Incompetence on High

Film: Paths of Glory
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

How revered is Stanley Kubrick? He made a mere 13 full-length features in his lifetime, and a whopping 10 of them appear on The List. Some of those (say Lolita, Barry Lyndon, and Eyes Wide Shut) could be dumped without much fuss, and his third film, The Killing, should probably be added. I’ve seen most of Kubrick. In fact, one of the only ones I hadn’t still seen was Paths of Glory, a film that I’ve heard nothing but good things about. Thus, with expectations high, I started watching.

I have a hypothesis concerning war films. There are a lot of great World War II films, a number of great Vietnam War films, but very few great World War I films. When it comes to WWI films, the bulk of the good ones come from places other than the United States. There are two reasons for this, I think. The first is that unlike most of the wars in which the U.S. participated, we were in World War I for a relatively short period. While the countries of Europe raged against each other, the U.S. sat back watching until the very end. The second reason is the way form the war took. It may not have been the least mobile war in history, but it certainly ranks. Front lines changed almost not at all for years.

14 Will Get You 20

Film: Lolita
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I was tempted, very tempted, to put “comedy” in the tags for this review of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. Despite being most definitely a devious domestic drama and a twisted and disturbing romance, there is a definite sense of black humor running through the entire thing. In many ways, the situation is so perverse and the editing so severe because of its perversity and the Hays Code, it almost needs to be viewed as comic. I’m also going to annoy a few people with this review; in the 1001 Movies blogging community, Lolita is regularly seen as the least of Kubrick’s films on the list. I found a strange pleasure in it, a bit of cinematic schadenfreude.

For those who don’t know the story, allow me to sum it up very quickly: academic and quirkily named Humbert Humbert (James Mason) takes a position in the United States. The summer before, he moves to a small town and takes a room in the home of a widow named Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). He agrees to stay because of the seductive power of Charlotte’s daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyons). Eventually, Humbert-squared marries Charlotte to get closer to his new step-daughter, and he eventually embarks on a sexual relationship with the young girl. This is pretty much the plot of Nabokov’s book as well. The only major change made by Kubrick is upping her age (roughly 14 in the film, 12 in the novel).

Sword and Sandals

Film: Spartacus
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

You expect certain things from certain directors once you’ve seen enough of their work. It’s difficult once one has seen a great deal of Kubrick’s work to fit a film like Spartacus in with Dr. Strangelove and The Shining. And yet, Kubrick it is. I still find it difficult to reconcile this fact with what I expect to see from good old Stanley, and this is despite the fact that I’ve seen this film before.

Our hero, Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), is a Roman slave sent to work in mines at the tender age of 13. When a fellow slave collapses and he is commanded to essentially let the poor guy die, he fights back, and for his trouble is strapped to a rock and left to die as a lesson to the other slaves. Fate intervenes with the arrival of Batiatus (Peter Ustinov), a slave master and owner of a gladiatorial school. He arranges to purchase Spartacus, sending our hero off to life in the gladiatorial pits after a good six months of learning how to swing a sword.

How Many Boobs Do You Need?

Film: Eyes Wide Shut
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Once upon a time, Nicole Kidman was a beautiful woman. I’m not sure precisely when she changed from beautiful woman into a botoxed mannequin with a frozen expression, but it happened sometime within the last few years. Evidence for just how damn pretty she was can be found in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s last film.

Eyes Wide Shut was celebrated initially for several reasons. It was Kubrick’s final film, and Manly Stanley didn’t make too many films in the first place. Second, it starred real husband and wife couple Tom Cruise and the aforementioned Nicole Kidman. Third, this film ramped up the sexuality to just shy of porn levels (much of which was cut or digitally altered to ensure an R rating rather than the dreaded NC-17). So let’s jump in.

Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and his wife Alice (Kidman) are invited to a party being held by their friend Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). During the party, Bill recognizes a former medical school colleague named Nick Nightingale (Todd Field) playing the piano; we also learn that Nick dropped out of med school. During the party, Bill and Alice get separated. Alice dances with a charming and mildly seductive Hungarian named Sandor Szavost (Sky Dumont), who makes no secret of the fact that he would very much like to take her off in a private room and have his way with her.

At the same time, Bill is being aggressively pursued by a pair of nubile young women. Just as Bill is seriously reconsidering his marriage vows, he gets pulled away. It seems that Victor has already reconsidered his marriage vows, and the young woman (named Mandy, and played by Julienne Davis) he’s been sexing up has had a very bad reaction to the drugs she’s been shooting.

And so neither of the Harfords breaks their marriage vows, at least at this point. As Bill and Alice talk, though, it becomes an argument about the party. Bill is convinced that Alice would never be unfaithful to him, but she relates a story to him about a fantasy she had involving a young military man she saw on a previous vacation. And suddenly Bill becomes obsessed with thoughts of his wife’s possible infidelity.

