What are you watching now? - (This is my brain on TV!)

[tonyw]

The voice-over in THE KILLING is designed to be ironic, satirizing the "just the facts, Maam" of DRAGNET and the use of this device in film noir. If you listen to the film again, you will find one example of an error that Kubrick throws in to undermine the so-called supremacy of planning and rational control. Likewise, Joker's narration in FULL METAL JACKET is as ironic as Trooper Ryan''s in Sam Peckinpah's MAJOR DUNDEE. Marion Falsetto's KUBRICK: A NARRATIVE AND STYLISTIC ANALYSIS is very good on this point.

We are not supposed to trust the narrator but look for aspects of the process of contingency that Thomas Nelson emphasizes in his KUBRICK: THROUGH A FILM ARTIST'S MAZE.

Welles probably saw Kubrick as a fellow styliistic subversive especially in the use of sound while Huston was much more mainstream.

[Kevin Loy]

I'm not so sure about the Kubrick/narration thing. I'll agree that the "just the facts, ma'am" voice-over in "The Killing" is superfluous, although it is very much part of the formula Kubrick was reveling in (and I admire how coldly detached it is). And, while adding a little color, "Full Metal Jacket" could have done without Joker's voice-over. Otherwise, Kubrick's use of narration is unerring in my opinion. The two best examples are "A Clockwork Orange" and "Barry Lyndon" where the narration often adds ironic and humorous counterpoint to what is actually being shown on the screen.

As for "excessive useage of dialogue": are Kubrick films any more talky than the average drama? A lot of his films have a number of scenes notable for very spare use of dialogue ("2001" is almost a silent film). When his characters do speak, their lines are usually direct and memorable.

I don't thnk that his films are more talkative, per se, but I do think that they go out of their way (especially with the voice-overs) to explain every single detail of the film, which gives me the impression that he was trying to "dumb down" his films. Personally, I find it extremely annoying when a film tries to explain something to me which is clearly obvious (like the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex stumbles through the rainy night to the "home" where he and the Droogs had assaulted a man and raped his wife, and he tells us where he was, as if we have forgotten about that place). But, like I said, I loved the language of the film, and would love to see it again based on that (and, in all fairness, I like it a lot more than pretty much any of his films outsde of 2001).

Which brings me to 2001, and why I think it is his best film. People go on and on about the impressive visuals, and while they are indeed spectacular, what really strikes me about the film (as you said, it is basically a silent film, and if "Modern Times" is considered a silent film, well, why not 2001?) is how open-ended the film really is. More than any of his other films, and more than most other films in general, it challenges the viewer to interpret what is happening for themselves. There is nobody there to tug on our heart-strings (indeed, most of the humans act in such an indifferent manner that the machines are more human, both in how they function and in how they look) and tell us how we should feel, or think, or even tell us what is happening. Like the Ligeti piece that opens the film and also turns up during the intermission (Atmospheres), the lack of a singular narrative allows the viewer the opportunity to see what they want on the film (just like the piece itself, while lacking a true "melody", is full of dense, shifting chromatic harmonics) and take away whatever they want. Of course, there is a general narrative, but it is broadly defined and generally open to interpretation.

[Roger Ryan]

Kevin - you may be the first reviewer in history to claim that Kubrick "dumbed down" his films! Casual viewers tend to miss the significance of the way Kubrick structured his work or the subtext included. Often, the characters' motivations are ambiguous, the dramatic tension established by what's not being said or shown. A good example would be the scene in "Eyes Wide Shut" where Tom Cruise's character contemplates the girl in the hospital morgue - I suspect he wants to kiss her (necrophilia being just one of the many sexual fetishes explored in the film), but nothing is overt about the scene.

All the same, your analysis of "2001" mirrors my feelings precisely. That film would fail utterly if given a more traditional narrative (which is why "2010" is so underwhelming).

[tonyw]

As for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the dialogue comes from the individual perspective of each character, something that Kubrick views ironically and challenges the viewer to react to. It is by no means "dumbing down." Young Alex is not the most intelligent of people and Kubrick uses sound in a similar contrapuntal manner as Welles does both in his radio broadcasts and future films. Do we believe Kane when he voices his superority over Jim Gettys, a figure treated with some sympathy by Welles since he also has a mother with whom he has an entirely different relationship than his opponent had with his.

