Stanley Kubrick Tagged Articles at Cinematical

"You can't put words back in your mouth. What you can do, is spread false gossip so people think that everything that's been said is untrue ... It's like the end of Spartacus. I have seen that movie half a dozen times and I still don't know who the real Spartacus is. And that is what makes that movie a classic whodunnit." -- The Office

I know very well there isn't a single Cinematical reader who doesn't know who the real Spartacus is. There's probably little children who haven't even seen Stanley Kubrick's Roman epic who know who the real Spartacus is because the movie has become such a cultural touchstone. But just because it's ubiquitous doesn't mean you shouldn't sit down and watch the movie again, especially since it's playing for free on SlashControl. Its lengthy runtime might make it a little uncomfortable to view on your laptop, but just make sure you have plenty of snacks and drinks, and you should be just fine.

Spartacus is quite dated (this is the era of filmmaking when no one thought flattops and beehives would be out of place in any time period), and Howard Fast's version of the myth was skewed toward his own political beliefs. But it's still a pretty brutal movie, and runs counter to Hollywood's vision today in that it makes the ending worse than the history. Eyewitnesses claim Spartacus died in battle. No one really knows, as his body was never recovered, but history is reasonably certain he wasn't one of the 6,600 crucified along the Via Appia. But Hollywood brutally chose to put him among them, and didn't even spare his wife and infant son the sight. That final farewell between Spartacus and Varinia traumatized me as a kid (it has to be one of the first movies I saw where the good guy didn't win), and still gets me every time.

Watch Spartacus now on SlashControl!

I adore movies because they encompass the whole world and allow you to titillate a myriad of interests without having to hone in on just one. (Same with writing -- why pick one slice of life when you can write about them all!?) But there's a side-love -- the art that comes out of cinema. Whether it's seeing a director's vision narrowed down to one particular image (David Lynch's photography!), or seeing what a filmmaker inspires in others. It's like having a fan conversation through the eyes. It could invite you to see a film in a new way, or simply pull you back into the filmmaker's world.

Or, to end all of the lead-up: Film-inspired art can inspire some pretty freakin' awesome imagery! The above photo is part of a new exhibit called Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light. Running all this month at the Light House Cinema in Dublin, the show features paintings, photography, and illustrations inspired by the filmmaker behind classics like A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. And of course, you've got to realize where the above picture comes from -- it's the Grady Twin Daughters from The Shining. "Thirty Years Later" from photographer Annie Atkins, and it not only runs with Kubrick inspiration, but also succeeds in replicating the creepy simplicity from the film -- the vacant look, the dingy lighting.

Peruse some of our favorites below and the full gallery right over here, then weigh in with your thoughts: Which is your favorite Stanley Kubrick-inspired piece?



[via Superpunch]

If you are the type of person who believes what you are told, then the release of James Gray's Two Lovers is probably your last chance to see Joaquin Phoenix 'the actor' before he takes the hip-hop world by storm -- but that's only if you believe what you've been told. For every person who is convinced that Mr. Phoenix has gone around the bend (and you can't blame them with footage like this floating around), you will find another person who thinks that the whole thing is a big hoax...and it wouldn't be the first time we've been taken for a ride by a celebrity. But until Casey Affleck releases that 'documentary' of his, we won't know for sure, and I decided it might be worthwhile to look at other Tinseltown hoaxes to remind us that you can't always believe what you read -- especially in Hollywood.

1. Stanley Kubrick Fakes the Moon Landing
It's been a popular conspiracy theory that the director provided most of the footage for the Apollo 11 and 12 Moon landings; and as the story goes, Kubrick was right in the middle of post-production on 2001: A Space Odyssey, when he was approached by NASA to create footage of a moon landing since his was so realistic. Over the years, most of these theories have been debunked, but defenders of the 'Kubrick connection' love to remind us that Kubrick later used lenses for Barry Lyndon that were developed by NASA -- which they say is the proof of payment for faking the lunar adventure.

After the jump: the birth of 'Bigfoot' and hoaxes that ended with hard time...

As an admitted Admirer-And-Not-Much-More of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic, The Shining (I know, I know, blasphemy and such), I still got a genuine kick out of this Channel 4 promo for their upcoming month-long Kubrick retrospective.

Hosted on UK newspaper The Guardian's website, the ad consists of a single minute-long tracking shot and takes the view of the Academy Award-winning filmmaker as he dashes about the quite meticulously recreated set. The twins, the axe, the maze, each and every last iconic touch -- it's almost like they Overlook-ed nothing... (No? Too much? Apologies all around then.)