From this point forward, Bill sinks into a world of sex. Significantly, he runs into Nick again, who tells him of a gig he has been taking regularly. An hour before his performance, he is given an address and a password. He goes and plays the piano, but must play blindfolded. At the last performance, the blindfold slipped, and he intimates that what is going on is a crazed sex party. Bill gets the password and runs off to find a costume, since everyone at the party wears cloaks and masks. At the costume shop, he discovers the owners daughter having sex with two Japanese gentlemen, and we discover later that the shop owner is essentially prostituting his daughter (Leelee Sobieski).

However, it’s the orgy in the middle of the film that caused all the controversy, raises all the eyebrows, and otherwise makes this film what it is. And it is an orgy, complete with something like a pagan ritual and tons of naked women. After the initial ceremony, Bill goes wandering through the giant house and sees, well, full-on sex acts being performed in every room, most of them with a fairly captive audience watching. However, it soon becomes evident that Bill does not belong there, and he is forced out. He returns home and discovers that Alice has been having dreams that are very similar to what he just witnessed.

And then shit gets really strange. Rather than get too detailed, let’s just go with this: sex, threats, death, more threats, disappearances, nudity, and sex.

This is a film that can be interpreted in any number of ways, I think. Certainly one can look at this as a sort of dark fantasy of Bill’s triggered by his wife’s mental infidelity. It does play that way in many respects—the fantasy that pushes Bill into this particular situation is both sexually interesting and arousing (the orgy) and sexually emasculating (Alice’s dream of having sex with countless men while Bill watches helplessly). But in many ways this can be interpreted as Alice’s dream as well. The frequent black-and-white shots of her having sex with the naval officer could easily be interpreted has her fantasy and not Bill’s thoughts.

It’s an interesting film in the sense that Kubrick is obviously using sex as the draw here, and there is a shit-ton of full-frontal female nudity in this film. I can easily see a bunch of guys watching it, or at least fast-forwarding to the “good parts” for the acres of boobs in the middle of the film. But Kubrick, while certainly willing to use those acres of boobs to get people into their seats, is certainly investigating more here. I’d suggest that regardless of whose dreams we are seeing here, this film is really in many ways looking at the sort of spiritual malaise of this group of insanely wealthy people who are evidently bored with their own existence. The sex is a cover for people looking for something more and grasping at sex. Alice and Bill need to work their way through this, or need to rediscover their own relationship, to survive.

Interesting and weird, but not my favorite Kubrick. Ultimately, the sex and the nudity becomes something not titillating, but grotesque. Of course, that may well have been the point after all.

Why to watch Eyes Wide Shut: Damn sexy, at least up to a point.
Why not to watch: It’s much longer than it needs to be.

Bang Bang Shoot Shoot

Film: Full Metal Jacket
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television.

Some films are difficult to review because so much has already been said about them, coming up with something new is nearly impossible. Full Metal Jacket is like that in a lot of ways. This is a film that essentially has a standard opinion with which most people agree. The first half of the film is generally considered to be some of Kubrick’s best work, while the general vibe from viewers is that the film peters off in the second half, becoming more or less a standard war film, albeit a war film directed by Stanley Kubrick.

There is some truth to this notion, and the reason for it is pretty clear. Full Metal Jacket is a story told in two parts. This means that people will naturally make a favorite of one part and consider the other part to be considerably weaker. When this happens with a film as highly regarded as Full Metal Jacket, the stronger half of the film grows over time to become something much more than what it is, while the weaker half is diminished in the eyes of viewers until it is something unworthy to be watched. That was certainly in the neighborhood of my opinion going in, and it’s the opinion of almost everyone I know who has seen this film. The opening 45 minutes are as close to perfect as a film gets, and then Full Metal Jacket sucks.

Guess what. Not true. While I’m still of the opinion that the first chunk of this film is by far the stronger part, the second half is far better than I previously gave it credit for being. There’s a lot going on here that I never really wanted to pay attention to, simply because it was the second, inferior part of a movie that starts so strong.

For the most of the first part of the film, we are unaware of who the narrator is. Instead, we have a collection of men entering basic training in the Marine Corps. While several of these men are in most of the scenes, it soon becomes evident that we are focusing primarily on Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) and Privates Cowboy (Arliss Howard), Joker (Matthew Modine), and Gomer Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio). Cowboy gets his nickname because he’s from Texas; Joker gets his because he can’t keep his big mouth shut; Gomer Pyle gets his because there’s not much he can do right.

This sequence of the film is as dehumanizing as almost any horror film I have seen. The men are stripped of their humanity and built into marines by the constant, brutal abuse of Hartman, who spares no pity for anyone, least of all Private “Pyle.” As the platoon screw-up, Pyle is constantly on Hartman’s bad side. Eventually, it gets to the point that Hartman starts punishing the rest of the men for each time Pyle does something wrong, which leads to retaliation, which causes Pyle to slip further and further into a sort of paranoid dementia. Eventually, on the night after graduation, Pyle slips his mental tether completely and guns down Hartman before turning the gun on himself. The complete stripping of humanity is done—the recruits have been turned into effective killers. D’Onofrio’s portrayal here is one of the best in his career—it’s safe to say that it’s the role that turned him into the actor he is.