[Kevin Loy]

As far as the idea of Kubrick "dumbing down" his films, this is mostly in relation to his tendency to explain very obvious plot details in the dialogue. I generally find it to be annoying and unneccesary, ruining the whole idea of what is unique about a film. I mean, if I wanted somebody to explain something to me in unerring detail, I would read a user's manual. Of course, the converse of that argument is that Kubrick didn't need to make films to satisfy me...but, like a computer game once said, opinions are like a**holes: everybody has one and they all stink (I only mention this because I had never seen the end tag to that particular cliche until I played that game)

I do realize that there is quite a bit of irony in Clockwork. In fact, what might be more ironic than the film itself is the title: while many people have pointed out that it is a reference to Alex's programming, I tend to think that it is reflective of how Alex basically starts and ends as the same person, despite the changes that are inflicted upon him, both by himself and others. But I don't think that Alex's explanation of, say, bumping into the former droogs (who are now cops) is ironic in itself. The idea and, particularly, image, are highly ironic and are what carries the irony more than anything Alex could say at that moment. So isn't it logical to feel that anything beyond that is superfluous?

I will have to go back to Eyes Wide Shut one of these days, mainly since I recall that it was more 'suggestive' than most of Kubrick's work that I have seen (and I haven't seen it in ages), though it pains me to consider it since I can't stand films that star "Tom Cruise" (I just don't feel that he is a very good actor...at all...in fact, I can't think of one film that I like in which he appears...of course, you could argue that the films might have been the problem, but no...I just find him to be grating.)

And as far as Kane and Gettys are concerned, I had always thought that the general idea wasn't to figure out which one was superior, but which one was inferior (of course, you could argue that it is a matter of figuring out relative superiority, but in a society where the notion of picking "the lesser of two evils" is widely accepted, I prefer to phrase it this way...after all, evil is still evil, right?). And I can't really tell you which one is worse...though I always did find it intriguing how both men are portrayed with empathy, especially at that point. I think that Welles really had a gift with portraying antagonists, not as the arch-villains that most directors feel a need to make them, but as people. Usually very screwed-up people, but people nonetheless. But, of course, I'm hard-pressed to name anybody who really stands as anything close to a protagonist in the story...hell, maybe Thatcher, simply because he at least tried to do somewhat right by Kane, but then there was that newsreel scene where he called Kane a "communist"...

[NoFake]

Kevin:

“I think that Welles really had a gift with portraying antagonists, not as the arch-villains that most directors feel a need to make them, but as people. Usually very screwed-up people, but people nonetheless.”

To quote from TIOW (p. 301, 1993 paperback ed.):

PB: Do you have sympathy for Quinlan?

OW: Yes. Even though he doesn’t bring the guilty to justice, he assassinates them in the name of the law. He wants to assume the right to judge, and I think no one has the right to judge except under the authority of law. Still, I have to like him because he loved Marlene Dietrich and saved his friend from a bullet. But what he stands for is detestable.

PB: Like Kane?

OW: Yes. Kane, in abusing the power of the popular press, stands against the law, against civilization. He tries to make himself a king in a world without law. All these people express, each in his own way, things I hold in loathing, but we have human sympathy for these characters. He has a human disposition, for want of a morality.

[Terry]

I watched several Robert Montgomery films on TCM. That guy was fucking amazing. And versatile. No stereotyped character-actor he. His daughter Elizabeth didn't inherit even a tenth of his talent.

I enjoyed HE WALKED BY NIGHT starring Richard Baseheart as a psycho con-man cop killer. Baseheart must have been superb at introspective roles - the intense, silent schemer. This film was already reminding me of DRAGNET (which it predated by years) when a young Jack Webb showed up as a crime-lab geek.

I watched all 13 episodes of the COSMOS series. It has aged very well. There is some new stock footage used in the set - Hubble telescope pictures, clips from the shuttle missions, new 3D computer composites of the data from the Voyager missions, a shot of the Mars Rover conked out next to a large rock at the Sagan Memorial Station - stuff like that. The updated footage doesn't detract (too much) from the show. Good old Carl. We sure need his reasoned voice in these days of fascist nationalism, religious bigotry, fear, hatred, witch-burning and ignorance...

I bought THE BROTHERS GRIMM on DVD. Excellent flick. Looks more like Gilliam's earlier films (Jabberwocky or Baron Munchausen) than his later period (Fisher King, 12 Monkeys.) Lots of lame Pythonesque comedy which is interesting but not funny. Great commentary by Gilliam, a bunch of deleted scenes with optional commentary and about 30 minutes of documentaries. Nice.

Gilliam's other new film TIDELAND (filmed during a hiatus of the shooting on Grimm) premiered in Canada last year. It polarized the audience and won a bunch of European awards. It hasn't been shown since. No distributor. Somebody has millions of dollars invested in the fucking thing. I bet they'd like a chance to make some of it back.

