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.

The Shining (1980) marks an interesting spot in Stanley Kubrick's filmography, one that hardly anyone ever mentions. Most Kubrick films are not appreciated in their own time, but while Barry Lyndon (1975) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) are beginning to enjoy a newfound critical reputation, The Shining -- stuck right between them -- is generally left out of the discussion. Despite mixed reviews (recommendations from Andrew Sarris and the New York Times, but pans from Pauline Kael, Stanley Kaufmann, Dave Kehr and Variety), it was a hit film, grossing $44 million on a $19 million budget (according to boxofficemojo.com). It was based on a young, successful horror writer's third novel, and thus it hardly warranted serious consideration. Only David Thomson, in his "Biographical Dictionary of Film," gives the film a once-over; in an otherwise negative essay about Kubrick, he calls The Shining Kubrick's "one great film," but he also calls it "very funny."

At the same time, horror fanatics find the film extraordinary; and by all counts, they're right. Here was a horror entry from a first-class filmmaker who had succeeded in escaping the "horror" classification. Our other masters -- Bava, Romero, Carpenter, Hooper, Craven, etc. -- started in horror and got stuck there, unable to express their artistry in any other medium, and unable to earn the acclaim of someone like Kubrick. He visited, left unscathed and left behind something truly exceptional. But where do these two sides meet? What did Kubrick bring to horror and what did horror bring to Kubrick?

I was at a dinner party recently, and the conversation turned to movies. Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) came up, accompanied by the usual groans of disapproval and boredom. I felt obligated to say what I usually say in such situations, to say something that results in shock and disbelief: that Eyes Wide Shut is the best movie I've seen since I have been a professional movie critic.

The initial responses to Eyes Wide Shut revolved around the following: 1) The MPAA, their threat of an NC-17 rating and Warner Bros' decision to alter the offending scene by censoring it with "digital figures." 2) Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's marriage and how it was affected by the filming. 3) Kubrick's death in March of 1999 and whether or not the released film was as he intended. 4) The fact that the film was set, but not shot in New York City and didn't look at all like the real thing; that Kubrick was an exile who hadn't actually been to New York for more than three decades. There were other rumors, and specific complaints about certain scenes that colored nearly everyone's opinion, but none of these had anything to do with the movie itself, as it actually exists.

Wowwy wow wow. I knew there were some new Stanley Kubrick special editions on the way, but I had no idea that Warner was going all out with new features! I don't even know where to begin! (OK, breathe.) According to DVDActive.com, five of the master's films will be hitting the shelves as part of a massive box set. Those films are The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. All of 'em 2-disc widescreen treat-laden Special Editions! (And yes the DVDs will also be available outside of the box set.)

Each of the 2-disc sets come with documentaries / featurettes both old and new, but what I find most exciting are the all-new audio commentaries. (Yes, I'm a commentary nerd. No apologies.) The new chat-tracks break down like so: On 2001 we get actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood; on Clockwork it's the awesome Malcolm McDowell and film historian Nick Redman; on Eyes Wide Shut we'll hear from actor/director Sydney Pollack and professor Peter J. Loewenberg; The Shining delivers Steadicam creator Garrett Brown and Kubrick biographer John Baxter; and (this should be great) on Full Metal Jacket the participants will be actors Adam Baldwin, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D'Onofrio and film critic-turned-screenwriter Jay Cocks. (What, Matthew Modine was too busy?)

And again I'll reiterate an important factor: All of these DVDs (which have been approved by Mr. Kubrick's estate) will come in digitally remastered widescreen. (The old-school Kubrickians know what I'm talking about.)

The discs will hit the stores on October 23, and if you're not satisfied by these five offerings, you can also pick up the new-but-movie-only releases of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Lolita. And just to quell any confusion, I'll remind you that Dr. Strangelove and Paths of Glory are Sony properties, whereas Spartacus is a Universal title. That's why they're not included here. But hats off to Warner Bros. for this inevitably awesome box set!

Note: Summer is coming to a close, and I don't have the budget to do much traveling. So I decided to take some Vacation time with the Griswolds instead. All this week and next, I'll be reviewing the Vacation movies, one of the most loved (and uneven) comedy franchises in modern film.

I think you're all f**ked in the head. We're ten hours from the f**king fun park and you want to bail out? Well I'll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It's a quest. It's a quest for fun. I'm gonna have fun and you're gonna have fun. We're all gonna have so much f**king fun we'll need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles! You'll be whistling 'Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah' out of you're a**holes! I gotta be crazy! I'm on a pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose! Holy S**t!

-- Clark W. Griswold (Chevy Chase)

Clark Griswold is my father circa 1988. The glasses. The Izod shirt. The too-short shorts. The unrelenting and misguided enthusiasm for all things family. The barely concealed rage. It's all there. What makes National Lampoon's Vacation work so well, all these years later, is that everyone thinks Clark is based on his or her father. Some of the funniest comedy comes from recognition, and this movie is almost like watching home movies from my youth. Except for the dead aunt on the roof of the car, but we'll get to that in a moment.

