Category Archives: Stanley Kubrick

Jun 03 2021
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Stanley Kubrick, Technology, Transport, Uncategorized

Sunshine (2007) went apeshit.

And for no apparent reason.

An hour in and you’re thinking that if the movie can keep it together the experience could quite possibly be up there with the best of them, a thought-provoking sci-fi masterpiece for the ages. But then it descends into sub-slasher ridiculousness, a third act that feels like the team behind Event Horizon (1997) rejected it. This happens quite a lot with these movies, and even more so when it comes to TV shows. There’s so much expertly paced build-up that goes … nowhere. Why try and turn it into a horror? The makers simply didn’t know how to fulfill all the promise or how to end it so resorted to cheap genre ‘thrills’, frenzied cutting and pointless bombast.

But for 70 minutes this is great. I highly recommend turning it off once it gets silly. And then proceed to stick 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on.

Sorted.

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Aug 03 2019
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Stanley Kubrick, Uncategorized

Waterloo (1970) – nostalgia clouds everything.

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Sadly, I’ve seen this movie more times than I have Barry Lyndon (1975), and this impressive calamity (accidental oxymoron) is what is universally posited as the reason Kubrick never made his Napoleon biopic.

It’s a hell of a logistical achievement, grand scale Abel Gance-like cinema utilising an entire Soviet infantry division; the sheer fact it got made is stupefying. At the same time it’s utterly dreadful, the director wielding his camera with carefree abandon, going from one style to the next like an ADHD child with a Tyco Xmas pressie. And the performances are dire, Rod Steiger’s Napoleon especially. He is constantly bulging his eyeballs, histrionics reaching Nicolas Cage levels. Even more fingernails-down-the-blackboard cringe are his inner monologues, the wee Corsican revealing his every banal thought to the audience.

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Yet it was always on TV, strangely on Sunday afternoons. It remains ‘just one of those things’. I’ll probably see it again (I voluntarily watched it the other day), my own guilty pleasure. As Pauline Kael said, ‘You talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.’

Full horror show here:

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Jul 17 2019
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Architecture, Art, Britain, Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Scotland, Stanley Kubrick, Uncategorized

A Clockwork Balgreen.

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Visions of A Clockwork Orange (1971) every time I run the Balgreen gauntlet for the tram to York Place, Alex DeLarge and his droogies bashing in a poor drunken hobo for kicks. Such ultra-violence has probably happened half a dozen times in this foreboding underpass, but without the costumes and long eyelashes.

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Nov 12 2017
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Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Stanley Kubrick, Uncategorized

Fountainbridge Marina.

Edinburgh does have its wee accidental allusions.

Gioachino Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie enters my noggin every time I slo-mo stride along ‘Fountainbridge Marina’, a singular image of Alex DeLarge and his droogs syncing to another Kubrickian vignette. Kubrick infects everything, cinema’s supreme stylist.

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‘As we walked along the flatblock marina, I was calm on the outside, but thinking all the time. So now it was to be Georgie the general, saying what we should do and what not to do, and Dim as his mindless greeding bulldog. But suddenly I viddied that thinking was for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use, like, inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid. There was a window open with the stereo on and I viddied right at once what to do.’

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