THE TORONTO EDITION OF THE KUBRICK EXHIBIT IS OFFICIALLY OVER!

On a personal note, I just wanted to thank the fine folks at the TIFF/Bell Lightbox for all of the massive effort they expended in creating a truly worthy showcase for, and fitting tribute to, the greatest practitioner of cinematic magic that the world has ever known. I won't soon forget the experience of being able to get so up close and personal with documents, props, costumes and other objects from Kubrick's personal collection. I realize the traveling exhibit is only a small fraction of what is available to see at the Kubrick Archive in London. God willing, I will one day be able to make the trek overseas and spend some quality time there, like my old AMK compatriot Bilge Ebiri (of Vulture.com fame) got to do.

CLOCKWORK ORANGE MEETS GRAND THEFT AUTO

Not much to say about this one. A bunch of game testers at Rockstar Games decided to use their gaming platform to re-create some iconic scenes from Clockwork Orange. It's pretty self-explanatory - to watch it is to get it - although if you still want more backstory, this Indiewire/Playlist article should suffice. 

STEVEN SODERBERGH'S 110 MINUTE CUT OF 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

I haven't seen it yet, but if you're interested, you can read Soderbergh's reasoning for this experiment and watch a high def version of his cut at his website.

I'm going to watch it now, and report back what I think of it.

ALAN CUMMING IN TORONTO ON EYES WIDE SHUT

From the IndieWire blog, The Playlist:

“Eyes Wide Shut” was Stanley Kubrick’s last film. It’s surreal, polarizing, somewhat perplexing, and incredibly cerebral. It’s also a total mindbender. So what was it like to work on the film, with one of cinema’s legends? Alan Cumming spoke about his experiences for a dozen minutes at the TIFF Bell Lightbox recently, and the truths he revealed shed a lot of light on Kubrick’s process. ... 

So how, with such a prolonged, carrot-dangling audition process, was Cumming available when production finally began? “Basically, I was like hanging out and doing a lot of drugs, so I had time to do Stanley’s film. Or to wait around for Stanley’s film to happen.”

There's more at the link, above. Cumming is awesome, as always.

BRET EASTON ELLIS INTERVIEWS MATTHEW MODINE ABOUT FULL METAL JACKET

Seminal 80's novelist Bret Easton Ellis presents us with a brilliant, incisive, absolutely necessary podcast interview with Matthew Modine, focusing exclusively on the time he spent in England with Stanley Kubrick shooting Full Metal Jacket.

The above is a model sculpt for a Full Metal Jacket project undertaken by model-fiend Peter the Painter.

JESSE WENTE ON COLVILLE AND KUBRICK

In July of last year, I wrote a post about Stanley Kubrick's strategic placement of artworks by legendary Canadian painter Alex Colville throughout The Shining. Now, Toronto's most prestigious art gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), is featuring a massive retrospective of Colville's art, and part of that exhibit is devoted to the artist's influence on - and appearances in - films by Stanley Kubrick and others, including the Coen Bros.

Here is a video of the exhibit's "house film critic", Jesse Wente, discussing what Colville and Kubrick have in common as artists:

Thanks to my lovely friend, photographer Kristan Klimczak, for hipping me to this video!

Finally, as I wrote back in July: "See the essential Overlook Hotel blog for more information about where and how four of Colville’s paintings can be found hidden throughout The Shining. As for why Kubrick chose to highlight this artist’s work in his film… your guess is as good as mine."

EARLY KUBRICK ~ FLYING PADRE (1951)

This is the second in a series of meditations on Kubrick's earliest works, and the way image and moments from those works echo through his entire career. Click here for the first installment. - MT

Stanley Kubrick's second film was 1951's Flying Padre, a documentary short subject about Father Fred Stadtmueller, a Catholic priest from New Mexico who uses a Piper Cub airplane - the "Spirit of St. Joseph" - to reach all the various far-flung ranches and settlements that fall within the vast territory covered by his parish.

With a skimpy runtime of just over 8 minutes, Flying Padre is a rather slight contribution to Kubrick's oeuvre, and in many ways can be seen as a bit of a step backwards from the promising premiere that he'd made with Day of the Fight. Indeed, the only reason Kubrick made Flying Padre was because RKO-Pathé - who had admired and purchased Day of the Fight - paid him $1,500 up front to do so... with the understanding that all expenses, including travel, film and equipment rental, would be covered by that meagre fee. The legendary "Kubrick thrift" held him in good stead, as he managed to break even!

Kubrick biographer Vincent LoBrutto writes: “Unlike Day of the Fight, Flying Padre is a rather typical human-interest newsreel documentary. Kubrick’s filmmaking skills are assured but reveal less of the cinematic talent that lies within. The photography is evenly lit. Shots are composed in classic photojournalist style, pleasing and artful to the eye.”

Let's take a moment to watch Flying Padre together, shall we?

