Dir.: Stanley Kubrick

First of all, what people need to understand and have in mind (I saw some comments here that blowed my mind), is that this was made in 1968... 1968! You have to understand that number. That's almost 40 years! What we need to ask ourselfs, and try to answer truly, is that if we could possibly have the vision to do something like this in that time. And the answer is obviously NO! I don't have the slightest doubt when I say that this film is one of the greatest achievements in Cinema history! The way Kubrick imagined the 'future', 2001, our present (or past), is brilliant and fascinating. Technicly the film is flawless, considering it's time, and there are moments, scenes that I actually didn't believe that that was made in 1968! Of course I understand people who say it's boring. As a classic has to be recomended to anyone who loves Cinema, but it's not for those who expects action and dumb entertaining. What I would say is that this is one of the most 'difficult' films to wacth and analyse. It just can't be watched if you're sleepy, as simple as that... Anyway, I said it and I say it again: this is one of the most important achievements in the history of Cinema! That's why it's one of the few that deserves 5 stars...

"He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."



Widely hailed as the greatest black comedy ever filmed, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is Stanley Kubrick's subversive take on a common Cold War theme. Deranged General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has sent his squadron of planes an order to attack the Soviet Union as they held at the fail safe point, and subsequently made it impossible for anyone other than him to call the planes back. When news of this reaches Washington, President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) calls his advisors to the war room, where General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) suggests the best plan of action may be to back the planes up with a coordinated all-out offensive that's sure to cripple the Soviet forces and limit American casualties to twenty million, tops. But the Russians, to everyone's surprise, have just completed a "Doomsday Machine" designed to destroy all plant and animal life on the planet, and even they cannot prevent it from retaliating.

Combine the plot details with Kubrick's direction, and it's probably safe to assume that few people in 1964 automatically assumed Dr. Strangelove would be a biting political satire. But on second thought, maybe they did. In retrospect, Dr. Strangelove feels like a departure from Kubrick's normal fare, like 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, but Dr. Strangelove pre-dates them all. So a comedy doesn't seem like a Kubrick project to us, but it makes sense when you view it in context. This is a man who had done several self-produced projects, which he had parlayed into the Kirk Douglas war film Paths of Glory. When Douglas couldn't get along with Anthony Mann, he replaced Mann with Kubrick for Spartacus, primarily to serve as a figurehead through whom Douglas could operate. Naturally, this didn't work. Kubrick took over, then made Lolita, a 'light-hearted' version of the Vladimir Nabokov novel that featured a supporting turn by Peter Sellers. All this is to say that when you view Kubrick's career in that sequence, a Peter Sellers dark comedy isn't all that unexpected. In fact, it's a rather natural progression.

But enough history, let's look at the film itself. The primary settings for Dr. Strangelove are deceptively simple: the interior of a plane, the War Room, and General Ripper's office. Apart from a few others, that's pretty much it. A knowledgeable audience member realizes that much of the film is shot on sound stages, but a couple of choices in staging and camera work gives the impression of so much more.

The plane interiors are filmed as if the camera is being operated by one of the crew. There are no long tracking shots or wide establishing shots. They are instead framed in a way that at no time are we given the feeling that the production has taken out a chunk of the plane so that the camera can get the perfect angle. This gives the scenes a cramped, uneasy feeling further heightened by the borderline mental instability of the pilot, Maj. T.J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens). Our level of closeness to him and the rest of the crew is uncomfortable, especially when you consider the nuclear bombs stored below. Contrast that with the scenes in the War Room, where Kubrick goes to great lengths to show us just how big it is.

He seats all the advisors around the type of enormous round table you only see in a film, with a circular florescent light hovering overhead. Behind them is the "big board", a large map of the Soviet Union with lights indicating the position of the planes. The room itself is so big that even the widest wide-angle shot cannot show it all. Clearly rooms of this size do not exist, but Kubrick uses it to remind us of the great power the men in this room hold, but at the same time, he often puts them in the lower part of the frame, an indication that despite all their power, there is little they can do in this situation.

