Let’s air something out - the first filmmaker a burgeoning young film nerd ever falls for is Stanley Kubrick, and many outgrow him. It’s very easy to understand his early appeal - he trades in genre, has fairly obvious themes and a pointed stylization that’s easy for young observers to detect, lending his work to the sort of literary analysis many young film nerds are used to. I appreciate his dogged stylization in his films I suppose but I can’t help but think that there really isn’t a lot going on in them - their themes on alienation and dehumanization are so readily apparent (and, revealing my biases a bit - I think they’re kinda adolescent) that I can’t find anything below the surface in his cinema. With some films (A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket in particular) the political project is so unnuanced that it comes across as very pedantic, nearly as oppressive in stylization as the very modes of mechanized discourse that he’s ostensibly against. Does anyone else have a hearty distrust of Kubrick?
Anyway, one thing I can be thankful to Stanley Kubrick for: he didn’t inflict Brian Atene on us. From the hundreds of audition tapes Kubrick (or his assistants) filtered through to find the cast of Full Metal Jacket, this is undoubtably one of the most embarassing:
[youtube]BWbl4vQLfr4[/youtube]
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Tyson added these pithy words on Nov 10 06 at 12:39 pmDude looks like a bizarro-world version of Harrison Ford…
Tram added these pithy words on Nov 10 06 at 6:07 pmI still like Kubrick, but not as much as other folks do - i.e. the IMDb crowd. (And I’m gonna pull a contrarian statement by saying that The Shining is pretty mediocre.)
Lolita is probably the only Kubrick film I’m most emotionally attached to right now. Although it’s not flawless per se., there’s something that feels much more personal than, say, Dr. Strangelove.
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