And then we’re in Vietnam, and suddenly most viewers want to change the channel. It’s evident now (actually a little before this) that Joker is our main character. He’s in country, and he is a correspondent for Stars and Stripes. He frequently works with a cameraman nicknamed Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard), who got the nickname because he’s never left the rear guard and has never been out in the action.

And then the Tet Offensive happens and Joker is sent out into the field with Rafterman tailing. Joker hunts up his old basic training mate Cowboy, is introduced around the squad, and they go out hunting for the Viet Cong, an action that essentially takes the rest of the film.

The question I have is why so many people seem to feel that this part of the film has no merit. While I freely agree that it doesn’t have the same power as the opening, which essentially has at its heart the idea that the military wants to train men to kill without question and without mercy, essentially removing their humanity to turn them into weapons, I disagree that the second half is considerably worse. It’s actually still very compelling, in no small part because of the personalities we encounter in Cowboy’s squad. There is Crazy Earl (Kieron Jecchinis), who celebrates his position in the war and fears its ending. There is Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), who is one step away from homicidal mania and is also the type to whom nothing bad in a war really happens. We meet Eightball (Dorian Harewood), who appears to be the only thing that keeps Animal Mother in line.

What we see here is that the war is just as dehumanizing and terrible as the training. Perhaps, because this is the reality, this is why the training is so brutal and crushing. The only way to come out of the war intact in any way is to reach a point where nothing matters, where life and death are merely states of existence. When a member of the squad is killed, there is some remorse and a little sadness, but not much. No one can afford it.

Is it the best film about Vietnam? No—that’s Apocalypse Now. But it’s right underneath it.

Why to watch Full Metal Jacket: The first 45 minutes and R. Lee Ermey’s coming-out party.
Why not to watch: Its reputation for ending weakly might keep you away.

Non-Traditional Horror

Film: The Shining
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

No less a luminary than Stephen King once said that horror comes in three basic varieties. The lowest level is the gross-out, which he likened to the lights going out and you being hit with something green and slimy. The second level is the horror, which is the lights going out and you being grabbed by a claw. The highest and most difficult level is the terror, which is the lights going out and you can sense something behind you and hear its breathing, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there. This is appropriate, because King wrote the novel version of The Shining, which Stanley Kubrick made into a sort-of based on the book film.

Since The Shining has become such a major part of film culture, you’ve either seen the film or you know enough about it that you can follow along without much of a plot summary. I’ll keep this short and sweet. An aspiring writer agrees to be the caretaker of a large resort in the middle of nowhere over the winter. He and his wife and son go there. We discover that bad things have happened at this hotel and have left a sort of make-you-go-crazy residue that makes the guy go homicidal when the place is completely cut off from civilization. Oh, and the boy has some sort of ESP. Weird shit happens. A lot.

What sets The Shining apart from other horror films isn’t that it strives for and achieves all three of King’s levels of horror. It’s that it goes somewhere else entirely. The film is absolutely saturated with a deep sense of wrongness. It contains so many things that are not completely opposite reality, but are just different enough to be truly disturbing, mind-searingly, horribly disturbing.

We find out early about the past of the Overlook Hotel when the new caretaker, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), is told of a winter caretaker in the past named Grady. Grady got a bad case of cabin fever and took an axe to his wife and daughters, then blew his own head off. We also learn that the Overlook as built on an Indian burial ground, and if the movies have taught us anything, it’s that building on top of any sort of old cemetery is a really bad idea.

Nicholson’s performance is sort of the ultimate Jack Nicholson performance—it’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Batman and a few more besides. He slips into the insanity so naturally that he’s much further gone than we think by the time we realize he’s gone insane.

While Nicholson’s performance is a great one, it is Shelley Duvall who steals the film as Jack’s wife Wendy. As Jack starts to slip more and more into his insanity, Wendy becomes more and more terrified of him, and Shelley Duvall has a natural deer in the headlights look to her, a terrified expression she does so well that it’s impossible to believe that she isn’t on the edge of simply falling apart for about the entire second half of the film.

The other character we spend a lot of time with is the son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Danny knows things and has premonitions of the future. These come out through his imaginary friend, Tony, who speaks through Danny’s finger in a disturbing, creaky voice. It becomes almost immediately evident to us in the audience that Danny really can tell the future and sees things that others don’t. We get this confirmed when we meet Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) at the Overlook. Dick has a bit of the “shine” to him as well and can speak with Danny mentally. Danny spends a lot of his time riding a trike through the halls of the hotel and encountering a number of disturbing ghosts, particularly the two little murdered girls, who are absolutely terrifying.