And the one man in the room who should be able to prevent a nuclear holocaust, comes across as the most ineffectual of them all - President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). Originally conceived by Terry Southern as a character with a bad head cold, the President is shocked to learn that not only has someone authorized an attack, but that there's no way to bring them back. And to top it off, the bill that enabled such a bizarre scenario is one that he approved. It is a politician's worst nightmare.

Of the three characters Sellers plays in the film (Muffley, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove), this is the most memorable, or at the very least my favourite. His telephone conversation with the Soviet Premier ranks as one of the best comedic exchanges in all of cinema, and it's all that more impressive that we can only hear one half of the call. The Premier is drunk, so Muffley must explain things to him multiple times and deviate from a very important issue to reassure this man that "Of course I like to speak to you! Of course I like to say hello!" The three-pronged performance by Sellers is clearly one the best from this comedic genius. Much of Muffley's scenes are played against Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson (George C. Scott), a military advisor a little too enamoured with the business of war and highly distrustful of the Russians.

Scott, a criminally underrated actor, is perhaps the best thing in the film. Chomping violently on multiple sticks of gum, he's all big movements and facial contortions, ready to fly off into a rage at a moment's notice. Secretly he's thrilled with the turn of events and a little perturbed that he must waste valuable time convincing this damned politician to launch a coordinated attack. Acting-wise, Scott is off in his own little world, but it's important to note that even as he launches nearer and nearer to madness, he stays firmly grounded in the reality of the film. Few actors can chew the scenery with such vigour without detracting from the film. It's a fine line, and Scott walks it perfectly.

There's little doubt that Dr. Strangelove serves as the high-water mark for anti-war films, but it also ranks alongside not only the best comedies ever made, but also the best films. For such a timely film, it feels as fresh today as it did in the Cold War. But what's most remarkable is that it was even made at all. Imagine the modern equivalent: a dark satire about terrorism featuring the melody "We'll meet again" playing over footage of the explosion. It's the sort of bad taste no one would permit, but when you have people as bold and talented as Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers, they find a way to make it work. In their able hands, the gruesome becomes absurd and the horrific becomes somewhat campy and sweet. It is, hands down, one of the greatest and most brilliant things ever put on film.

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence."



Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange will always go down in history as one of the most polemical, violent, disturbing films ever made. A tale most vile, full of the old in-out and other such nastiness. A tale in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell), our faithful narrator and leader, is imprisoned for the accidental killing of a person and later conditioned by his government to abhor sex and violence, but also the glorious music of Ludwig Van. Sometimes karma can be a cruel, cruel mistress. Sometimes it can be poetic. But, the thing to remember, is that it's always in play.

So learns Alex after his release from prison. Cured of his predilection toward sex and violence, he encounters the victims of his earlier transgressions only to find that people's forgiveness cares little for his cure or the fact that he's paid his debt to society. The wounds Alex has inflicted are deep, so it's little surprise when his victims exact their revenge because, deep down, they are no better than Alex. Freed from restraint by a feeling of righteous indignation, they are able to expose their true selves, as dirty and nasty and vile as Alex in his prime, only now Alex has been so conditioned that he cannot even fight back. He is defenceless, begging for mercy. It's doubtful that this was a desired effect of the conditioning, so you have to wonder: if the government takes away Alex's ability to defend himself and sends him out in a society that hates his very existence and distrusts this so-called cure, does perhaps the punishment exceed the crime? Taking nothing else into consideration, possibly. But when you factor in the conditioning against the perfectly natural sexual appetite and the music of Ludwig Van Beethoven, then it's clear the government has gone too far.

There's little question that's part of the film's message, but to what end? The Prison Chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), as close to a voice of morality as A Clockwork Orange gets, argues before the review board that due to the conditioning "He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice." He's right, of course, as the Pavlovian approach to morality takes away the subject's humanity, reducing him to nothing more than a castrated animal. He's pitiful, really, which is a stunning turn of events considering his actions in the first half of the film. A great deal of that change relies on the acting abilities of McDowell, who's amazing in the role. His performance is often noted as one of the best to never be nominated for an Academy Award. He was also snubbed by the British Academy. The film received four Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing. It won zero.

