy!
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Horror News Network reprinted excerpts from a discussion in which David Fincher talks about the notion of a cinematic auteur. One stand out bit:
Steven Spielberg once told an incredible anecdote about visiting Stanley Kubrick in post production. They way Spielberg told it, he once asked Kubrick why he was looking at the same shot on eight different monitors. Kubrick explained that they were actually eight very slightly different takes and proceeded to explain the minor differences between each take. As a viewer, Spielberg- a clear master of profession as well- simply wasn’t looking for the same thing out of the image as Kubrick, who was attempting to perfect his vision, so the subtleties were lost on Spielberg as a viewer because all of the shots were likely near-perfect.
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Click HERE if you'd like to know what Christopher Nolan would ask Stanley Kubrick if he had the chance to ask him only one question. Actually... never mind, I'll just tell you. Actually... never mind. I'll just let HIM tell you. Check out the video beneath to find out.
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Should I even bother mentioning that a director has been chosen for the "sequel" to The Shining, called Doctor Sleep? I mean, it's going to be a sequel to the novel (and, one assumes, the absolutely dire Stephen King TV miniseries), and NOT to Kubrick's masterpiece distillation/re-imagining of King's novel. So this will probably be the last time I mention it, unless director Mike Flanagan (who admittedly did a very good job with King's Gerald's Game for Netflix last year) says something stupid about Kubrick's film.
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People are calling this ad for a doubled-up Christmas sweater "Kubrick-esque". Aside from the Shining Twins (and Kubrick's obsession with doubling in general), and the slow zoom and the perfect symmetry of the shots and the willful breaking of the 180% rule... can't say's I see it!
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Noel Vera has cooked up one of the more intriguing critical appraisals of Kubrick (and Nabokov)'s Lolita that I've ever read. It's well worth your time. And then, when you're done reading that, why not move on to this Conversation article by Margaret Leclere, in which she argues that it's time for Nabokov's legendarily huge and "unfilmable" screenplay got its due. Personally, I'd love to see it come out in book version, at least, and have always said so. Filming it, I imagine, would be an incredibly difficult proposition. But it sure would be interesting!
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J.M. Tyree's appreciation of one of Kubrick's finest transition moments - maybe even his second best after the bone-into-satellite transition from 2001 - is a fun and insightful read that has enhanced my own appreciation for said moment. Can you guess which transition it might be? Click through for a pleasant surprise, and a damn fine piece of writing!
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Say hello to the newly-discovered Dendropsophus kubricki, aka Kubrick's Tree Frog! Why Kubrick, you ask? Well, it's probably got something to do with the distinct coloration of the markings on its body, and also with Anthony Burgess once explaining the title of his novel A Clockwork Orange by saying: "I've implied the junction of the organic, the lively, the sweet - in other words, life, the orange - and the mechanical, the cold, the disciplined." You can find out more, HERE.
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As a former member of my own alma mater's college paper, it's always a nice for me to run across some quality, punchy writing in a current student newspaper. And this delight is only compounded when that writing is about a subject so dear to my own heart as the works of Stanley Kubrick. So check out Ryan Suppe's funny love letter to his cinematic crush (weren't we all there at some point), titled Kubrick: Criticizing the Greedy, Rich and Powerful Through Art.
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The great Jordan Peele explains how he snuck a Kubrick reference into his excellent, Oscar-nominated film, Get Out.Saturday, April 14, 2018
MOUNTAIN ON PLUTO'S MOON CHARON NAMED "KUBRICK MONS"
And the best part is, it's parked right next to a small mountain range named after Arthur C. Clarke! Take a look! Click on the image below to enlarge.
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ MARCH 6, 2017
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From the ridiculous to the sublime: Matthew Woodson's new painted poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey is a real beauty.
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Jamie Stangroom interviews Louise and Lisa Burns, better known as The Shining Twins, and they're just as charming today as they were creepy 40 years ago!
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Anybody know where we can find a copy of the new documentary short that accompanied the UK theatrical re-release of The Shining late last year? I've looked around but so far have had no luck. If any of you run across it, please send it my way!
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Check out this whining, repetitive idiocy about how that mean old baddy Stanley Kubrick tortured Shelly Duvall on the set of The Shining and how nobody would stand for that sort of treatment nowadays. Yes, well, considering the state of film today...
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So Tony Zierra, the director of Filmworker, the documentary about Leon Vitali, has decided that his next documentary is going to be about Eyes Wide Shut. Titled “SK13,” it will offer an inside look at the making of the film. Zierra says the appeal is that it is the one film of Kubrick’s that people are still divided on: “The one movie that I feel is the wrinkle in Kubrick’s filmography is Eyes Wide Shut. The people that love him always say, ‘He’s a genius, but I’m not sure what the hell that movie was about.'” No release date for the documentary has been announced as yet.
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If you're a fan of Mr. Robot, you're probably already aware that this is a show where the Kubrick references fly fast and thick. This Hollywood Reporter article does a great job of breaking down all the many, many homages and references to Kubrick films found in the third episode of the third season of the show.
