MOVIE
The Gist: A Case Study In The Pathologies Of Glory
$199.92 (with Eight-film Stanley Kubrick Collection)
"Bliss and heaven! It was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh!" A Clockwork Orange's Alex loves his Ludwig Van, and American cinema's alpha droogs - Spielberg, Scorsese, Nicholson, Cruise - adore the late Stanley Kubrick. And their fervor's contagious. Just a few minutes of A Life in Pictures, directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law and longtime exec producer Jan Harlan, will give you a nice warm vibratey feeling all through your guttiwuts. Forget the controversy, the ultraviolence, the obsessive control; forget that every film from Lolita to Eyes Wide Shut dissects passion in clinical detail. Kubrick's cinéaste fans, explains critic Richard Schickel, "love Stanley in a very uncomplicated way": what's in the frame. To its credit, Pictures expands that frame to include home movies. But it also crops out the emotional complexity that propelled Kubrick's slap-kiss allure.
His career chronology continues to be striking: a Look photographer at 17; a directing streak starting in 1960 that spanned Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001; "a film director whose primary influence has become himself" by the time of Clockwork (1971). The doc's talking heads speak no evil; Nicholson, tellingly, recalls Kubrick's method: "You don't try to photograph the reality, you try to photograph the photograph of the reality." On rare occasions, Harlan hits that mark himself, notably the hilarious accounts of hyperscrupulous Kubrick mollycoddling his cats.
At finish, Pictures, like Tom Cruise's narration, is neither as intimate nor irreverent as its subject deserves. Refusing to embrace Kubrick's brilliant complications, this revisionist history makes the master's cool genius feel less, not more, human - not like Alex, but HAL. Appy-polly-loggies. Happy 2001.
Warner Bros.: www.warnerbros.com.
STREET CRED
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Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
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