Part of what made A Clockwork Orange so controversial upon its initial release - Kubrick received death threats against both himself and his family and took measures to ensure the film wouldn't be shown in Britain until after his death, which happened in 2000 - is that switch wherein Alex goes from hated to pitied. Kubrick presents us with a protagonist and narrator who is essentially an uber-villain - a gang leader who picks fights with rival gangs, beats up a homeless man, orchestrates a gang rape, and has a three-way with two teenage girls. There is no code of ethics by which he could be considered a good person. But, he is a clever and charming young man who serenades his rape victims with "Singin' in the Rain" and has a strange, unexplained fascination with Beethoven.

It's difficult to reconcile that this likeable young man could be capable of such atrocities, which is partly what Kubrick's going for here. Take Alex out of his odd white outfit and into some normal clothes and he looks no different than anyone else his age. Only at night he lets his inner demons run wild, where the rest of society has decided to suppress them. But the solution of just taking the demons away isn't a solution at all, because the demons are vital to who we are. Think of it as a ying and yang approach to the soul of man. Without that battle between good and evil we have nothing but an empty, boring wasteland. And that's not a life worth living.

A Clockwork Orange, like so many of Stanley Kubrick's films, is an acquired taste. It is a bold, daring piece of cinema that aims to provoke a reaction in the belief that it is better to be found spectacularly bad than dull. Thankfully, it is neither. Kubrick paints in broad, provocative strokes, muting nothing in the frame. He employs a broad range of colours and flourishes that give the film a vibrant and raw feel, as if you're watching the characters and images explode off the screen. Alex mentions during one of his sessions that "the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen", so Kubrick does his best to make them seem really real, from Mum's hair to the red outfit of the woman being raped to the flashing lights of the record store. Couple that with the wide-angle lenses Kubrick is fond of, the slang bordering on gibberish, the numerous phallic symbols, and the occasional intention continuity error and the entire film is a bit disorienting and unnerving. It's designed to put you slightly on edge.

Of course, A Clockwork Orange isn't for everyone. It's an X-rated film that contains rape scenes and torture and pretty much anything that could make someone uncomfortable, but it's also a brilliant film with grand ambitions. Sure the film's message gets a little muddled near the end, and it isn't always clear what the intention is, and it tends to occasionally lose its way, but that isn't a reason to discount it. Thanks in large part to Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange feels like jazz, and because of that it feels alive, and a flawed film that feels alive is always preferable to a by-the-numbers one that's dull, especially when it's directed by a genius.

"These are great days we're living, bros. We are jolly green giants, walking the Earth with guns. These people we wasted here today are the finest human beings we will ever know. After we rotate back to the world, we're gonna miss not having anyone around that's worth shooting."



Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was originally released on the same month I was born. It opens, as the twangy "Hello Vietnam" plays on the soundtrack, with a montage of Marine Corps recruits getting buzzcuts. We examine one bored, distracted face after another until the sequence ends with a shot of the piles of hair collecting on the linoleum floor. Their individuality has been stripped away, and the first half of the film is concerned with the military's methods of rebuilding these "unorganized, grabastic pieces of amphibian shit" into a powerful, violent collective. Kubrick exerts a similar control over his most restrained, calculated film; as with any of his films, it's fascinating to consider how the ideas that drive Full Metal Jacket are mirrored in the director's process.

We follow a platoon of recruits during their training at Parris Island under the delightfully profane Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey). Both the film and Ermey have earned their place in the pop culture firmament, of course, thanks to the character's endlessly quotable dialogue. But to recall Hartman simply as a collection of one-liners is to underestimate Ermey's brilliant performance. A retired Staff Sargeant and Vietnam vet, Ermey lends the film enormous verisimilitude and helps to steer Hartman clear of becoming a cardboard, Strother Martin-like caricature. Ermey was one of the rare actors that Kubrick allowed room to improvise, and his torrents of almost poetic verbal abuse not only lend the film credibility, but also colour in shades of ambiguity.