Watched several films with Barbara Stanwyck. My Gods, what an ugly woman. She sure could be the seductress when she wanted to, though. She was great in BALLS OF FIRE. (I had that once - the doctor gave me a shot.) Good old Gary Cooper. He was suspiciously good at playing simplistic dolts (Sgt York, Mr Deeds.) Stanwyck also did the movie version of SORRY, WRONG NUMBER. No Aggie. Aggie would have been better - more hateful and hysterical. What was a linear radioplay got to have tons of flashbacks in the screenplay - a big, invented melodrama. But at least Mrs Bernard Herrmann got to write it (as she had the radioplay.)

I saw John Barrymore in GRAND HOTEL. He sucked. "They" say that alcohol had already destroyed his talent. I don't see any talent. His elder brother Lionel is in this one too. He could still walk at that time. Lionel is awesome. Superb actor. John made a number of silent films before he burned out. Maybe he's great in those - but I haven't seen any of them.

[Tashman]

Yes, these are the days of fascist nationalism. Learning this, one doesn't bat an eye over the other healthy sentiments about various actors.

[Terry]

Yeah, these are the days of milk-sucking, spineless political correctness too - but I was never good at self-castration.

[Tashman]

Plain correctness is worth aiming for. The milk-sucking variety, not so much. But call ugly whoever you will.

[Terry]

Call me an asshole if you want - I'll freely admit to being one, and unrepenting at that. I'm not sure what "correctness" is. I say what I find to be true and factual, and damned be the torpedoes.

I watched THE BROTHERS GRIMM a few more times - like most Gilliam films it has enough depth/complexity to allow such things - also I wasn't sure what I liked/disliked about it - and I had trouble understanding the dialogue, so I had to figure out what I had missed.

The music is great, mostly. Dario Marionelli's score is evocative, emotional and gorgeous - when he was left to his own devices. Since Gilliam thought this was a comedy, Marionelli was instructed to score some of the sections as such - it's kind of like Monty Python and the Holy Grail music. Marionelli's own non-comedic themes play over the end credits, and I played them back five times in a row, they're so good. Very Italian. Very operatic.

The cast is really good, as a whole, with exceptions only to the superlative. I've always hated Matt Damon. He's great in this. Gilliam says he was playing against type. I've never seen Heath Ledger before - but he's wonderful as a weak, cringing, chagrinned oaf. However, I can barely understand a word he says. It's almost as if he graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Orson Welles School of Mumbling, Slurring and Unintelligible Enunciation. Honestly, I had to watch the film with the subtitles turned on in order to make out the dialogue. Heath is great, but he really needs to get that whatever-it-is out of his mouth. Peter Stormare is fantastic as a lilly-livered panic-proned Italian torturer. I couldn't understand him half the time, either, but he's very funny - even the dialogue I missed sounded funny. Jonathan Pryce is great as an evil French general who hates German food. Lena Headey is okay - she didn't have that much to work with, but she could have been better. Monica Bellucci is gorgeous, though her English-by-phonemes recitals are annoying - luckily she doesn't say much.

Odd film. The dynamics between the brothers is very good - how they hate/love one another. Heath's character is the only one which really develops - the nerd made hero. As I kept watching it (four times in a row) it kept getting funnier - especially all the sissified faggy mannerisms with which Gilliam imbued the brothers - Matt Damon shrieking like a girl, throwing up his hands and screaming "run" - Brave Sir Robin returns - Heath Ledger sucking on a quill while twirling a tassle around his finger as he ogles the rather masculine girl he likes...I love this movie.

Great use of Colour Grading - similar to what Peter Jackson did in LOTR. Unfortunately, they also used that damned "spotlight" - where they brighten the contrast on a certain object or detail to draw the viewer's attention there - nice intent, but I find myself staring at the spotlight instead, and thinking it's a shitty, unsubtle effect. Lots of CG effects - some superb, many are too obviously CG.

I'm going to watch this as many times as Catbuglah watched Treasure Island. I see obsession rearing its irresistable head...

[catbuglah]

Gilliam's an interesting filmmaker. Didn't he have an oddly Wellesian experience with Don Quijote? I think he used to work on this funky american magazine called Help! - his editor was quite a cartooning dude - Kurtzman - did these remarkably deep war comic books in the 50's - Two-Fisted Tales & Frontline Combat - The Grimm's are cool - read the complete fairy tales - lots of interesting stuff...

