Speaking to Michael Ciment about his 1975 masterpiece Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick revealed that he had once been interested in adapting another of Thackeray’s novels, Vanity Fair, for the screen. This idea was ultimately abandoned by Kubrick who felt that the story could not have been “successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a …
We’ve recently posted letters from directors Michael Bay and Terrence Malick to projectionists on how to properly project The Tree of Life and Transformers 3. Recently we recorded our very first and much overdue Stanley Kubrick special. In that episode we reviewed what I think is the director’s best film, Barry Lyndon, which is nothing …
It is a mark of how jaded and inured to screen violence we’ve become that the “ultra-violence” of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 portrait of a not-too-distant future dystopia, A Clockwork Orange – considered so shocking at the time it brought death threats by the bushel to the director and caused him to withdraw the movie from distribution …
“If it can be written, or thought,” said Stanley Kubrick, “it can be filmed.” Kubrick could very well have been articulating the credo for every cinematic explorer of the fantastic since Georges Melies. Ironically, Kubrick – who was second to none in pushing the limits of filmmaking technology – several times found himself in the position of …
Throughout the 1960s-early 1970s, a combination of financial desperation, creative daring, and an adventurous movie-going public had produced a creative detonation in mainstream American movies not seen before or since. Each year of the period seemed to bring at least one mightily ambitious visual experiment by a new contributor to the commercial movie scene, the …
First Posted on FilmBusters on 05/18/10 So it has been ten weeks and the HBO mini-series The Pacific has drawn to a close. So I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the production now that I have had the opportunity to watch it in its entirety. In broad strokes, I have to …
1. The Shining Jack Torrance only kills one person yet he is the monster of the film. No one ever questions Wendy, who not only repeatedly hits Jack over the head with a baseball bat, but also lashes after him with a knife, finally leaving him to die of hypothermia. Clearly the so-called “victim” in …