On the one hand, we're invited to recoil at Hartman's dehumanizing treatment of the recruits, particularly the dim, sensitive Pvt. Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio), who is dubbed "Private Gomer Pyle." On the other hand, you can sense both Ermey's pride in the role and Kubrick's respect for the character; Hartman is never depicted simply as a sadist, but as a man who is preparing these "maggots" to serve in his beloved Corps. It is a sign of Kubrick's faith in the audience's intelligence that he allows us to answer the question of whether such treatment is necessary for ourselves.

Full Metal Jacket spends a great deal of time establishing the monotonous routines of basic training, and it's no wonder that Kubrick, who would put his actors through the paces with dozens of takes, would be drawn to the methodical aspect of the military experience. The man who made Shelley Duvall cry invites us to consider the morality of pushing characters like Pvt. Pyle to the breaking point because they don't fit into a well-oiled machine. Our narrator, Pvt. Joker (Matthew Modine), is assigned to whip Pyle into shape, and we share both his compassion for and impatience with poor Pyle. A scene where the recruits give him a brutal beating to teach him a lesson is painful to watch, but rather than going for easy emotional manipulation by allowing us to view the scene from Pyle's perspective, Kubrick shoots the scene from Joker's POV as he attempts to drown out Pyle's childlike sobs. We share Joker's (and Kubrick's) anger at Pyle's lack of restraint, and so we're partially implicated in Pyle's "major malfunction."

The second half of the film alienates much of the audience, and it is indeed an abrupt tonal shift from Paris Island. Nancy Sinatra announces this shift on the soundtrack; country has given way to rock and roll. Joker, now a combat journalist, hooks up with fellow Parris Island graduate Pvt. Cowboy (Arliss Howard) near Hue, Vietnam. These scenes, particularly the "Vietnam: The Movie" sequence, are often dismissed as aimless, but they actually serve as a thorough demythologization of war. John Wayne is frequently name-dropped, but the closest thing we get to John Wayne is Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), a dull, racist meathead. These kids are armed only with their rifles and well-worn clichés about camaraderie and valour learned from movies. Animal Mother's idiocy allows him to inadvertently see the war as it is; when he remarks that if he were to die for a word, that word would be "poontang," at least he chooses something tangible. Ever the pragmatist, Kubrick largely sidesteps political philosophy and depicts Vietnam as essentially the place they sent a lot of well-meaning, naive kids to die.

Kubrick's clinical approach turns chilling in the final scenes, as a sniper offs several troops. Each death is accompanied by a hollow blast on the soundtrack that echoes the film's icy electronic score (composed by Kubrick's daughter, Vivian). He was a master of irony, using it not as a cheap, sarcastic tool but as a microscope that exposes underlying truths; here, the well-oiled military machine is severely crippled by one resourceful individual. It's enough to turn Pvt. Joker, who wears a peace symbol and a helmet reading "BORN TO KILL," from a detached outsider to a "hardcore" killer.

The war/sex parallel seen throughout the film and previously in Dr. Strangelove comes into focus here, as Joker is "born again hard." He's a walking erection, and rather than editorializing, Kubrick leaves us to decide whether this is evolution or regression. As the soldiers march into the darkness singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, we reflect on their homecoming, when they will return to Mickey's world, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but definitely not the same.

"I wanted to see exotic Vietnam... the crown jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them."

One of Kubrick's masterpieces. It is utterly unbelievable to me how can one man create films so different and equally genius like Spartacus, 2001... or Dr. Strangelove. An epic!

"A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one."

I used to hate Barry Lyndon. I first saw the film when I was fourteen, soon after discovering the dizzying, almost narcotic rush of A Clockwork Orange (the perfect film for sharp-witted teens beginning to develop a distrust of authority), and I was blown away by the cinematography, which remains unparalleled. At the same time, I felt that Stanley Kubrick was using the film's painterly images to tell a rather humdrum story devoid of intrigue or emotional investment, and I resented Kubrick for what I read as a sick joke. I was wrong, but I was also right.



The truth is, Barry Lyndon is a perverse film, one that keeps its audience forever at a distance from its story, constantly undercutting even the slightest chance of suspense, and then arriving at a conclusion that dismisses its characters' lives as completely meaningless and forgettable. Yet at the same time that it practically forces us towards indifference, Barry Lyndon unfolds with a sort of beautiful, epic splendour that contradicts the film's own claims of irrelevance. It's a maddening, unforgettable cinematic experience; of all my favourite films, I hate this one most.

