David Vining's Blog, page 206

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

Mutually assured destruction is inherently absurd because no sane person would trigger it. Only a crazy person would do that, and once that happened all the sane people would try to prevent it. That’s the basic premise of Dr. Strangelove, and Kubrick takes the concept to its absurdist end with the kind of ironic humor that obviously tickled him (with a healthy smattering of Peter Sellers, of course).

General Ripper sends his air wing to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union using...

Lolita

This is the anti-Spartacus. Where Spartacus was about the pure ideal of a man sacrificing himself for the good of humanity, Lolita is about a selfish man-child who kills the man who stole his under-aged sexual conquest from him and dies in prison. Spoilers, I guess.

It’s obvious that Kubrick struggled through the filming of Spartacus, and one of the ways that he dealt with that frustration was by buying the rights to and writing the script to the unfilmable novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov....

Spartacus

Kubrick dismissed several of his early films from his canon. Fear and Desire makes sense because of its amateurishness while Killer’s Kiss has some similar problems (though I feel it’s a successful movie overall). Spartacus, though, isn’t about quality but more about authorship.

Out of all the feature narrative films Stanley Kubrick, he produced most of and had writing credits on all of them except Spartacus. The history was that Kirk Douglas, as producer, had hired Anthony Mann to direct th...

Movie News – Week of 10/7

News that caught my eye:

Real-Life ‘Terminator’: Major Studios Face Sweeping Loss of Iconic ’80s Film Franchise Rights

One of my bugaboos is the modern copyright regime. The current law allows copyright to extend through the entire life of the author plus another 70 years. Did you know that Rudyard Kipling still has works under copyright?

So, any news that changes copyright in a certain direction is something to applaud. This doesn’t address the core insanity of Life+70, but it does potential...

Joker

Out of all the comic book movie’s I’ve seen, this is probably the one that wants to be taken seriously the most. So, let’s return the favor and take it seriously.

There’s a lot of noise in this film that distracts from the core of the film, and I think it really detracts from what would otherwise be a rather good character study. The noise confused things to a point that I had to consider the movie for a while just to piece through everything to determine what that core was, though. A lot of...

Paths of Glory

Okay,…This kid from New York has real talent.

This is Stanley Kubrick’s first great film, and it has the kind of emotional punch that many find sorely missing from his overall oeuvre. Dealing with themes that Kubrick would explore for the rest of his career, Paths of Glory is one of the great anti-war movies.

It seems like there’s an unwritten rule that if you want to make a movie about war as a necessary and even noble thing you make it about World War II, and if you want to make a movie ab...

The Killing

This Kubrick fellow just gets better and better with every movie. Fear and Desire was bad. Killer’s Kiss worked despite some technical limitations. And here we have The Killing, a well assembled noir thriller about a group of men robbing a race track.

Really, at its core, the movie is about control. It’s about one man doing everything he can to make a plan work like a clock when he has to rely on people. Some of the cogs work perfectly while others, no matter how well-oiled or selected, ulti...

Killer’s Kiss

Okay, maybe this kid has some chops cause this ain’t bad.

Very much of the realist movement in New York going on at the time, made only a year after On the Waterfront, Stanley Kubrick’s second film is a grounded feeling look at working class people with melodramatic tones. Filmed silent and completely dubbed in post-production, Killer’s Kiss carries some technical awkwardness and skips over scenes with voice over, but there’s an extremely strong visual sense, especially at the end and a much...

Fear and Desire

This is the work of an immature, unfocused, and pretentious bore. This Stan Kubrick guy has no future in the movies. He should just go back to New York and become a dentist or something.

Seriously, this movie is unwatchably bad. Its story, if you can call it one, is about four soldiers in an unnamed war who have crashed behind six miles behind enemy lines and the lazy day they spend between building a raft and abandoning the raft to steal a plane instead. Along the way, they muse endlessly a...

Movie News – Week of 9/30

I’ve been bandying this idea around a bit recently, but I’ve never gotten around to actually doing it.

This isn’t meant as a comprehensive list of movie news happening right now, just what interests me. The bits of news and promo material that caught my eye over the last few days. I’ll try to keep it regular.

First, reviews have come out for The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s new movie produced by Netflix. It’s Scorsese, so of course I’m excited, but the reviews have been ecstatic. The one less...