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Any fellow font fanatics out there? I've always loved fonts and typefaces, and Kubrick's films have always been a source of beautiful treatments of text, so I love this short history of Futura, the first font to land on the Moon! It also, not so coincidentally, was a font featured prominently in the early promotional materials for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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The Guardian catches up with Danny Lloyd and helps him dispel a few rumors that have sprung up due to his absence from the movie biz after what should have been a star-making role in The Shining. This is a really comprehensive interview and is well worth the time and attention of any and all fans of The Shining or Kubrick in general. Lots of great tidbits to be had here. Too bad they weren't able to get into the recently developed theory that Danny is actually the villain in both the film and the novel! To learn more about this surprisingly convincing theory (or, if you're so inclined, to poke holes in it), then check out this essay.
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Now here's an interesting project! The Shining 237 is Susan Kruglinska's podcast wherein she and a number of guests dissect The Shining in discrete two minute, thirty-seven second chunks. And guess what? Turns out there's a shocking amount of material to explore, including a bunch of stuff that was new to me, despite watching this movie well over a hundred times over the years. A wealth of material for Kubrick scholars. Definitely this is one to bookmark and return to with regularity.
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In a KNIB full of Shining related links, this last one, from The Stranger, may be the most interesting: experimental musician Corey Brewer discusses creating a soundtrack to go along with everybody's favorite weirdo pomo film experiment, The Shining Forward and Backward, Simultaneously, Superimposed (about which more here). You can actually listen to this score at Brewer's bandcamp page, sans imagery of course. It's actually pretty impressive and makes for great nightmare fuel, if you're into that sort of thing.
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And speaking of university courses, how about this Rollins College class, as described in their independent school paper, The Sandspur?
For those with darker tastes, 'The Madness of Stanley Kubrick' may satisfy. The Psychology Department’s Dr. Paul Harris has been fascinated with the films of Stanley Kubrick ever since watching the original release of 2001: A Space Odyssey as a boy.
“Every Kubrick film is unpredictable,” said Harris. “[A]nd every Kubrick film contains some element of madness as well.” This intersession will explore five Kubrick films, looking at “mentally ill characters in a mentally ill society—where’s the madness? Is it in the characters, or the context the society is in?”
Harris, however, makes clear the distinction between madness and real mental illness. “Madness is fictitious,” he noted. “[The class] will be looking at Kubrick and how he uses madness as a dramatic tool.” In drawing the line between true mental illness and literary madness, this class serves well the purposes of those interested in psychology, film, sociology, and so on.Definitely a course I would have loved to take, if I was still a student! Although I figure if I took it now, I'd probably ace it, considering I've spent most of my adult life steeping in Kubrick's films, as well as scholarship about his films.
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John Mollo, who won an Oscar for his costuming work on Star Wars (the man created Darth Vader's iconic "look") and was one of the men whom Kubrick relied on to make sure the costumes in Barry Lyndon were perfectly appropriate to the era, down to every last ribbon of lace or ivory button, passed away near the end of last year. May he rest in peace.
Saturday, February 24, 2018
EYES WIDE CUT ~ A FILMMAKER RE-CUTS KUBRICK'S UNFINISHED FILM
Those venerable cinema hipsters at Film Threat are reporting on actor/director Marshall Allman's decision to re-cut Kubrick's final (and, imo, uncompleted) film, Eyes Wide Shut. It begins, in part:
When did we stop thinking deeply about movies? We consume films so quickly that we barely take time to breath before the next event film hits the stadium-seated multiplex. Many of the themes in movies made today are not far below the surface–themes are piled right on the top, they’re easy to spot and often spoken aloud in case audiences missed it. I miss films that provoke thought and conversation, weeks, months, years, even decades after its release. It’s rare to see a cinematic experience that creeps into your subconscious, marinating with ideas, then spewing forth some kind of understanding.
Stanley Kubrick made those kinds of films every single time. Sure, some landed more successfully than others, however, I’m still watching 2001 hoping to grasp more about that trip to space.
Unfortunately, upon its initial release in 1999, Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut was considered something of a disappointment. And the fact that US distributor Warner Brothers sought to “soften” a crucial sex scene did not help, The film was released on the heels of the master filmmaker’s untimely death and some felt Kubrick’s latest was weak when compared to previous works. Others speculated Eyes Wide Shut was really an unfinished film, as Kubrick often made dramatic changes, even after a film was put into commercial release.
Well, recently Marshall Allman got to thinking about Kubrick’s last film. Marshall is an actor best known for roles on Prison Break, True Blood and Humans. The actor/filmmaker had a few thoughts about how Eyes Wide Shut might have turned out if Kubrick only had the time to consider a few changes. As if swept up in some fever dream, Marshall re-edited the two hour and 40 minute movie within a 72-hour period. The surprising result is a new version he calls Eyes Wide Cut. And like all of Kubrick’s work, this version must be revisited, rewatched, redigested and rethought. He posted his new 120-minute version onto his recently launched Eyes Wide Cut website and is inviting you, me, all of us, to carry on a discussion of all-things Kubrick and what it all means.The above is followed by a very interesting interview, which I suggest you peruse over at Film Threat, seeing as I've stolen enough of their work for one blog post.
Saturday, February 3, 2018
KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ FEB 3, 2018
Sometimes you'll find tidbits of Kubrick-related ephemera in the strangest places. For instance, in Daniel Raim's documentary Harold and Lillian, A Hollywood Love Story! This doc "tells the story of husband-and-wife team Harold and Lillian Michelson, who brought their talents as storyboard artist and film researcher, respectively, to numerous Hollywood classics including The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and The Graduate, and working with such master filmmakers as Hitchcock, Spielberg, and Kubrick." How does Kubrick fit into this one? Well, a quick look at the poster, above, provides a pretty good clue!