The most famous scene in the film is Jack hacking through the door of the bathroom with a fire axe, leaning in, and saying, “Here’s Johnny!” While a great scene, and one that has been referenced and parodied for the last 30 years, it is not the scariest moment of the film. This comes when Wendy, looking for Jack, gets a look at the novel he’s been working on for the past few months. As it turns out, it’s nothing more than the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over in a variety of patterns. As she flips through page after page, seeing the same words over and over, she finally realizes the level of Jack’s psychosis. The look of despair on her face in this moment is so real, it’s almost impossible to believe that she is acting and not truly experiencing the emotion herself.

That’s what makes this film work throughout, the sense of things just being wrong. Near the end, Wendy tries to leave the hotel and runs into a series of ghosts or spirits or visions, many of which are actually more disturbing than something horrible, bloody, or dead. In particular, she finds a man in some awful bunny/bear suit performing some sort of sexual act on another man—we see nothing, but the two men stop and simply stare at her until she flees in terror.

For what it’s worth, The Shining is different from King’s novel in a number of significant ways. It’s a completely different vision, and much of the source material is simply not here because Kubrick didn’t have the room for it. I honestly don’t miss it. The Shining is a film that stays with the viewer for a long time because of its strange and horrible otherworldly evil quality. This is not a film to take lightly or to watch on a whim. But it’s absolutely a film that belongs in this list.

Why to watch The Shining: It’s genuinely and deeply scary.
Why not to watch: It’s nightmare fuel.

My Return to Kubrick

Film: Barry Lyndon
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

When I started this a little more than a year ago, I watched several Kubrick films right away. I realized soon enough that if I kept it up, I’d be through all of the Kubrick-y goodness in a few months and have no Kubrick to look forward to over the long months and years to come. So I stopped watching them, despite the fact that I had ample opportunity to watch more of them. I figured if I was doing the same thing with Hitchcock, I could do the same with Kubrick.

Well, it’s been more than a year since I screened a Kubrick film, so I figured I’d waited long enough. I’m not entirely certain why I selected Barry Lyndon save for the fact that it was immediately available to me, and I’ve made it a goal to continue watching a few long films every month so that I’m not buried by them at the end.

Barry Lyndon is the tale of a man born Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) as he stalks through the various courts of Europe in the mid- to late-18th century. His goal is to live the life of a gentleman, something taken from him at a very early age when his father is slain in a duel over some horses. Barry is raised in the home of his relatives, where he falls in love with Nora (Gay Hamilton), his cousin. This is made complicated by the fact that the family is in dire straits for money, and thus wants to marry Nora off to a wealthy British officer named John Quinn (Leonard Rossiter). Barry engages to fight a duel with the man and slays him (he thinks), and is thus forced to go on the lam to avoid imprisonment. He’s immediately robbed, and forced into the British Army as a way to survive.

As it turns out, the duel was a sham, and Nora did marry Quinn after all. Now in the service, Barry gets his first taste of battle and decides he’s had enough. At the first opportunity, he steals the uniform of a courier and deserts only to be eventually pressed into service by the Prussian Army. It is here that his life changes again; Barry is assigned the task of playing servant to the Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee). The Prussians believe the man to be a spy, but he’s really just a card cheat. Barry throws in with him immediately, and the two work out a scheme to keep them in money. Barry helps the Chevalier cheat at cards, and does the dirty work of dueling those who refuse to pay.

Barry’s life changes again when he meets the lovely Lady Honoria Lyndon (Marisa Berenson). Her husband, the sick Lord Lyndon (Frank Middlemass) confronts Barry, and then is so enraged by the young man that he immediately has a heart attack and dies. Barry marries the widow and officially tacks her family name onto his own, becoming Barry Lyndon.

So now we’ve seen the rise; it’s time for the fall, because no good epic story about a complete bastard can ever be without a fall of at least the same length as the rise. The newly named Barry Lyndon begins indulging himself at every possible opportunity. The two have a son named Bryan, but the heir to the estate and the Lyndon name is young Lord Bullingdon (played as a child by Dominic Savage, and as a young adult by Leon Vitali), Lady Lyndon’s son from her previous marriage. Lord Bullingdon and Lyndon take an immediate dislike to each other, one that continues to grow through the years.

A large part of this enmity is that Bullingdon holds the title, and should anything happen to Lady Lyndon, Barry, his mother, and his son will all be turned out without a penny between them. Lyndon, realizing this, spends a great deal of the Lyndon fortune in an effort to get himself a title. It all goes for naught when Bullingdon insults him publically and Lyndon beats his stepson severely. While this manages to get rid of the stepson, it also gives Lyndon a reputation for merciless cruelty, and he is abandoned by his society peers.

To pile tragedy on top of problems, Lyndon’s young son is killed in an accident, sending Lyndon into a spiraling depression of grief and alcohol. It all comes to a head when Bullingdon returns and challenges his stepfather to a duel. The results of said duel are better kept as a spoiler.

*** HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN ***

Bullingdon gets to shoot first, but his nerves cause the gun to go off prematurely. With his shot, Lyndon fires into the ground instead of at his stepson, essentially granting the boy his life. Whether this is from pity, or because he realizes that killing the lad will make him all the more hated isn’t clear. What is clear is that given a clear chance, he refuses to kill Bullingdon.