Considering the massive constrictions Kubrick had placed on him, both budgetary and otherwise, it's kind of amazing that he managed to pack so much information and story into such a tight little documentary package. Also, for all its flaws - the lame attempt at injecting an element of suspense with the "sick baby" bit at the end, for instance - one still can't help but spot images and moments that would continue to echo through Kubrick's oeuvre as his budgets, ambition and pretensions would skyrocket beyond anything his cinematic peers would even dare to dream of. And this, beyond the mere use of a narrator, which was a hallmark of Kubrick's early style. In fact, I found more to remind me of future Kubrick films in Flying Padre than I did in Day of the Fight!

Here are a few of the more defensible cases in point...

For instance, when I first saw the post-title shots - slow panning shots of the dry, arid wastes of the American Southwest - I couldn't help but be reminded of the opening shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which were pretty darn similar.

  

Pretty cool, no? And I love how Kubrick captured Father Stadtmueller looking back over his shoulder in this shot, as occurs a number of times with a variety of characters in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Of course, the Leper Colony had a few more controls and dials...

Kubrick's love of aerial shots can be seen in Strangelove, of course, as well as in 2001, during the "Stargate" sequence, and of course, during the opening shots of The Shining.

This one's a bit of a long shot, but there's something about the priest leading the funeral party in Flying Padre that reminded me of the priest leading the funeral party in Barry Lyndon.

Another long shot, but I think there's something a little bit "Eyes Wide Shut" about the Church ceremony we're shown.

A bit less of a stretch is how much Father Stadtmueller resembles the Clockwork Orange padre in certain moments.

Here's one that didn't remind me of any future Kubrick framings, but I did think it might be sort of a sly little anti-clerical subliminal cue planted by Kubrick in his otherwise laudatory little spit-shine of a documentary. I mean, it's a priest, visually trapped in a theological or moral "cage", just like his canaries are trapped in a real-life one! And - unlike his canaries, which he breeds for profit - the priest can't even pro-create!

Although Father Stadtmueller is, without a doubt, nowhere near as threatening a personage as Timothy Carey from The Killing, nevertheless, I couldn't help but be reminded of him when I saw this shot.

Heck, there's even something to remind me of Full Metal Jacket in this movie!

And finally, I apologize for the morbidity of this last selection, but when I first saw the awkward stance that the mother took while comforting her "sick" baby, I couldn't help but think of this similarly staged scene from Eyes Wide Shut.

Okay! So with all of the above speculation out of the way, let's bid a fond adieu to a priest who seems like he was probably a pretty swell guy back in the day. So long, Father Stadtmuller! Until next time, when we tackle The Seafarers!

ROBOT CHICKEN TAKES ON EYES WIDE SHUT

Nice to see Eyes Wide Shut getting some satirical love from those cutting-edge jokesters over at [adult swim]! Lowbrow, but pretty funny too.

MY TOUR OF TORONTO EDITION OF THE KUBRICK EXHIBIT!

Well, I finally made it! The Toronto edition of the world-renowned Kubrick Exhibit, which can be visited until the end of January at the beautiful TIFF Bell/Lightbox building in the heart of Toronto's bustling entertainment district. 

I'm no photographer, unfortunately, so you'll have to excuse the roughness of the photographs below. They frankly fail to capture the magnificent splendor on display at this massive collection of unparalleled cinematic delights. Even so, I'm going to keep my comments to a minimum, letting the props and artifacts from Stanley Kubrick's movies do most of the talking for themselves.

I hope you enjoy my report at least a fraction as much as I enjoyed assembling it for your perusal, and I urge any of you reading this, if at all possible, to make your way down to the Kubrick Exhibit and take it in for yourselves. 

***

Here I am at the threshold, kissing a giant Star Child poster, waiting for the doors to open with my buddy Spider-Man, who accompanied me on this journey and took this photo...

SMOOCH!

And here's my ticket...

A BARGAIN AT TWICE THE PRICE

The TIFF gift-shop was nicely stocked with Kubrick-related knick-knacks, from which I selected Taschen's legendary Stanley Kubrick Archives. I'll have an in-depth review of this incredible book in the near future. Keep watching this space!

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES

Stan the Man's chair, which every Kubrick fan has surely seen in photographs before. And there it was, in the flesh... or splinters, so to speak.

NICE!

Before checking out the exhibit proper, Spidey and I snuck into the back section ans spied this selection of Kubrick's clapboards. 

  

The first official item on the exhibit schedule? Kubrick's Oscar for 2001's special effects and his Career Gold Lion from the Venice Film Festival for his full body of work.

NOT REPLICAS - THE REAL DEAL

MORE ON ALEX NORTH'S UNUSED 2001 SCORE

Quoted by critic/author Michael Ciment in his epochal tome Kubrick - the gold standard of "Kubrickeana" until Taschen's Kubrick Archives came along - Stanley Kubrick described his reaction to the score he commissioned for 2001: A Space Odyssey from one-time Spartacus collaborator Alex North thusly:

Although he and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film."

Read more about this ill-fated musical match - and watch sequences from the film that have been refitted to play North's score instead of the needle-drops we've all come to know and love and associate with this movie and with outer space in general - in this Open Culture article.