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I full realize that "unboxing" videos are, in many ways, symptomatic of what's gone wrong with the Internet, social media, and late-Capitalist decline in recent years, but just try and keep from drooling when the lucky so-and-so's in the video below "unbox" Taschen's limited edition (and sold-out) 'Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Film Never Made'...
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Den of Geek has an extended examination of the great Clockwork Orange Ban myth... the real facts of the case, how the myth surrounding it began, and how that myth evolved into a big part of what solidified Clockwork Orange's 'street cred' as a legendary "dangerous movie".
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Criterion's latest version of The Killing gets top marks in this Christopher Aguiar review. I particularly liked this insight into the film:
The Killing often operates as a film about making movies. Johnny Clay is Kubrick in this reading. Both assemble teams, both decide on an end-goal and both craft a plan to get from point A to point B. Much like filmmaking, Clay needs his counterparts to pull their own weight. His wrestler friend has to instigate the bar brawl, Cook Jr. has to ensure that every door remains open. Without their collaboration, Clay cannot carry out his heist. Without the collaboration of his actors and writers, Kubrick cannot assemble his story. As aforementioned, it is the small unconsidered details that can derail a heist. The same can be said about filmmaking. You consider all the variables, but then it may rain on set – at that point, your period of filmmaking for the day is, effectively, over.
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Someone over at the Ultimate Guitar website's forum decided to do the sort of thing I've been doing at Kubrick U for a while now, and assembled a collection of music videos that reference the films of Stanley Kubrick. Their list features such diverse artists as Kanye West and Lady Gaga to Blur and Guns and Roses. One that was new to me was this one for "Time is Running Out" by neo-prog band Muse. Enjoy!
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In this article for the Daily Trojan, British directorial phenomenon Edgar Wright cites "his parents’ favorite filmmakers as vital to his creative upbringing, specifically choreographer Busby Berkeley and directors Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick." It's enough to make this would-be filmmaker feel really, really old and past my due date.
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In a recent article for The Drive, entitled 'Autonomous Cars and the Great Failure to Communicate', Eric Adams explores how "Aviation can help carmakers learn to talk to drivers, but they'd be better off asking Stanley Kubrick." After going over some of the mistakes that current industry leaders are making in this area, Adams explains how his own...
...gold-standard reference has actually become—in all seriousness—Stanley Kubrick. Go watch 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968 and look at the control panels of the separate spacecraft used to reach orbit, fly to the Moon, translate across the lunar surface, and, later in the film, operate the extravehicular activity pods. Those aren’t the whimsical riffs of a 60s set designer; they’re thought-out projections of what human-machine interfaces would be like in a more advanced technological society, envisioned by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay. Some are more complicated than others, but the gist is the same: The system does the thinking and tells the operator what he or she needs to know. Take that left-hand screen (below) with the automatic landing guides and replace it with a big green arrow, and it could be the next semi-autonomous Cadillac.
It's a thought provoking article that should appeal to techies of every stripe, Kubrick fan or no.I’m guessing, by the way, that it’s likely that when Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos unveil the control panels for their own spacecraft at SpaceX and Blue Origin, respectively, they’ll look more like a Kubrick creation than, say, the overwhelmingly complex Space Shuttle of yore—simple, clean, with necessary data, sure, but not incomprehensible boatloads of it.
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As part of his brisk review of the 1972 giallo Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, critic Matthew Lickona goes off on an extended Kubrick-related tangent:
A bit of serendipity: last week, I happened upon Jon Ronson’s short documentary Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, about the years he spent sifting through the director’s dizzying, even terrifying collection of research material, fan letters, memos, etc. Kubrick was famous for being incredibly exacting, for maintaining a level of precision and care that made every frame matter. But it cost him: Waterloo came out and flopped while he was still in pre-production on his Napoleon epic, and the spooked studios killed the project. (The reams of research material for that one were eventually transformed into a book, subtitled The Greatest Movie Never Made*.) The same thing happened with his planned Holocaust movie — Spielberg made Schindler’s List in the time it took Kubrick to do his research. And Full Metal Jacket famously got beaten to the punch by Platoon. There’s much to admire in The Shining. But there’s also much to enjoy in this brisk, brusque, bloody, bawdy Italian cheapie.*See above for the unboxing of the book in question.
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Witness 23 minutes of gameplay demo from Lust for Darkness, a videogame that's being called "Eyes Wide Shut meets HP Lovecraft" by some reviewers.
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In the context of an interview about his most recent turn as the Devil in American Satan, Malcolm McDowell continues to use his public appearances as a chance to explore his evolving feelings re: his relationship with Kubrick, particularly about how things went down after they finished working on Clockwork Orange together:McDowell is aware he still gets recognized for his most iconic character, that of Alex, a sadistic gang leader in 1971’s “A Clockwork Orange”. Still, nearly 50 years later, McDowell is grateful for the chance to take on one of Hollywood’s most recognizable bad boys.