They assembled a real dream team for this movie, three giants of comedy at their primes. Behind the camera, you've got Harold Ramis, fresh off his directorial debut (Caddyshack -- not a bad start!). He clearly came to play here, and I'd imagine he had something to do with keeping Chevy Chase's tendency to overact in check. The script was written and based on a short story (click here to read it!) by John Hughes, unquestionably the finest film comedy writer of the 1980s. Disagree with me? Take a look at this list of Hughes scripts produced from 1983 to 1990: Mr. Mom, Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes Trains and Automobiles, She's Having A Baby, Uncle Buck, Christmas Vacation, and Home Alone. The man was a god.

If you're a fan of the late Stanley Kubrick, you'll probably want to start saving your pennies for a new box set that is coming out. Now, there's already been the Stanley Kubrick Collection, which held everything from Lolita through Eyes Wide Shut. (Where's the Spartacus love? I know he didn't write it, but still!) It has a documentary with assistant Jan Harlan and an (at the time) new anamorphic edition of 2001. Now while another assistant, Leon Vitali, talked with The Reeler about some screenings of Kubrick's oft-forgotten Barry Lyndon, some info came up about an upcoming HD box set that is in the works, although no release date has been announced.

Using the previous set as a guide, the films have gone through the HD process and Vitali says: "they did a really good job... They looked really, really fine. It also means that in HD you are getting the 1.85 you saw theatrically." Now, what confuses me, as well as Vitali, is why the list of films is not including Barry Lyndon, like the original set. He says they're doing all but that film, which means that Lolita and Dr. Strangelove will be added to flist he mentioned -- 2001 (a transfer he says is "stunning! It is so stunning!"), A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. If you're using the previous set as a guide, what would inspire you to cut out a film that might not be remembered as much, but is held in high regard? The people who go out and spend a ton on this set will be the big fans of Kubrick's work, so why leave them partially hanging? Nevertheless, I'm sure many will purchase the box set, since any visual filmmaker is going to look even better in HD, but don't hand out a skeleton without the femur!

[via JoBlo]

I'm a sucker for creative, non-fancy fandom. In January, I shared a clip to Star Wars' Battle of Yavin done entirely with hands. Now I've got something of the non-motion variety. There is an art exhibit making the rounds that recreates scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The kicker -- it's done with household objects. Now, I'm not talking about taking them and making mini replicas by morphing them. Instead, this is a collection of images very similar to actual scenes, but within the constraints of the materials used. It's kind of like the hands -- they can't be perfect replicas, but the idea and mood are down pat.

The exhibition comes from Kristan Horton, a visual artist hailing from Canada. For two and a half years, the only video he had in his studio was Dr. Strangelove, and he watched it over 700 times. Why he didn't go and pick up any other video is beyond me. Heck, I love Heathers and have probably seen it 100 times, but that's over 15 years! The collection of images starts with the classic Columbia logo with the torch-bearing woman, which is shown with its recreation -- one that uses a bottle and what appears to be an old trophy bottom, some tape and some plastic or tissue. Beyond that, a plane is recreated with silverware, a remote control becomes a computer panel and an old dictionary becomes a bed. You can see some of the images here, and the exhibit is currently housed in Toronto, at York University, before it moves to Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery this July.

Wow, this is going to be hard for two reasons. On one hand I'll find it tough to rank my very favorite Stephen King movies because the ones I love ... I really love. On the other hand there's been a whole LOT of rotten King flicks churned out over the years -- and I actually like some of those, too! But as a lifelong King kook I think I'm able to separate the wheat from the chaff -- even if, yes it's true, I actually sort of enjoyed Tobe Hooper's The Mangler. (It's just so enjoyably stupid!) So with that I bring you my own personal picks for the best Stephen King adaptations yet (not counting TV shows, mini-series or short films).

Christine (1983) -- Yes, the book is better and sure, a few important things were monkeyed with on the way from page to screen, but there's so much I do like about John Carpenter's adaptation that it makes the speed bumps a lot easier to handle. From the filmmaker's creepy score to an excellent lead performance by Keith Gordon, the flick's just got an admirably bad-ass attitude. Stripped down to its essence, Christine is not much more than another "geek fights back" revenge-centric horror flick, but Carpenter makes the movie his own with a solid production design, a few excellent set pieces and a pace that moves at an appreciable clip. Plus that car is just so damn cool.

Pet Sematary (1989) -- Just about every hardcore horror geek I know holds Pet Sematary in pretty high regard, and just one visit with this bleak and unflinching piece of pulp horror will explain why. It's a remarkably grim and unapologetic tale of dead cats, cute kids and a patch of land that, well, it resurrects dead tissue is what it does. And if you've read even one "back from the dead" story, then you know they never end well. (Pet Sematary, both the book and the movie, packs one doozy of a dark denouement.) OK, so maybe Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby aren't exactly the rock-solid thespians you'd want for a screenplay this devilishly mean-spirited, but the pair do what they can, plus they've got good ol' Fred Gwynne supplying background color by the bucketful. (And don't forget about poor sickly Zelda! Yuck.)