For this mercy, Bullingdon’s response is especially cold. Declaring that he has not yet had satisfaction, he takes another pistol and fires, wounding Lyndon in the leg. As a result, Lyndon has his left leg amputated below the knee. To finish him off, Bullingdon grants him an annual income of 500 guineas if he leaves England and never returns. Given that his only other option is jail, Lyndon takes it and returns to Ireland with his mother. He returns to his gambling ways, but never with any success.

*** BANG BANG, SHOOT SHOOT ***

The question here is one of crime and punishment as well as redemption. Is Lyndon redeemed by his actions at the end? I don’t know. I think it more likely that his redemption comes instead from the punishment he receives. But again, I don’t really know.

I also don’t know if I like it. Evidently, a great many people feel that this is one of Kubrick’s best films, and while it’s certainly pretty, I found very little here that got me excited. One man’s social climb and fall isn’t a story that excites me too much, and while everything here is beautifully filmed and appears to be exquisitely authentic, I sometimes found my mind wandering.

Where the film excels is the overall look. Kubrick is often at his most interesting when it comes to the visual style and appeal of his films, and Barry Lyndon does not disappoint. Many of the scenes are lit by candlelight, not just in appearance on screen, but in actuality; Kubrick used electric lighting only when absolutely necessary. This gives the look of the film another level of authenticity the really does play. It looks like 18th century paintings, which is almost certainly what Kubrick was after.

But this authentic look comes in the service of a very slow-moving plot in which the few points of actual action are the punctuation in some long sentences in which not much happens. As always, I’m impressed by Kubrick’s visual artistry. I just wish that for this film I were more impressed with the actual story taking place.

Why to watch Barry Lyndon: A great period piece with Kubrick at the helm.
Why not to watch: No one to root for.

Horrorshow

Film: A Clockwork Orange
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on big ol’ television.


There I was, sitting in my basement making up my rasoodock of what to do with the evening. There are papers that must be graded, but also this film to viddy all on my own oddy-knocky. It was made by Stanley Kubrick, some great chellovek who made a bolshy great pile of cutter, such that he might be like Bog and all his saints, oh my brothers.

When I think of movies that fascinate me, I frequently forget about A Clockwork Orange until such time as I watch it again. Once I do, I remember how much I like this movie despite how difficult it can be to watch. This is Kubrick at his best, at the absolute height of his abilities as a filmmaker.

All films are of a time, place, and creator. The power of A Clockwork Orange is such that I cannot imagine anyone else making this film, nor can I imagine it coming from any other era. This film is unquestionably from the early 1970s and could not have come from any other time period. It would be an entirely different film if it was created in a different decade.

Kubrick was an incredibly smart filmmaker, and this movie is ample evidence. A Clockwork Orange is hardly an innovative story—the basic question is whether or not being good without choice is better than being bad by choice. If a person has his or her free will taken away, do they continue to be a person, or are they something significantly less? This is the “clockwork orange” of the title—an organic thing that is nonetheless without the ability to make a choice for itself. It’s also possible that it’s a minor corruption of “A Clockwork Orang,” or a mechanized man without free will.

What makes the story so great is the setting. The original novel by Anthony Burgess takes place in the near future, a world that is terrorized by youth gangs who attack anything they wish, do anything they wish, steal anything they wish, and suffer virtually no consequences. Burgess is a master of language, a virtuoso of the written word, and of adapting language to suit his various purposes. He’s good enough at this that he created the language used by the proto-humans in Quest for Fire.

For A Clockwork Orange, he developed his own slang, called Nadsat. This language used by his narrator in the book is also used by most of the teens throughout the story. Based on a combination of rhyming slang, schoolboy slang, and Russian, Nadsat is a complete language in and of itself, difficult at first to follow but ultimately cohesive and following a complete set of rules.

The evidence of Kubrick’s genius is that he left most of the Nadsat in the film. While this does make some of the dialogue difficult to understand at times, much of it is simple to follow. It adds a unique texture to the film, adding to its futuristic and otherworldly qualities.

The film is also visually striking throughout. One of the best known images of the film is Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) in his white outfit and black bowler, false eyelashes on one eye, holding a glass of drugged milk. Perhaps more well known, and much more striking, is that same Alex in a straightjacket, head held in place with wires coming off the top, eyes clamped open, forced to watch film after film while an assistant douses his eyes with a constant stream of eyedrops.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our Nadsat-speaking narrator, Alex, is a juvenile delinquent of the worst and most vicious caliber. Within the first few scenes of the film, he and his three droogs, Pete (Michael Tarn), Georgie (James Marcus), and Dim (Warren Clarke) savagely beat a beggar, beat up a rival gang headed by their foe Billy Boy, steal a car and run pedestrians and other traffic off the road, and break into a country house, savagely beating the owner and raping his wife. And then, Alex goes home to bed, because he has school the next day. It’s worth noting that while he’s a little older here, in the book, our humble narrator is a mere 15.