“… I have to say I’m more than thrilled that I did it all those years ago with a great director who was an amazing co-conspirator if you like,” he explained. “It was great fun working with [director] Stanley [Kubrick], and I really loved him. We produced an incredible piece of work that’s there for all time… It defines my career... which is fine! And listen, I’m very happy to have an iconic movie. It’s a great piece of work. And I’m very proud of it. And it opened many doors for me.”
While McDowell considered Kubrick to be a wonderful collaborator, their friendship would ultimately dissolve. McDowell wouldn't give specific details on what caused the relationship to crumble, but he admitted they never stayed in touch after an incident tore them apart. Kubrick died in 1999 at age 70.
“We fell out and I think this is something I regret,” admitted McDowell. “My pride prevented me from picking up the phone and just saying, ‘Hi Stan, how are you doing?’ It was silly, really… I was really pissed with him, I thought what he did to me was really an injustice… I felt very injured by him and I was really annoyed for many, many years. But you know what? I made a mistake… And I had my wife begging me to call him, but I went, ‘Nope, he can call me! Why can’t he call? Why should it always be me?’ But you know, that’s so stupid. That kind of pig-headed… I admit it. I was wrong.”
When Kubrick died in his home in England, McDowell didn’t know how to cope with the news.
“The family then reached out,” he said. “And I was very glad to go see them.
“Christiane, his widow, took me to where he’s buried in the back garden basically. And I burst into tears. And I realized, it all came out. The thing that I buried and stuffed inside me. And I realized what an idiot I’ve been… Unfortunately, I can’t change it now, but at least I realized how stupid I was.”
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AV Club discusses Ridley Scott discussing Bladerunner's debt(s) to Stanley Kubrick, in specific re: the "eye shine" exhibited by Replicants, and in a major casting decision... but it's all in the WiReD video, above, so you don't really need to click through to learn more.
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The winner of the 2017 Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award was... Matt Damon. Now, I've got nothing against Matt Damon. I think he's a pretty good actor and I'm sure he's nice, as far as big time Hollywood actors go. But, well, the award is supposed to be given to individuals “upon whose work is stamped the indelible mark of authorship and commitment, and who has lifted the craft to new heights.” Is Matt Damon really the individual who best represents these qualities in 2017? Oh well... considering the fact that past recipients include Robert Downey Jr., George Clooney, Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, and Tom Hanks... maybe being a nice, handsome guy with the right political opinions and whose filmic output is occasionally slightly thought-provoking and rarely if ever prurient garbage is all it takes.
This, however, brings up a potential avenue for speculation. If YOU had to nominate someone for a Kubrick-related award, who would it be, and why? Answers in the comments section, please!
ON STANLEY KUBRICK: A FORCE OF NATURE
Thanks to 'The Stanley Kubrick Appreciation Society', we all now get to see the video of a talk given in 2001 at the University of Oklahoma Department of Film and Video Studies by Joseph Turkel, one of the few actors to have scored a Stanley Kubrick Hat Trick, having appeared in a bit part in The Killing, a co-starring role in Paths of Glory, and a pivotal part in The Shining.
On Youtube, it's been chopped into five pieces, but some kind soul has combined all the parts into a single video and made it available as a single video on the superior platform, Vimeo. Watch it there, or see it here, embedded, below...
LEON VITALI: FILMWORKER
An October New Statesman article about FilmWorker, the documentary exploring the intriguing life and times of former actor-turned-Stanley Kubrick's long-time right-hand man, Leon Vitali, begins:
In the early 1970s, Leon Vitali’s face, cherubic but with a hint of insolence, was forever popping up on British TV series like The Fenn Street Gang and Crown Court. Then he fell into Stanley Kubrick’s orbit and everything changed. Not his prospects or his level of celebrity or his skillset (though they changed too) but his entire existence — his purpose in life.
Kubrick cast Vitali in his 1975 masterpiece Barry Lyndon as Lord Bullingdon, the justifiably enraged stepson of the 18th century cad and chancer played by Ryan O’Neal. Though Vitali was 26 when he played the role, he looks in many scenes like an overgrown child: plump-lipped and babyish. His performance is explosive and thrilling. Once shooting was finished, the actor told Kubrick he wanted to get more involved behind the scenes. Be careful what you wish for and all that.I have yet to see the documentary myself, but I have long been intrigued by the idea that Kubrick had people in his life that, in a very real and important sense, helped him to be the best, most complete and uncompromising artist that he could be. As the New Statesman review makes clear in this review, Vitali was clearly one of those people, and his contribution to Kubrick's oeuvre--casting Danny both and the Grady twins in The Shining, for example--is vast and, quite possibly, unquantifiable.
More reviews can be found at The Film Stage website, The Daily Beast, and Variety. There doesn't appear to be a trailer yet, but here's a video of Leon and the film's director, Tony Zierra, on the red carpet at the AFI Film Festival:
KUBRICK'S INFLUENCE ON TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
A bunch of websites, including Fan Sided, Vulture, and Slant Magazine, have drawn some parallels between David Lynch's magnificent, triumphant return to the universe of Twin Peaks, and some of the themes and tactics employed by our man Stanley in service to his oeuvre. Most of these comparisons, of course, are due to (and stem from) the incredible, rule-breaking 8th episode, otherwise known as "Trinity" or "the Bomb episode".
In Vulture, they Matt Zoller Seitz points out the use of Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,”...