Carrie (1976) -- The very first (and arguably one of the very best) of the Stephen King movies, Carrie hit the screens courtesy of a young Brian De Palma, and the director pulled out a big bag of Hitchcockian tricks to bring the story to the silver screen. It's about a socially bankrupt young girl who tries to cobble together a normal social life ... much to the chagrin of some snotty she-bullies and a resoundingly devout lunatic of a mother. Some might say the flick takes a long while to get where it's going, but between the prom night finale and the graveside stinger, Carrie more than delivers its share of grisly goods. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie make it watchable all by themselves, but De Palma is the real star here. (OK, De Palma and a young, evil John Travolta.)

"Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels."

In graduate school, I had a roommate get all over my case for videotaping a Pedro Almodovar movie I'd seen the year before and wanted to watch again, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (pictured above). She asked me to please not watch it when she was in the apartment. "I don't see how you can possibly want to watch something that is so degrading to women," she told me. She was also disgusted that I liked Midnight, the 1939 movie in which a female character says she doesn't disapprove of a man beating his wife.

A few years later, I was having lunch with a female coworker and told her the story about how I loved A Clockwork Orange so much the first time I saw it, that I went back to the theater the next night to watch it again. And once I went to the Paramount to see it when I had a fever of 102. She looked at me like I was insane. "I didn't know I had a fever at the time," I explained. "It's not that," she said. "But you liked A Clockwork Orange? I wouldn't see it myself, I heard it's terribly misogynistic." "Well, yes ... but it's very good," I replied. And this week, acquaintances have been giving me the hairy eyeball because I admitted to liking a movie advertised with a poster featuring a woman in chains: Black Snake Moan.

When Robert Altman died Monday night he left behind a good deal of pre-production work on what was to be his next film, a fictionalized remake of the 1997 documentary Hands on a Hard Body. Scheduled to begin shooting next year, the new film has a screenplay, co-written by Stephen Harrigan, and a distributor, Picturehouse, but now is without a director.

Those familiar with the story presented in Hands on a Hard Body -- twenty-four contestants try to win a new truck in a contest that has each attempting to be the last to remain holding onto said vehicle -- should be in agreement that it would have been perfectly dramatized by Altman. And possibly by nobody else. Picturehouse head Bob Berney is now debating whether to go ahead with the production with a new director at the helm or to let the project die with the late, great filmmaker, knowing that it just won't be as good without him.

The first idea that comes to mind for the substitution option is to have Paul Thomas Anderson take over. He is nearing completion on his latest, the oil-tycoon-family drama, There Will Be Blood, so he may be able to fit this into his schedule, and also he recently worked alongside Altman on A Prairie Home Companion, so he is likely the most qualified to continue the project relatively close to Altman's vision. A second choice, and less appealing one, would be to have Richard Linklater have a shot, since he seems to have no new film in the works, he has done a fair job of handling the multiple-character, multiple-storyline style, he just adapted a non-fiction book as a fictional narrative, and he should feel at home working with the Texas-set film. A final idea would be to have S.R. Bindler, who directed the original doc and has since moved into shooting fiction films, redo his own film.

Talk about guts! This kid submitted this video to Stanley Kubrick way back in 1983 when Kubrick was having open auditions for Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick had advertised around the U.S. for young actors to send in audition tapes to be considered in the casting process. Brian Atene, aged 20 at the time, sent this tape in and was apparently never heard from again, as least by Hollywood. That is until this video started making the rounds on the web.

Now, Mr. Atene can be accused of many things, but being shy about his "acting abilities" sure isn't one of them. He compares himself to a young Alec Guiness, and calls the Juliard School where he is a student, the "finest acting institution in the world". Although he says this, "not as a statement of conceit, but humbly as a statement of fact." He calls Kubrick one of the greatest directors of all time while rolling his eyes to the heavens, although tells him that he isn't quite as good a director as Michael Curtiz, who directed The Sea Hawk (which is apparently Atene's favorite film) in 1940.

After taking Kubrick to task for not directing 2010, he goes on to let him know that his favorite composer is Erich Wolfgang Korngold (he composed the music for The Sea Hawk, of course), that he won a puppy for 50 cents when he was 12 years-old, and his favorite color is green. Oh, and he's a Trekkie. He then performs a short "cutting" loosely based upon on The Outsiders, by which I think he means the book, and not the film, since that came out the same year that Atene was recording the tape.

This is probably the best video definition of the word hubris that I've ever seen. See for yourself after the jump. Once you've seen that, check out the parody update of Mr. Atene, aged 43.