I'm having trouble ascertaining whether or not Channel 4 was also responsible for this live-action opening to 'The Simpsons' that popped up a few years back. Even if it's not, the fact still remains that precious few American commercials can claim to be their equal in both fondness and dedication. Alas, until Spike someday hosts a Joe Eszterhas tribute marathon...

[by way of AICN]

NASA's Phoenix lander has its rendezvous with Mars, and that, as well as the upcoming Puerto Rican primary, gives a torn-from-today's-weblogs quality to this purported horror film, aka'd both as Mars Attacks Puerto Rico and Mars Invades Puerto Rico. But Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster is a film for all seasons anyway. Lou Cutell's alienating Doctor Nadir (above) in bald wig, goblin ears, and loads of clown white makeup, isn't even the most uncanny part of this particularly inexpensive sci-fi epic, which pits a disfigured robot Frankenstein against the gorilla-suited, skull-headed Mull: a sort of an alien attack dog.

Made by Robert Gaffney, a long-time second-unit director for Kubrick (this piece from dvdtalk.com considers Gaffney's career), FMTSM is a good-looking li'l crapburger. It's remembered fondly for Mull, and the hoity-toity aliens who keep him on a leash. Recently at the Super-Con in San Jose, I saw two separate TV horror hosts on a panel endorsing FMTSM as their favorite bad film. Could it give Plan Nine From Outer Space a run for its money? Hard to say, but it shares four essential qualities of Plan Nine; four things that may be completely necessary to the making of a memorable turkey. You've heard it said that it's as hard to make a bad movie as it is to make a good one. Fair enough: there are plenty of filmmakers out there who want to work hard making a bad movie.

No, no, there's not going to be a remake of A Clockwork Orange starring Mick Jagger. At least I don't think so. This is just a fun bit of what-could-have-been. We like to play around with alternate-universe casting here once in a while, and this one's a doozy. Someone found a letter from producer Si Litvinoff to legendary director John Schlesinger, urging him to consider directing an adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel. And part of the pitch was that Mick Jagger wanted the role of the psychopathic Alex, and that the Beatles "love[d] the project" and wanted to provide the musical score. Fortunately (?) Schlesinger wasn't interested and the project eventually wound up falling to good old Stanley Kubrick.

The Clockwork Orange we got was -- like all of Kubrick's work -- too singular a film to even try to imagine how someone else's version would have been different. But I admit I'm amused (and intrigued) by the notion of Jagger taking on the Malcolm McDowell role. Hell, after watching the manic two-hour stage show he put on in Shine a Light at age 63, I'm kind of convinced that he's actually omnipotent. As for the Beatles? That's just creepy. I'll stick with Kubrick's classical selections.

[hat tip: Movie City News]

The great futurist now belongs to history; AP reports that Arthur C. Clarke was found dead in his home in Sri Lanka. Others can write about Clarke's contributions to technology ... for example his 1945 scientific paper "Extra-Terrestrial Relays" describing the possibilities of the communication satellite, which was as essential to modern living as electricity was to earlier generations. Let's talk about movies. 2001: A Space Odyssey is in some ways a collaboration between Clarke and Kubrick ... or as the author said, "the film should be credited to Kubrick and Clarke and the novel should be credited to Clarke and Kubrick."

This account from wikipedia notes the genesis of one of the ultimate science fiction films was a 1950 short story by Clarke, titled "The Sentinel." The classic spawned a 1984 sequel, 2010. Various short stories were adapted for television (unfortunately not enough of them from Tales From the White Hart, still waiting for its time on screen.) It's been announced that David Fincher will film Rendezvous With Rama, with Morgan Freeman in the lead; here's Jessica Barnes' item on it from 2007. The film concerns a close encounter of the third kind with an alien spacecraft. And John Hurt is definitely playing a Clarke figure in this Jodie Foster outer-space movie.

Clarke was born in England, and was a radar expert with the RAF during World War 2. Years of astronomical research gave way to a later-life interest in the ocean; hence his life in Sri Lanka, where he could scuba dive. He is remembered, among numerous accomplishments, for the fostering of Clarke's Three Laws: 1."When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." 2."The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." 3."Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

John Orloff got his break writing two episodes of the Emmy-winning HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. His latest script is another true-life tale -- Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, just out on DVD. Heart focuses on Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), a reporter whose husband Daniel, an American journalist, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. The script just earned Orloff an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay. The awards will be held on February 23rd.