...an “unorthodox, largely symbol-based score” that “sometimes directs the musicians to play at various unspecific points in their range or to concentrate on certain textural effects.” (Rather like Twin Peaks itself.) Bits of Penderecki’s piece have been used in other genre works with a strong horror component, notably Children of Men, The People Under the Stairs, and The Shining.
That last film is notable because of the Stanley Kubrick connection. The section following the bomb blast is structured as an homage to the “Stargate” sequence that ends Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. That work and this one are both so clearly concerned with ideas of evolution (and the role of weapons in furthering evolution) that it’s safe to say that Lynch is leaning into the comparison. Confidently, too.
It is the highest praise to say that, of all the filmmakers who’ve referenced the final section of 2001, Lynch seems to me the only one to have created something that equals it even as it humbly bows to its example. The post-bomb sequence takes us through what appears to be a series of tunnels, some comprised of nuclear hellfire but others of a more tantalizingly organic texture (as if to literalize the idea, expressed in Kubrick’s tunnels of light, that humanity was “reborn” after 1945). The use of the bomb claimed hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, and was justified retroactively as necessary to make Japan surrender, but even in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians, tacticians, philosophers, and pundits questioned whether any strategic objective could justify unleashing a genocidal monstrosity of science, the likes of which not even the prophet Mary Shelley could have imagined.
Very well put, indeed. The other articles are worth checking out, too.
BOORMAN ON KUBRICK
In this wide-ranging interview with the website Little White Lies, eclectic director John Boorman briefly touches on his friendship with Stanley Kubrick:
Didn’t Kubrick want to use Bill McKinney [who plays the rapist in Boorman's Deliverance] for a film at one point, but was too afraid to meet him?
Stanley called me to ask what he was like. I told him he was a marvellous guy, a tree surgeon when he’s not acting and a wonderful man, really into his meditation. Kubrick said it was the most terrifying scene ever put on film, and that surely he’s got to have that part in him somewhere to be able to play that character. I said of course not, he’s just a marvellous actor. So Stanley cast him in Full Metal Jacket. When Bill was at Los Angeles airport he was called over the tannoy. Kubrick didn’t want him to come, he’d recast the part because he couldn’t face him.
Were you and Kubrick close?
Yeah, we spoke on the phone for years. We were both working at Warners. His method of communication was flat-out interrogation, he would just ask a series of questions, constantly on the look-out for information. He never wanted to go anywhere. I remember coming back from doing The Heretic and we went out for dinner. I’d told him that I’d meet him at the restaurant so asked him where he wanted to go. ‘I’ll let you know’ he said, ‘I’ll pick you up’. He was worried I might tell someone else which restaurant we were going to. It was all pretty paranoid. So he picks me up in his new Mercedes but before we go anywhere he says, ‘Watch this,’ and he activates the central locking. It was something every car had fitted as standard by that point but he was very impressed with it. For someone who gathers all this information, there’d be little things like that of which he had no idea. He didn’t know about ordinary life really. He was so cut off.Read the rest of the interview at Little White Lies. Having personally watched Exorcist 2: The Heretic for the first time recently, I had a real need to try and understand what the fuck is going on in this guy's brain. That movie is balls-out insane.
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
KUBRICK NEWS I NEVER GOT AROUND TO PASSING ALONG!
Check out (and be inspired by) Stanley Kubrick's work as a brilliant "boy genius" photographer, thanks to the fine folks at Konbibi! There are some really cool photographs in this collection, some of which I'd never seen before. Fans of Kubrick's early photography really shouldn't miss out on this link!
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Over at MoviePilot.com, James Dunlap presents his "Fan Theory" about Eyes Wide Shut, asking... was it all a dream? By the time you're done reading his exhaustive and entertaining exegesis, you just might end up convinced.
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In this Vulture story about the all the influences on the TV series Legion, we get the following paragraph, sub-titled "Stanley Kubrick":
British film website Filmoria polled their employees to find out their favorite directors (and the reasons why), and I was glad to see that one of their female employees chose Stanley!
According to Abraham Riesman’s behind-the-scenes feature, Stanley Kubrick haunted the development of Legion, and Hawley was somewhat obsessed with the the late, great filmmaker. You can see Kubrick’s touches all over Legion — and not just because the facility that’s treating David (Dan Stevens) happens to be named Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital. The “normalization” of David feels similar to the treatment of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in the second half of A Clockwork Orange, and the orange jumpsuits definitely look like a product of the era. There’s also a sense in Legion that the design is meant to reflect the confused mental state of the protagonist — production designer Michael Wylie told the Daily Beast, “We’re not supposed to know where we are or what year it is” — and using design to reflect a character’s psychology is a very Kubrickian device utilized across several of his films. Hawley has even referred to Legion as existing in a “hybrid A Clockwork Orange/Quadrophenia world.”
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This FilmMaker Magazine article by Jim Hemphill points out some intriguing parallels between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Raquel Welch jiggle-fest One Million Years B.C., declaring, of the latter: “It’s a surprisingly experimental movie in some ways, telling its story of prehistoric man with virtually no dialogue (what dialogue does exist consists of mostly grunts and made up words) and a reliance on a deliberately paced series of impressionistic images that had a clear influence on Stanley Kubrick.” The same column goes on to point out another Kubrick connection, this time to the Frederic Raphael scripted Two For The Road (directed by Stanley Donen). Raphael, notoriously, helped script Eyes Wide Shut.