WITH THEIR DEAD EYES

From The Simpsons Episode 151: Much Apu About Nothing

So I finally made it to the Toronto edition of the Deutsches Filmmuseum's world-traveling Stanley Kubrick Exhibition, and to call it a success, or "impressive", is just a massive understatement. I am not a photo bug. I rarely take pictures. But today, I took over 130, and I still feel as though I missed out on a ton of great stuff and need to go back. I'll have more to say about the exhibition over the next couple days, but for now, I wanted to bring to your attention what may be the makings of a new "Kubrick conspiracy theory".

Let me explain.

Earlier this evening, while carrying on an email discussion with documentary filmmaker Scott Noble (my recent concordances for his films The Power Principle I: Empire and II: Propaganda, are at my Useless Eater Blog), we found ourselves discussing Eyes Wide Shut. 

Scott wrote:

"I think Cruise and Kidman were chosen precisely because of their seeming vacuity (Christian Bale modelled his performance in American Psycho after Tom Cruise, who also appears in the book). Kubrick was reportedly a HUGE Simpsons fan (in its early years), and there's a line in one of the episodes where Apu, attempting to become more "American" to avoid deportation, hides his Ganesha statue; ashamed, he states, "Who needs the eternal love of Ganesha when I have Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman staring at me from the cover of Entertainment Weekly with their dead eyes!" Perhaps I'm reading too much into this."

Reading too much into it? Perhaps... but something about what Scott wrote gave me pause. 

You see, part of the Kubrick Exhibition is devoted to his unfinished projects. It includes part of the notorious Napoleon archive, and paperwork from The Aryan Papers. However, it also included unused marketing materials, including two posters for Eyes Wide Shut that had been commissioned and printed, but which were ultimately nixed.

Here... have a look:

Rejected "Eyes Wide Shut" Poster

Complete Set of Rejected "Eyes Wide Shut" Posters

Rejected "Eyes Wide Shut" Poster

So... what do you think? Do their eyes look "dead" enough to you? Indeed, is it possible that these posters are evidence that Stanley Kubrick - a "massive Simpsons fan" - was trying to have a go at his movie's top stars?

I have to admit, the idea of Kubrick turning the tables and referencing The Simpsons - a show that has referenced his work more times than even an obsessive like me can count - is somewhat of a mind-blower. It even exhibits a Kubrickean symmetry of sorts, mirroring the way Kubrick's artistic visions have been mirrored and refracted through the popular culture by thousands upon thousands of imitations, homages, rip-offs, etc...

So what do YOU think? Was Kubrick taking the piss? Did he have The Simpsons in mind when he commissioned this disturbing promotional artwork? What were Tom and Nicole's reactions like when they first saw these posters? And was the decision to scrap these posters made before or after Kubrick's untimely demise more than three months prior to Eyes Wide Shut's premiere?

I have a lot more digging to do on this story, consulting with fellow scholars of the occult and reviewing my extensive files on Scientology's secret teachings to see if there might be any hidden significance to the unique, bristling color palette used by the artist, or anagrams of anything of a paracultural nature worth mentioning. 

Keep watching this space.

(SIGH) I GUESS YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY NOW...

OPEN CULTURE ON KUBRICK'S MUSICAL CHOICES

The fine folks at OpenCulture.com have put together an intriguing, short history of Stanley Kubrick's mid-career decision to switch from using film-specific scores like those for The Killing, Paths of Glory and Spartacus, to favoring needle-drop selections from his vast collection of classical music, as best exemplified by the iconic, paradigm-shattering soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As it turns out, not everyone was wowed by this musical evolution. No less a light than the legendary composer Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver) declared: “It shows vulgarity, when a director uses music previously composed! I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the height of vulgarity in our time. To have outer space accompanied by The Blue Danube, and the piece not even recorded anew!”

Then again, maybe Herrmann was just showing solidarity with his fellow film composer Alex North, who only found out that Kubrick had abandoned his full, lush orchestral score for 2001 when he attended the film's premiere screening. Not cool, Stanley... not cool.

The Open Culture article ends thusly:

Thanks to Spotify, you can listen to over four hours of classical music that Kubrick used in his movies. Find the playlist below, and a list of the classical music in Kubrick films here. The playlist features everything from Beethoven (A Clockwork Orange) to Schubert (Barry Lyndon) to Bartók (The Shining). If you need to download Spotify, grab the software on this site.

STANLEY KUBRICK INFO-GRAPHIC FROM THE GUARDIAN UK

According to every good liberal's favorite UK broadsheet, The Guardian, the following info-graphic contains "everything you need to know" about "one of the greatest directors of all time." If any of you get the Shallow HAL 9000 "joke" in the upper right corner, please explain it to me because it's going right over my pointy little head. 

KUBRICK: KING OF COSTUMES

This NOW Magazine article begins, sort of condescendingly...

Stanley Kubrick wasn’t known for his personal style, but the visually arresting costumes in his films have haunted our cultural psyche for decades. Here are five of the most memorable...

Of course, it goes without saying that the costumes from 2001: A Spacey Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut are fantastic. But there's something to be said for the simplicity of a grey anorak, a simple white shirt without ties, and an assortment of sweaters. Quite frankly, he's a personal style guru to yours truly!