Say Treasure got a good review :


Welles makes it work

[catbuglah]

Welles makes it work for real this time

[Terry]

Gilliam's an interesting filmmaker. Didn't he have an oddly Wellesian experience with Don Quijote? I think he used to work on this funky american magazine called Help! - his editor was quite a cartooning dude - Kurtzman - did these remarkably deep war comic books in the 50's - Two-Fisted Tales & Frontline Combat

Yes, Gilliam had just started principle photography on THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE, starring Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, when Rochefort succumbed to illness and was no longer available. The financing was contigent upon Rochefort appearing as Quixote, and with Rochefort gone, the film collapsed. An insurance claim paid $15 million to the investors, and all materials for the film, including Gilliam's script, became property of the insurance company. Gilliam has spent years trying to find backers to buy the rights back. The tragic tale is told in the wonderful two-disc set LOST IN LA MANCHA.

Harvey Kurtzman was the cartoonist who did the strip HEY LOOK in the 1940s. He became an editor/writer/layout artist for EC Comics in the 1950s. His best-known creation was MAD, which ran as a comic book for a couple years, and then became a magazine to escape the government censorship which ensued after the publication of SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, the focus of a fear-mongering witch hunt which was as at home in the McCarthy era as it would be in today's era of fomenting terror about Al Qaeda and Sex Offenders. Kurtzman surrounded himself with some of the best-loved comic artists of living memory, including Bill Elder, Wally Wood, Jack Davis and John Severin. The censorship of the Comics Code destroyed the EC line of titles. EC combined all of its resources into MAD MAGAZINE, but Kurtzman was unwilling to share editorship with Al Feldstein, so Kurtzman quit, taking most of the EC artists with him. They got Hugh Hefner to publish TRUMP, which lasted two issues. They tried again with HUMBUG, which lasted a couple years. Kurtzman then branched out with HELP, changing the format to the extent that the stories were photographed with real actors on real sets instead of using drawings. This was Kurtzman's most successful post-MAD title.

Terry Gilliam was an aspiring cartoonist, originally. He had edited a college magazine, and he sent a copy of it to Kurtzman. Kurtzman's response was, ultimately, to hire Gilliam as an assitant editor on HELP. One of the photographed stories featured a young John Cleese, as an executive with a sexual obsession for his daughter's Barbie Doll. Gilliam left New York for London and within a few years drifted into MONTY PYTHON. HELP folded, and Kurtzman and Elder gave their character Goodman Beaver a sex-change and produced LITTLE ANNIE FANNIE which ran for 30 years in PLAYBOY. Gilliam would later satirize his old mentor in the film BRAZIL, in which Ian Holm portayed a Mr. Kurtzmann.

[Tashman]

I'm not sure what "correctness" is.

Well, given the casual setting, it probably wasn't worth broaching on my part, either. Since it's already broached, though...

There's faint irony in saying Agnes Moorehead would have been better in SORRY WRONG NUMBER in the same breath as you level another actress on the basis of beauty. Moorehead had it spelled out in terms nearly as unpleasant as yours when she was offered a supporting role rather than the one she made famous. But as that other noted Barrymore, Ethel this time, said, an actress must have a hide like a rhinoceros. That need is double-edged: she may need toughness trying to "break through", but then she needs as much or more once on stage (as you've demonstrated vis-a-vis Stanwyck). Do you just insult one actress calling her ugly? If 'Aggie' weren't a child of the Mercury, what would you say of her? It's not irrelevant, I don't think, inasmuch as we are all complicit in making the wheels turn. Coincidentally, Hollywood is run by unrepenting assholes.

Admittedly, this has nothing to do with fascism. But if we are going to be careless and wild with large and important subjects (as I meant to imply), it is not surprising that little things like actors and actresses hardly stand a chance. Barrymore is just as roundly debased as Stanwyck, and somehow way out of proportion to how easy a mark he is. It might otherwise be suggested that you watch TWENTIETH CENTURY, and reminded that Orson lovingly reenacted Barrymore's great performance in that for radio (and other times did his Barrymore on radio--"Marvelous Balastro", etc.--and fondly recalled Barrymore), but discussion seems pretty well poisoned at the outset.

All this amounts to useless gum-beating, I imagine. But it seemed only friendly to elaborate after being impertinent enough to pipe up in the first place. Clearly you have an abiding interest in movies. I can't understand not being a little careful with the object of one's obsession. But that's your business. These days ("of political correctness" and so on) may be as you define them, but I think it's more likely the age of "I don't give a shit," or, as you like it, "damned be the torpedoes." I just don't get the outlook.