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This Alex Sayf Cummings essay for MoviePilot.com asks a very good, salient question: “What is it about Stanley Kubrick that drives some people crazy?” It is a question to which I, myself, will be returning in future blog posts, but in the meantime, I wanted to post this link to Alex's excellent summary of the conspiracy community's latching on to Kubrick and his oeuvre--which has led to such serious projects as the documentary Room 237, as well as to silly fluff like this Oral History of the Faked Moonlanding--to help KubrickU readers get up to date about the current state of affairs in that particular speculative arena.
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Here's a Guardian review of a homosexuality-themed stage production of A Clockwork Orange, which differs significantly from both the Burgess novel and the Kubrick film, and includes at least one Pink Floyd selection to help get the message over.
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I never ran this in February, but on the occasion of Anthony Burgess' 100th birthday, Trainspotting novelist Irvine Welch wrote this beautiful think-piece on the influence A Clockwork Orange had on him and his writing. It begins:
Few writers, whatever the claims made for them by literary critics, ever manage to spawn big cultural moments. One who genuinely did so was Anthony Burgess, with his novel A Clockwork Orange. And, as novelists are often contrary by nature, he was highly ambivalent about this state of affairs. Burgess would disparagingly refer to the book, published in 1962, as a “novella”, regarding it as an inconsequential sliver of his Brobdingnagian canon. He blamed (and there’s really no other term for it) the book’s resonance on the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, which appeared nine years later.
My generation was obsessed with this stylistic, inventive affair, a movie that spurned both mainstream Hollywood concerns and European art house affectations to stake out a unique terrain for British independent cinema. Kubrick’s movie was an influence on the Ziggy-era David Bowie, and it was those cool credentials that made me backtrack to the film, which I first saw at a late-night screening several years after its release. As is generally the way of those things, far fewer of us had enjoyed any exposure to the novel. As a writer who has had many of his own books adapted for screen, I’m a little uncomfortable at conceding that I was in this camp.It's a really good piece. You should read it. Cheers for now!
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
CLOCKWORK ORANGE BUBBLEGUM CARDS!
A Clockwork Orange is another set of trading cards, like The Wicker Man, that never could have existed at the time the film was released. But now, I would rush out to buy a box. Wouldn’t you? I’m happy with the card design, but less so with the Clockwork Orange font which I wish had been a little sharper. To do it over again, I’d just get rid of it. Of course, the cards represent a sort of edited-for-television version of the film, and it’s also the shortest set I’ve done at only 33 cards.Click through to the Dangerous Minds story, linked above, for more information, more cards, and for that Wicker Man set I'm sure you're all dying to check out!
Sunday, March 19, 2017
COOL KUBRICK-RELATED VIDEO SHOWCASE!
Today, I'd like to present you with a bunch of interesting Kubrick-related videos, starting with this rare 1967 trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey that incorporates some Douglas Trumbull test footage into the mix. Thanks to The Playlist for making me aware of this one!
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AV Club presents this intriguing mashup by Richard Vezina, which combines the work of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. Called "Blue Shining", it contains some real nightmare fuel, superimposing a bunch of different Lynch movie and TV show scenes into a new context via The Shining.
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MovieMaker.com has a page featuring three Kubrick "Supercuts" covering three of the master's preferred techniques: The Kubrick Gaze, One-Point Perspective, and Red. They're all from Vimeo, and they're all pretty short, and they're all related, so I'll just leave this link here instead of embedding three more videos into this already crowded blog post.
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And finally for today, I bring you a psychedelic ride through some dude's crazy Hot Wheels track set-up, using a model-mounted GoPro camera. It's called Hot Wheels Nightmare, and it's guaranteed to remind you of the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence in 2001!Wednesday, March 15, 2017
S IS FOR STANLEY
I still haven't seen it yet, but I figured I might as well post a little something about Italian director Alex Infascelli's recently released documentary S is For Stanley, which takes a look at our favorite iconic filmmaker through the eyes of the man who was his devoted driver and manservant for 30 long years, Emilio D'Alessandro.
So, to begin with, here's the English language trailer:
Pretty cool, right? Sure makes me want to see it!
Our first review comes from the Village Voice, and it's by their new lead cinema critic (and former alt.movies.kubrick netizen!) Bilge Ebiri. His review is essential reading for any Kubrick fan, particularly considering it was written by perhaps the premiere Kubrick admirer currently working in the mainstream entertainment media. It begins:
It isn't every day that you're asked to drive a giant dick across London. But for Emilio D'Alessandro, a young Italian émigré, erstwhile race-car driver, and full-time cabbie, it was just another job: It was December of 1970, a blizzard was on, nobody else was around, and the object — a massive sculpture of a phallus — had to be delivered quickly to a company called Hawk Films on the other side of town. Speedy, careful, and prompt, D'Alessandro got it there safely and on time. The recipient, impressed, offered him a regular job. And that's how Emilio D'Alessandro became Stanley Kubrick's personal chauffeur.
He was, in truth, more than that.This is, of course, an understatement. A wonderful part of Ebiri's essay is his eye for how the smallest details from the documentary can be spun out into fairly grand ideas about what lay behind Kubrick's work. It's a positive review, but I would only have expected otherwise from Ebiri if the film had been a hatchet job, which it obviously isn't.