The rape sequence is notable for its savagery as well as the fact that, while he prepares his victims, Alex sings “Singin’ in the Rain” in preparation for his festivities. It’s a brilliant move by Kubrick. A song that for so many years had such pleasant associations becomes, in the span of a couple of minutes, attached to a scene of depravity and horror. It’s nearly impossible for me to hear the song again, even in the context of the movie that made it famous, without flashing back a little to Alex wearing his rubber mask and emphasizing particular words by kicking Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee).

Things go sour for Alex the next day. Warned by his probation officer to stay out of trouble, Alex and his gang instead quarrel amongst themselves. Alex reasserts his dominance by thrashing two of his mates. Then they break into a spa, where Alex inadvertently kills the resident by bludgeoning her with a giant ceramic phallus.

Here again, the visual brilliance of the film is evident. The spa is decorated, at least in the one room, with incredibly suggestive art. In addition to the giant phallus (attached to a combination scrotum/sphincter), the art on the walls shows women either pleasuring themselves or posing in pre-sex positions. And in the midst of this, the woman is killed in what is, ultimately, a simulated sex act.

From here we follow Alex to prison, where he falls in with the prison priest (Godfrey Quigley). The priest is convinced of Alex’s trying to better himself. The boy does, in fact, spend a lot of time reading the Bible, but it becomes evident to us that he is interested less in salvation and more in many of the Bible’s more lurid tales. This is evidenced when we see Alex reading, then watch his mental picture of the crucifixion, with him driving Christ onward by beating him with a whip.

Ultimately, Alex submits to the new Ludovico Technique, which is guaranteed to completely reform him in a couple of weeks. Essentially, Alex is forced, eyes clamped open and otherwise restrained, to watch films of beatings, rapes, and other atrocities while being drugged to feel ill. Essentially, he is conditioned a la Pavlov’s pooches to respond to sex and violence with intense nausea, guilt, and feelings of suicide. Once “cured,” he is released again into a brutal world where he is no longer capable of defending himself, since even self-defense makes him violently ill.

These scenes of the Ludovico Technique are difficult to watch, but also demonstrate the commitment of this film. They had to be pure torture for MacDowell to undergo, and yet he does. There is no way to fake what was being done to him, and he soldiers on, acting through what must have truly been something like torture.

The film is graced by an incredible soundtrack of electro-techno Beethoven performed by Walter Carlos in the few years before he became Wendy Carlos. It is both classic and disturbing, and a perfect complement to the film.

If I have one complaint about this movie, it’s that Kubrick based his film on the American version of the book. For whatever reason, when Burgess’s novel came to the U.S., the 21st and final chapter was omitted. That 21st chapter is absolutely pivotal—it changes the entire meaning of everything that happened. Kubrick’s film ends on chapter 20, which is also as far as I knew the book went the first time I read it. Now, having read the restored novel, I would have liked to see what Kubrick would do with it. Part of me imagines he still would have stopped where he did—but I’d have liked him to have that choice.

Should you watch it? Yes. But you should also read the book. Just make sure you find a copy with a decent Nadsat glossary in the back, or you’ll likely find yourself lost.

Why to watch A Clockwork Orange: Even 40 years after it was made, it has lost none of its original power to shock, awe, or provoke thought and discussion.
Why not to watch: It is tortuous in places.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Yawn

Films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solyaris
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library (2001), DVD from Bettendorf Public Library through interlibrary loan (Solyaris), both on big ol’ television.


There are films that give film critics a bad name. Had I a dollar for every time somebody complained about the fact that the movies that film critics like are all foreign titles with a lot of talking and not much action, or movies that are completely incomprehensible to all but the most erudite, well, I’d be able to write this blog full time and live off the interest. Just as there are bands who are known and beloved by music critics without having much of a general fan base, there are films that critics adore and gush over while the rank and file movie watcher is left cold.

2001: A Space Odyssey is sort of like that, I think. When it was released, it was thought of as a great movie to watch zoned out on a variety of chemicals, and I can see that, particularly the ending sequence as our lone astronaut pal goes barreling down a corridor of shifting lights and landscapes for what seems like an eternity. These days, though, I’m not so sure. I have a sense, I think, of what a lot of people will sit through willingly and what they will throw their hands up at, and today, 40 years or more after the release of this film, I don’t know how much of 2001 a typical audience can take.

It’s not that the film is incomprehensible, although very little is actually explained here. It’s that the film is incredibly, ploddingly slow. Nothing happens for vast stretches of time. We get long moments on screen of no dialogue, and even no sound—just images. Some of the most well-known sequences, ones that have been repeatedly referenced in other films and television shows stretch and stretch and stretch for minutes on end. The docking sequence, set to the Blue Danube waltz, goes on for what seems like forever, just a ship floating toward a space station and eventually touching down.

