|
 |
The Killing (1956)
I consider this to be Stanley Kubrick's first proper film, although technically it isn't. It's an interestingly structured heist film to which Reservoir Dogs owes a large debt of gratitude. A group of men led by Sterling Hayden plan on robbing a racetrack in an elaborate hold-up. The story moves back and forward in time so that we see the team being put together, and the planning of the robbery, aswell as the robbery itself. It's structured much more like a novel than a film. Whether some or all of the team will succeed in their plans is in doubt right up until the last ten minutes or so. This is a great first film and a great entry into the heist movie genre aswell as being an interesting take on the noir conventions in American filmmaking. Hayden is the perfect leading man for the role of head heist planner. |
 |
Paths of Glory (1957)
This is one of the very best war films in the English language you could hope to see. The futility and irony of the war in the trenches in the first world war is shown in stark detail as a unit commander in the French army must deal with the mutiny of his men and a glory-seeking general after part of his force falls back under fire in an impossible attack. There's corruption at the top of the tree as the boorish generals blithely play their wargames with real soldiers, and the viewer really feels for the four men who are patently not cowards but rather political pawns. Kirk Douglas puts in a powerful performance as the military lawyer trying to have the men cleared and the injustice of it all makes for an engaging film. The black and white photography is sharp and crisp, and the camerawork is impeccable. This is the first film where one can recognise the true Kubrick style. |
 |
Spartacus (1960)
This is something of a blip in the Kubrick canon in that he was a 'director for hire' after the original director - Anthony Mann - withdrew from the project early on. Even though there's not much for Kubrick to sink his teeth into he makes an excellent job of it. Anyway, now that everyone's so enamoured of Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator' isn't it about time it was pointed out that it's really just 'Spartacus' with some fancy cgi effects and some palace intrigue? Not that Gladiator is necessarily a bad film, but it's not in the same league as Spartacus. This is probably the last time there was a proper sword and sandal epic produced on a grand scale and Kubrick takes on what must have been a logistical nightmare with aplomb. Kirk Douglas is full of piss and vinegar as the slave-about-to-revolt and there's some kinky goings-on between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis that didn't go down too well with the censors at the time but everyone's cool about it now. And as cgi was forty odd years in the future the battle scenes (which are impressive in scope and execution) are full of real people. |
 |
Lolita (1962)
You've got to admire the audacity of Stanley Kubrick: He searches around for a novel that sparks his intellectual curiosity, and no matter of the practicalities of filming the subject or the commercial considerations he will attack that subject with gusto until it's done and just the way he wants it. It must have taken a lot of bottle to decide to film Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita considering the time it was made and the stink the book had already caused, but he carried on and I think he made a pretty decent film of it. For those not familiar with the book it's the tale of a college professor in his mid forties and his infatuation with a young girl (in the book she's twelve, but even a madman wouldn't try to get away with that so she's fourteen in the film) with whom, through a combination of blind chance and his own machinations, he ends up in a sexual relationship. The performances here are of a uniformly high quality - James Mason portrays just the right balance as the lecherous and manipulative Humbert Humbert, Peter Sellars is excellent as the unbalanced Clare Quilty and Shelley Winters is superb as Lolita's sex-starved, emotionally vulnerable mother. This is one of the Kubrick films that deserves more attention than it receives. |
 |
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)
This always seems to me to be a film only Stanley Kubrick could have made, and is a film that typifies what he was all about as a director. 'Dr. Strangelove' is a both a very clever and a very funny film. The fact that it's funny is the key here, dealing as it does with the issue of nuclear catastrophe. Peter Sellars plays the three major characters in this film - the crazed Strangelove, the stiff upper lip Lionel Mandrake, and the US president Merkin Muffley, and he's impeccably good in all three roles. The idea of the film captured the absurdity of modern warfare and global politics of the time in all it's bureaucratic glory and it still rings true today. The lush black and white cinematography is very nice, and the set design of the war room is really striking. 'Strangelove' has more laughs than most straight out comedies and has more emotional resonance than most honest to goodness dramas and that's quite a trick to pull off. If you want to watch a Kubrick film and you're in the mood for a comedy then it has to be 'Strangelove' - because it's the only comedy he made. |
 |
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
There's probably been more written about this film than any other in the history of cinema. It's such an ambiguous tale whose meaning is open to so many interpretations that it encourages debate and introspection from even the most casual viewer. 2001 is a lot of different things to many different people - to the sixties pothead it was the next best thing to a trip, to the scientifically minded it was the first Hollywood film (and remains one of the very few science fiction films to this day) that dealt with science and technology in a realistic manner, and to the philosophically inclined it was just a revelation - something they could ruminate over endlessly. Technically it's an absolute marvel and could never be filmed in the same way today due to budgetary constraints. It would all be done with cgi these days but this was done the old-fashioned way with animated cells and mechanical models and such. It's an intriguing story and the last half hour or so threatens sensory overload, but when all the dust settles it'll leave you thinking. With '2001' we have a very rare and wonderful thing - a perfect symbiosis between intellectual stimulation and visual spectacle. This is a monumental cinematic acheivement that deserves every accolade it's been given over the years. |