The film opens with a wide shot - which is not uncommon with Kubrick, but it is used for a drastically different effect. Consider the opening image of 2001, designed to overwhelm our senses; or The Shining, with its labyrinthine helicopter shots teasing our anticipatory sense of dread. But from its first image, which depicts the death of the protagonist's father in a duel, Barry Lyndon keeps us at a distance. Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott (with the help of a Zeiss lens originally used by NASA) create a period piece with an astounding sense of immediacy, the image of the opening duel composed with such astonishing depth and clarity that we feel present in the action.

But rather than using the images to pull us in, Kubrick remains remote, a time traveller observing the alien behaviours and practices of 18th-century Europe. This gives each shot an oppressive weight, as though each moment were a slide examined through a microscope lens; this deterministic approach is perfect for a protagonist who remains almost totally passive in his own fate. We meet Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) as a sullen, lovestruck youth and follow him across the continent as he wins and then loses everything through no fault or effort of his own.

Kubrick uses O'Neal's vacant screen presence brilliantly - Barry is a cipher who is able to deceive his way into wealth and status not through any particular talents of his own but out of sheer luck (in fact, the Thackeray novel upon which the film is based was originally titled "The Luck of Barry Lyndon"). The scene when Barry romances the wealthy, widowed Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) is a masterpiece of surfaces, both actors photographed like perfectly-made porcelain dolls similarly incapable of demonstrating actual emotion. The narrator (Michael Hordern) assures us they have fallen in love, a fact we might have otherwise missed; throughout, the narration dryly mocks these characters' half-realized aspirations and lays bare their actual motivations.

These characters have no apparent inner selves, substituting manners for morals and objects for ideas. The meticulously recreated props and costumes, along with the striking period locations, supply not just the film's style but its meaning - Kubrick simultaneously fetishizes the art and culture of the period while attacking the shallow materialism of his characters. Kubrick's films are frequently about the struggle of the individual; here, the individual has receded into the background, upstaged by the tapestries. It's as sharp a comment about the present as it is the past.

The film builds deliberately, almost to the point of boredom - what would constitute a good 40 minutes' worth of action in other films stretches past the intermission here. We begin to wonder why Kubrick has forced us to endure this endless parade of images that make us feel nothing. It's actually a set-up, and Kubrick snares us with the introduction of the adult Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali), Barry's stepson, who returns after a childhood of petty torments from his ineffectual stepfather to assert his rightful claim to his family's wealth. The moment when Bullingdon uses his smirking half-brother to interrupt a concert with a clomping pair of boots is a genuine shock; by destroying the sustained audiovisual symmetry, it's as if violence has been done to the film itself.

Kubrick presents our children as the only beings we must ultimately answer to - this is paralleled, devastatingly, with the death of Barry's own son after his fall from the horse that was the boy's birthday present. We do not see the fall happen at first; then, as the boy recounts it, Kubrick cuts suddenly, jarringly, to an image that represents everything we reach for and fail to attain. Dissonant noise replaces Schubert on the soundtrack for one moment, exposing the underlying chaos that we attempt to overrule by creating our own meaning. In this sense, Barry Lyndon is also a comment on the cinematic apparatus, which cannot help but recreate a reality that it was designed to reproduce.

Barry Lyndon, more than any of Kubrick's other films, invites the oft-repeated criticism of the director as a cold, calculating misanthrope, and it's certainly his chilliest film. However, while Kubrick's evaluation of humanity is unsparing, the film is almost religious in its search for meaning in the meaningless. Late in the film, Barry finally commits a selfless act, for which he is mercilessly punished. Kubrick has no sympathy for overdue introspection; his films attest to his understanding of existence as an ongoing practice that may eventually be perfected, and as the ending of 2001 demonstrated, he was capable of great hope. So while Barry Lyndon is far from Kubrick's cuddliest picture, it is nevertheless a perfect, dazzling example of the search for truth even in the most untruthful of worlds.