The plot, as best it can be comprehended, is as follows. We start in the distant prehistoric past. A tribe of proto-humans is visited by a gigantic black monolith that, evidently, gives them the power of rudimentary thought. At least shortly after touching the monolith, one of the proto-humans figures out how to use a discarded animal bone as a tool, and uses it to both procure food for the tribe and to slay one of the tribe’s enemies. The proto-human (called Moon-Watcher and played by Daniel Richter) tosses the bone into the air, where a jump cut turns it into the ship of the docking sequence.

Now we’re in the near future. Mankind has colonized the moon, and it’s evident that, unlike 1968 when the film was made, we’ve made friends with the Soviets. The space station appears to be of the international variety. A scientist named Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) is taken to the moon because something has been discovered. There is another one of those monoliths that has been buried under the moon’s surface. While investigating the black slab, the moon’s rotation brings the slab into the sunlight, which causes it to emit an ear-piercing shriek.

We jump forward again. Now we are on the first manned mission to Jupiter. The crew consists of three men in cryogenic sleep, two awake and running the ship, and the ship’s computer, HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain). The two astronauts, Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and David Bowman (Keir Dullea) do not really know the reason for their mission. Things seem to be fine until HAL notices something wrong with one of the sensors on the ship. The sensor is removed and tested, and proves to be fine, leading the two men to think that something might be wrong with HAL. Not wanting to be doubted or disconnected, HAL then acts to keep control of the ship by any means necessary. Eventually, this leads to the long trip over the psychedelic landscape, a hotel room at the end of the universe, and a final meeting with the black monolith.

2001 is still a marvel, even today. It is still a beautiful film to watch and pore over and study because of its startling imagery and intense beauty. But it is slow. Really slow. Go and make a sandwich between lines of dialogue slow. For many, this is a considerable problem because modern audiences don’t have the same sort of patience as tripped-out potheads did in the late 1960s.

This is the first time I’ve watched 2001 since I was quite young, and I remembered it far differently from its reality. I remembered the opening sequence of the proto-humans, for instance, as taking ages to get through, even though it’s less than 20 minutes. I remembered the ending light show as going on forever as well, and it is long, but not oppressively so.

Kubrick was a master of film, and it was never more evident than here. The long, still shots allow the viewer to concentrate not on the moving camera but on what is happening on the screen. Particularly disturbing are the shots of HAL’s camera lens, impassively watching and plotting while action takes place elsewhere. HAL is one of the screen’s great villains, and would not hold this distinction without Kubrick including so many shots of his red camera eye simply glaring.


The film that is most commonly compared with 2001 is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris. On the surface, the comparison is a good one. Both films are epic in length, deal with Humanity’s place in the cosmos, and are painfully slow at times. Solyaris is often thought as the Soviet answer to Kubrick’s film. The movie is based on a novel by the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, who disowned it upon seeing it. It’s worth noting that when he made the film, Tarkovsky had not seen 2001.

Ostensibly, the movie is concerned with a station on the planet Solaris. This world is home to a vast ocean that is currently being studied by a small contingent of men living there. This ocean is actually a sentient organism that attempts to communicate with the men on the Solaris station by creating physical manifestations of their thoughts, dreams, and hopes. These manifestations came as a reaction to the ocean being bombarded with heavy radiation—essentially, the ocean is attempting to communicate with the humans on the station in the only way it knows how, but since it is completely alien (a common theme for Lem), it is doomed to failure.

The protagonist of the film is Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), who is sent to the Solaris station to determine whether or not it should be kept open. The station is designed for more than 100 researchers, but currently, there are only three onboard: Snaut (Juri Jarvet), Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn, who looks vaguely like Robert DuVall), and Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan). However, once Kelvin arrives, he discovers that Gibarian has committed suicide, and has left a cryptic message behind.

Kelvin is almost immediately plagued by a visitation that arrives thanks to the sentient ocean: his wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk). What might have been a comfort is something very much the opposite, since Hari committed suicide 10 years previously because Kelvin was transferred for his job and she refused to go with him. Essentially, the ocean is plaguing him by continually visiting his dead wife on him, a physical manifestation of the world’s most intense guilt trip.

The genius of Solyaris is evident in the set design. Where 2001 is pristine precision on the ship—even the astronauts who are killed in their cryogenic sleep are perfectly contained and sedate in death—the station on Solaris is in complete disarray. Machinery lies abandoned in the hallways, wires are exposed throughout every room. The lack of people on the station and the increasing mental and emotional demands placed on the men have turned the station into an outward manifestation of its inhabitants’ inner turmoil. These scenes of disarray are frequently contrasted with scenes of clean, orderly, pristine beauty of places on Earth. Solaris is a technological purgatory at best, a place where disorder and entropy constantly increase.

While beautiful and existentially powerful, Solyaris is perhaps even slower than 2001. Like 2001, this tranquil pace is punctuated by significant events. Here, though, the events are far more horrific than the coldly logical crimes of HAL. Hari continually relives her separation from Kelvin and his rejection of her, and kills herself again, this time with liquid nitrogen. In a truly horrifying scene, the body revives, forced back into consciousness by the alien ocean. It is equally terrible for Kelvin, who must constantly relive the loss of his wife. It takes a fascinating toll on Kelvin himself. It is almost impossible to pinpoint his age based on physical appearance. At times, he looks to be in his late 30s or early 40s while at other times, he seems to have aged terribly.