 |
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Any movie buff from the UK of a certain age will remember trying to find a video copy of this film at memorabilia fairs, because Kubrick decided he didn't want it shown in the UK after some copycat violence following it's initial cinema release. Now that all the hype and hysteria has died down you can see it for what it is - a stylish take on a controversial cult book of the early seventies that makes a bold statement about the choices people make in this world, and the role of government in our lives. It stars Malcolm MacDowall in the lead role of Alex - a very violent young man who's at home in a violent future Britain. He spends his free time roving the streets with his gang, getting into running battles with other gangs, committing all sorts of disturbing crimes including breaking and entering, grievous bodily harm and rape. He finally falls foul of the law and is sent off to prison where he enrolls in a new treatment program that promises early release, but at the cost of his individuality and free will. In effect he would become a mere puppet of the state, acting merely as he's been programmed to act with no other function - in other words a clockwork orange. This is full-on cinema Kubrick style. Very violent whilst critiquing onscreen violence, very stylish whilst critiquing style over substance, very thought-provoking whilst critiquing over-intellectualising issues. It's a clever film adapted from a clever book. One of a kind. |
 |
Barry Lyndon (1975)
This is loosely based on the novel 'The Luck of Barry Lyndon' by William Makepeace Thackeray. Redmond Barry is a young farm boy growing up in a small village in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, who falls in love with his cousin Nora. When Nora gets engaged to John Quin, a captain in the British Army Barry challenges him to a duel. He wins and escapes to Dublin, where he's promptly robbed. Seeing no viable alternative, Barry joins the British Army to fight in the Seven Years War. He eventually deserts and is then forced to join the Prussian Army, where he ends up saving the life of his captain who takes him under his wing and promotes him to the rank of a spy. He then becomes involved with an unscrupulous Irish gambler Chevalier de Balibari, who in turn teaches Barry to lie, steal and cheat his way through the social classes to becoming an aristocrat. Barry eventually ends up in a lacklustre marriage to the wealthy Lady Lyndon whose fortune he eventually loses as his life slowly falls into ruin. Kubrick's eighth film is one that improves with each viewing. It features Kubrick's trademark fastidiousness and attention to detail and has an understated but epic quality to it. It's also something of a technical marvel, although it may not at first glance seem it. However, just ask any seasoned cinematographer about lighting a scene using only candles and he'll tell you how impressive this film is on a technical level. |
 |
The Shining (1980)
I liked the Stephen King book a lot when I was younger, and Kubrick made some significant changes to the book, which to be fair was not filmable at that time with the technology available. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance - a writer struggling with writer's block - who takes on a job as winter caretaker in an isolated hotel which is shut down for the winter months. Jack and his wife Wendy are having some marital problems and he figures some time alone with her will help. Not the case, as it turns out and the two drift further apart as the weather closes in and Jack starts to go stir crazy. Add Danny - their young son who sees disturbing visions and has the gift, or curse, of being able to see the future - and you've got a recipe for some claustrophobic psychological fireworks. Nicholson is highly entertaining as the unbalanced Jack, and the technical elements of the film are impeccable - from the inch perfect framing to the virtuoso camerawork by Garrett Brown - inventor of the steadicam. The rivers of blood flowing out of the elevator engulfing the dead twins, Jack breaking down the bathroom door with his ax, and Danny running through the maze are all images that will haunt you for years to come. Superb. |
 |
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
This film is based on the Gustav Hasford book The Short Timers. The first half of this film follows a platoon of American marines going through basic training at the time of the Vietnam war. R. Lee Ermey gives as authentic a performance as the platoons drill instructor as you're likely to see given his former occupation (he used to be a drill instructor). We live and breath the routines, trials and abuses the recruits go through and get to know a few of the characters. The monotony of the young recruits' lives doesn't really prepare you (or them it seems) for the second half of the film - to which we're introduced with no warning at all. The remainder of the film takes place in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. We follow the marines who made it through basic training as they navigate their way through the mess they've been thrust into. The central set-piece involving a hidden sniper terrorising the group is nerve-wrackingly well done. As far as American films about the Vietnam war go, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket are the benchmarks by which the rest will be measured. |
 |
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
There was twelve years between Full Metal Jacket and this film - now that's just laziness. But that's what happens when you're given carte blanche to behave any way you see fit, as Kubrick was by Warner Brothers. Based on the novella 'Traumnovelle' by Arthur Schnitzler, this features Tom Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman as a married couple in a stale relationship who awaken their sexual adventurousness with revealing confessions one night. It's set in and around New York City, and follows the bizarre, sexually charged waking dream of Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise), who embarks on a sexual quest after his wife reveals she contemplated an affair a year previous. This leads him on a night-long, sexual odyssey that eventually leads him to infiltrating a masked orgy at a baronnial manor house on Long Island. The more Harford finds out about the masked ball and what goes on there the more disturbed he is at what he witnessed and the more danger he appears to be in. This is an eerily riveting film. The odyssey Harford undertakes is as unpredictable as it is surreal and in it's dark oddness the film is weirdly hypnotic. |
|