Daniel Eagan's review for Film Journal isn't quite so positive, nor is it half as interesting. Calling the film "a low-key effort geared towards cultists", his review concludes on the following note:
It will take a dedicated Kubrick completist to find inspiration in the director's fondness for pets, bad driving habits and poor typing. S Is for Stanley manages the difficult feat of circling around both of its subjects without saying much interesting about either of them.
Glenn Kenny's New York Times review sits happily between Ebiri's enthusiasm and Eagan's dismissive snark. He concludes his short review indicating that, "for Kubrick enthusiasts, this picture will provide a fun and sometimes moving fix."
It is also perhaps worth noting that all three reviews begin with the story of Emilio's delivery of the smooth white wobbling phallus sculpture/murder weapon from Clockwork Orange; obviously a memorable moment from the doc!
Finally, for our Italian speaking friends, here's an interview with the film's director, Alex Infascelli:
It is also perhaps worth noting that all three reviews begin with the story of Emilio's delivery of the smooth white wobbling phallus sculpture/murder weapon from Clockwork Orange; obviously a memorable moment from the doc!
Finally, for our Italian speaking friends, here's an interview with the film's director, Alex Infascelli:
Friday, February 24, 2017
KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ FEB 25, 2017
How awesome do NASA's new tailored Starliner astronaut suits look, right?! Designed by Boeing, to be worn by astronauts going to and from the International Space Station on their new Starliner transport ship beginning in 2018, i09 wasn't kidding around when they said the suits were "straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey"! And they're not just stylish... they'll keep you alive! New features include an upgraded helmet, which is incorporated into the spacesuit, touchscreen-sensitive gloves, and built-in ventilation. Think they'll come in a size XXXXXXL?
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Feast your eyes on this custom drum kit based on the carpet patterns in The Shining!
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If any of you Kubrick fanatics out there have some spare change burning a hole in your pockets, the man's French vacation house in the Dordogne valley, about five hours south of Paris, has been put up for sale at an eminently reasonable $1.6 million. Photos and other details are available at the link. If you're reading this and you do end up buying it, kindly invite me over, as I speak the language and am a pretty decent cook, and I've been told I'm not too bad of a conversationalist, to boot!
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Last month, Michael Moorcock--another man whose work I greatly admire--wrote an intriguing essay about Kubrick's relationship with Arthur C. Clark for the New Statesman. Entitled "The Odd Couple of Science Fiction", the piece gained some notoriety on social media over a passing mention about Clark being "brought to tears" at the film's premiere over some of the changes Kubrick had made to the story without telling him. Of course, in context, this betrayal comes across as a lot less dramatic than the online click-hunters would have us believe. Anyway, it's a great remembrance that every fan of both Clark and Kubrick owes it to themselves to read. It's full of great insights and interesting moments, and Moorcock even addresses the sordid rumors about Clark's sexual proclivities in as decisive and definitive a manner possible at this late (i.e. posthumous) date. There is one moment that Moorcock relates that I'd like to share with you all, and it comes from the essay's conclusion:I have one other memory of that visit to the 2001 set. After being given a tour of the studio by the MGM publicist, I was led towards Kubrick's office just as the director entered the main building. I prepared to meet the man who had contacted me a year or so earlier. I had many questions. Perhaps he would confirm some of my guesses.Not very flattering to Stanley, for sure, but the authenticity of this account gives credence to everything that comes before.
Kubrick's eyes went straight to me and did not leave me as he spoke brusquely to the publicist.
"Get these people off the set," he said.
We were never face to face again.
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A short film, entitled Kubrick by Candlelight, aims to recreate the filming of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon in Ireland. Here's the film's Kickstarter, where you can learn more about the project. In this interview with the Irish Film and Television Network, director David O'Reilly--whose day job involves location scouting for such A-list projects as Star Wars: Rogue One--discusses all of the complexities and challenges of filming the project in the Irish midlands, as well as the lengths he and his crew went in order to be as true as possible to the source material. Finally, though there isn't much here of interest to Kubrick fans, here's a video of cast member Al Foran having fun impersonating various celebrities while in full costume and makeup:
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In this interview with the UK Independent, UNKLE's James Lavelle reminisces about his acclaimed project from last year, Daydreaming with... Stanley Kubrick, which saw more than 60 artists participate in a celebration of Kubrick's work, held at Somerset House. He also discusses his latest venture, Daydreaming with UNKLE presents... THE ROAD: SOHO. It looks pretty interesting. All my UK peeps, go check it out!
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Okay, so I've finally seen Passengers, Morten Tyldum's morally problematic deep space romance flick, and I have to say, I kinda dug it. And not because of the much ballyhoo'd Kubrick references, which, to be honest, pretty much boiled down to just the somewhat ghostly robot bartender in the vast ship's Shining-like ballroom bar. In this interview with Deadline Hollywood, however, Passengers sound editor Will Files explains how Kubrick inspired both he and the director:
I’m a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, and as it turns out, Morten is also a big fan. I’ve always liked the way Kubrick uses sound, as well as the image. He tends to have a sparse soundtrack—they tend to not be very cluttered— so we really wanted to try to use that, not maybe as a point of reference for how the actual sounds would sound, but in terms of the approach to the sound, keeping it elegant in its simplicity. We wanted everything to sound effortless, and like it was really there. A real sense of reality. As opposed to a film like Star Wars, which is all about being stylized for the point of having fun, this movie was all about being stylized for the point of giving the audience a certain feeling about this ship. We wanted this ship to really have a character.So there you go. Personally, I thought Passengers was a somewhat intriguing story surrounded by an absolutely fantastic sensory spectacle, making it a very fitting second half of a double feature movie night alongside Prometheus. You can use the former to come down from the grisly exhaustion brought on by the latter, and also pretend that they take place in the same fictional universe!