Ultimately, the two films are remarkably different for all of their surface similarity. Kubrick seems to be saying that human ingenuity, drive, and power will eventually take us to the edge of the universe. We may not remain human, we may become something alien or much greater than ourselves. The culminating moments of the film are obscure, but hopeful. It is the machine that will take us there, even if it attempts to betray us in the end—it is the machine that we must trust in, our own invention and inventiveness that will allow us to conquer the vast reaches of space.

Solyaris on the other hand seems to be far more concerned with our souls. It doesn’t doubt that the conquest of other planets and solar systems is almost inevitable, but asks instead what the cost of such conquest will be. Rather than growing from our humanity as Kubrick envisions, Tarkovsky would have us think that we will be diminished by such exploration in the end. We will not become something more than human, but something different entirely, something separated from that which truly makes us human. The cost will not be giving up our humanity for something greater, but losing the essence of our beings entirely. Isn’t it funny that from God-fearing America comes the film that pushes an ideology of conquering science while it is the godless communist Soviets who search space for Humanity’s soul?

Both films are masterpieces of the cinema, but for those not willing to give over to them entirely and experience them as they are meant to be, both films are also potentially incredibly boring. I am no less guilty than anyone else of this. I admire both films, but a year ago when I first tried to watch Solyaris, I fell asleep the first two times. I just couldn’t get past the endless scenes where nothing happens. This is why these films give critics a bad name with the rank and file. Critics see the style, the grandeur, the majesty of these films in their slow pace and gorgeous scenes (Kelvin and Hari floating in weightlessness, the docking sequence) while someone expecting an explosion every 30 seconds wanders off mentally or drifts into sleep. Since those unwilling to spend time studying what is on the screen or investing the mental energy into it don't get it, the feeling becomes one of finding critics stuffy, needlessly academic, and full of their own pomp.

Why to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey: Kubrick may have been this good, but he was never better.
Why not to watch: It…is…reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally…slow.

Why to watch Solyaris: A quest for the soul of Mankind and existential angst to end all angsts.
Why not to watch: It’s not just slow, it’s frequently inert.

Fighting in the War Room

Film: Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.



















It’s perhaps impossible to deny that Stanley Kubrick was a great director. I believe it’s correct that 10 of his movies are on this list, his final 10 movies, and he only made a total of 16 in his career. I’ve seen one of his films not on the list (The Killing), and I think an argument could be made for including it here as well.

One of his better known and better loved films is Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. There probably isn’t a reputable Top-100 list of films that it doesn’t appear on, and virtually anyone who has seen it will sing its praises.

That said, it’s also the sort of movie that critics love and that ordinary film viewers may find interminable. The reason for this is simple: Dr. Strangelove is desperately funny, but is presented in general with such a completely straight face that it can be difficult at times to determine. In short, while I think the film is incredibly funny, I can also see how someone could entirely miss the humor, because the humor is as black as it can get.

I think the humor is obvious, if only from the names of the characters, most of which are funny. Peter Sellers plays three of the characters: the eponymous Dr. Strangelove, Colonel Mandrake, and President Merkin Muffley (a merkin is, for lack of a better way to put it, a pubic toupee). We also have Russian Premiere Dmitri Kissov (not actually in the film), Ambassador de Sadesky (Peter Bull), Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn), and General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden).

General Ripper has lost his mind. Convinced that the Russians are going to take over by force of infiltrating American through the use of fluoridation (he speaks frequently of the purity of his own bodily fluids), Ripper gives the order to send his bomber wing into Russia to attack with nuclear bombs. He then cuts off all communication with everyone outside of his own base.

What follows are the extensive efforts to get the planes recalled. This involves bringing the Russian Ambassador into the War Room, where General Turgidson balks because “he’ll see the big board!” President Muffley talks to the drunken Russian leader on the phone. He is upset because the President no longer calls just to chat. Ripper’s Burpleson Air Force Base is overrun, and the fate of contacting Washington lies in the destruction of a Coke machine. And then there’s Dr. Strangelove himself—a former Nazi scientist, confined to a wheelchair, and endlessly battling with his own right hand.

If there is a problem with Dr. Strangelove, it’s that the film is simply too highbrow for a lot of people. It’s the sort of film that makes its mark by being extraordinarily clever, and it would be easy for someone who didn’t want to put any thought into watching a movie to quickly become bored by it.

Personally, I love this movie, and I think it’s worth watching. However, I also understand why someone might dislike it. It does require the viewer to watch actively and pay attention to it. If jokes are missed, there’s not much here to enjoy.

Why to watch Dr. Strangelove: Kubrick doing comedy, and biting satire.
Why not to watch: You have a short attention sp—Oh! Something shiny!