Cinematical: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

John Orloff: I still don't know whether I want to be a writer! I went to UCLA Film School, and I had a great writing teacher who thought I had a particular skill in that department. So I kept taking that teacher for the whole time I was at UCLA, kept on writing. At the end of it I was 22, it was the late 80s, and people weren't really hiring young writers, so I started to work in advertising. Spent about ten years miserably working in commercials, until I met a woman -- who is now my wife -- who was working in the business as a development exec at HBO. And she was bringing home all these screenplays, and they were horrible! Just awful! And these people had agents, and they were working. So I pitched my wife a non-fiction movie that I had been thinking about writing for ten years, with the incredibly commercial idea of a sixteenth century English melodrama. It was actually about the Shakespeare authorship issue -- who wrote the plays? I wrote the script and had the misfortune of writing it two months before Shakespeare in Love came out. But I sent out this script, trying to get an agent, and did finally get "hip-pocketed" by an agency.

Cinematical: And that script eventually got you your big break with Tom Hanks -- pretty decent guy to start out with, no?

JO: Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, yes! The most important thing that happened out of the Shakespeare script was that Tom's company was among the readers. They liked it, and I met with Tom about another project, but every time I sat down with him I would ask if he had hired writers on Band of Brothers. I'm a huge World War II buff, and I think I eventually just wore him down. He finally asked me to write a script, and I wrote one episode. He was very happy with it and asked me to write another. So, that was my first paying gig.

'Tis the season to get away from your family, bundle up with a gallon of moonshine (preferably one with "XXX" written on the label), and watch endless hours of movies! What follows is not a comprehensive or "Best Of" list. These are simply seven DVD box sets that any film buff would be thrilled to find in his or her stocking this Christmas. Most of them were released in the past few months, and a couple have been out a while but just got amazingly cheap. Have a few gifts left to buy? Consider picking one of these up. You don't even have to get off your fat ass, if you click on the titles you'll be taken to the links on Amazon. I've included items to suit every budget, and they've been arranged in order of price. Naturally, the more expensive the set you purchase, the more you love the person you're buying it for. That's just the way it works.

The Alien Quadrilogy ($33.99)

Pretty much the gold standard for DVD box sets. This collection's price recently took an incredible drop. It was worth every penny of the $80 bucks I paid for mine years ago, so you can better believe it's worth $34. The set gives you several versions of each film in the beloved Alien series -- Alien (one of the best suspense movies ever made), Aliens (one of the best action movies ever made), Alien 3 (David Fincher's misunderstood take is a stronger movie with each viewing), and Alien: Resurrection (Nobody's perfect). An unprecedented amount of extra goodies that includes the amazing Director's Cut of Aliens, extremely cool fold-out packaging, and the absence of Alien Vs. Predator make this set a must-own. I've owned it for four years, and still haven't seen everything in there. Plus, don't you just love the word "Quadrilogy?"

Last week in my Indies on DVD post, I mentioned a new Stanley Kubrick box set (from Warner Home Video) and Criterion's release of Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Both releases had raised pre-release questions. Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere sounded the alarm back in August that Criterion's upcoming re-issue of the Days of Heaven on DVD would look "really different" than the previous version from Paramount Home Video. He based his concerns on comments by Criterion's Lee Kline. Now that Wells has seen the new DVD, he writes: "I saw Days of Heaven in 70 mm on the day it opened -- 9.13.78 -- at the Cinema 1 on Third Avenue, and the Criterion DVD took me right back to that transporting experience. This is how it looked back then, and should have always looked. " Good to hear.

The Kubrick set raised eyebrows when it was announced that three of the films (The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut) would be presented in a different home video format than Kubrick had insisted upon when he was alive. Film critic Dave Kehr noted: "Kubrick apparently had his reasons, as mysterious as they may be, for releasing them to video the way he did." The new, reformatted aspect ratio, Kehr says, "would be closer to the way the films were originally seen in theaters." Kehr then quotes a statement from Jan Harlan (the present keeper of the Kubrick estate) and questions the historical sense of Harlan's statement before concluding: "I'm really not well informed enough to have a solid opinion. And without Kubrick around to consult, I don't see how we'll ever know for sure." He recommends hanging onto the older DVD versions as reference points, if nothing else. So if you've been waiting for the definitive edition of these films (others in the set are 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, in addition to the doc A Life in Pictures), you'll need to weigh out the positive and not so positive.