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Here's a great video of Kubrick nut Peter Jackson telling the story about how fellow Kubrick fanatic Adam Savage helped him to understand just exactly how awesome his HAL-9000 prop from 2001 really was. This Nerdist article goes into a bit more detail.
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Guess which films take the Number One and Number Two spots on this Cheat Sheet list of authors who hated the movies made from their books? I'll give you two hints: One didn't like the fact that the last chapter was left out of the movie, and the other has been whining about it to whoever will listen for the better part of
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In this Telegraph UK account, Andrew Birkin describes going from being Stanley Kubrick's teaboy to being one his most trusted assistants.
Kubrick had a horror of flying, so 2001 was made at MGM studios in Borehamwood. I was 19 when I started work as a runner. I was soon barred from the set because I got so distracted: the production office would send me to get 20 boxes of envelopes from the store and I would pass the set and be totally mesmerised and not come back for hours.
One night, Kubrick was having a meeting about the Dawn of Man sequence and I was on hand to supply cups of tea. Kubrick said, ‘Gee, fellas, I can’t believe there isn’t a desert in England.’ The art department said there wasn’t, but I said, ‘I know where there’s one.’
And Kubrick said, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m the tea boy; here’s your cup of tea, sir.’ I vaguely remembered seeing a picture of Formby Sands in an old geography book. The next day they sent me off to photograph it with a Polaroid.
Unfortunately the picture in the book had been taken 40 years earlier when it was all sand and no trees – but if you ducked down low enough and avoided the nuclear reactor in one direction and the high-rise flats in another, it could still arguably look like a desert.
Somebody told me to bump up the photos with production ideas, so I stayed up all night in a Liverpool hotel, then caught the milk train back to the studio, put the lot on Kubrick’s desk – and then dashed back up to Liverpool because I wanted it to look like a miracle.
And indeed at 11am I got a phone call: ‘Come back to the studio – we’re getting you a union ticket [almost impossible to get at that time], and Stanley has doubled your pay.’ I arrived back and was summoned into the conference room.
There were the art department, looking sheepish, and Kubrick, who was really enjoying himself. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Andrew? Is that your name?’ Then he asked the art department why they’d spent £40,000 and many months looking for a desert when the tea boy had come up with one in 24 hours at a total cost of £10, six shillings and eight pence.Birkin went on to a very successful, Kubrick-influenced career as a producer, writer and sometime director. Among his films, the most Kubrickean are The Burning Secret and Cement Garden, both of which he directed, and Perfume, which he co-wrote. Kubrick had expressed interest in filming both The Burning Secret, based on a story by Stefan Zweig, and Perfume, based on the novel by Patrick Suskind.
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Speaking of long lost Kubrick stuff, Cinephilia And Beyond brings us an interview with Kubrick from 1980, conducted by Vincente Molina Foix, and reprinted for the first time ever in that must-have Taschen tome, The Kubrick Archives. Purchase from the link!
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Goddamnit, here's yet another book I'm going to have to pick up, read, and write a review for: Kubrick's Game, which the linked i09.com review compares favorably to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Ernie Cline's Ready Player One. Compounding my misery over this is the fact that I, myself, have long wanted to tackle such a project. Thanks, procrastination--and also, most likely, a lack of the necessary talent and know-how--for ruining yet another life goal.
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In this Cumberland Pennsylvania Sentinel "Senior Moment" op-ed piece, William Parkinson describes the time he and his navy shipmates watched Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for the first time, the year it was released:
The audience was aghast. Moviegoers packing the theater at the U.S. Naval Facilities in Yokosuka, Japan, were literally stunned as Peter Sellers, playing the mentally deranged and physically crippled Dr. Strangelove, rose from his wheelchair to proclaim the benefits of global destruction — to the president of the United States — and shouting, “Mein Führer! I can walk!” There followed a cascade of nuclear explosions that blew the world to bits.
That evening in 1964, the crowd that slowly left the theater was strangely silent; obviously disturbed by what they had witnessed on the screen. They had expected a comedy, of sorts, but coming less than a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the growing concern — and involvement — in the war in Vietnam and increasing sabre rattling by the Soviet Union, the sailors, Marines and their families wandering into that night more than half a century ago had been shaken.
Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” played differently with a military and naval audience than it did with the critics back in the states or with the hometown movie house crowd. Those of us then in uniform had lived for years with the harshest of realities — that things could vanish in a nuclear instant. Such were the facts of the Cold War.
The rest of it is really great, too, comparing Kubrick's terrifyingly educational satiric take on the the technocratic Powers That Be to today's far more (apparently) chaotic situation, in the hope of finding either some answers, or a direction in which to look for them. The search goes on.
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And finally for today's edition of the KNIB's, I present 2001's HAL-9000 and Her's Samantha, having an interesting chat about love, consciousness, and human nature. Enjoy!
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