This has been brewing for a while; probably since I first saw this AV Club piece reviewing Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street. For those not willing to click the link, the review, which is not that favorable, basically calls Oliver Stone a one note director:

Present the audience with the simplest, least sophisticated morality tale imaginable, then throw in a line like that, just in case the point wasn’t clear.

One little sentence, writing off the entire career of a man that has made a slew of different kinds of flicks. The problem is that if you look for simple morality tales in Stone’s career, you basically come up with two flicks: Scarface and Scarface for White People, aka Wall Street. You’re not going to convince me that unsophisticated morality tales are at the root of either Platoon or JFK, his most successfully nuanced works. The majority of his other movies are also totally clean. It would be a more accurate (but still incomplete) blanket criticism to say that predictable politics are at the heart of many Stone movies than to say morality.

But hey, why don’t we get to the heart of this matter? The only reason the AV Club gave Stone a crappy review on what is typically regarded as one of his best flicks is because the man has been a complete joke for the past several years, making the harsh review seem like the reviewer’s opinion of Stone’s modern suckiness has soiled his perception of the past successes. Although Stone hasn’t made a good movie in a decade, and although he might never again make another decent flick, these factors do not take away from the effectiveness of his accomplishments in the 80s and early 90s. Before crap like Alexander happened, I have little doubt that the AV Club would have said Wall Street was one of the most defining movies of the 80s. And there would have been an American Psycho comparison.

This gets me kind of worked up. I dig the AV Club, and I dig Stone’s good movies. This hipster hating of a movie that’s actually pretty great sets an annoying precedent where in the future I have to defend Stone in conversations against asshead Wes Anderson fans. What makes the AV Club review even worse is that the blanket statement it uses to condemn an entire career is only accurate if you look at a tiny, tiny subset of his films. Feel free to hate on the man for his modern failures, but please don’t pretend like his present day crappiness is the final form of some sort of chronic disorder that’s been present since the very beginning. Please, dumbass critics, don’t bury this guy and leave him to be rediscovered in a half century. Stone is one of the good ones. He’s just overstayed his welcome a bit.

Just the other day I vocalized my desire to uncompromisingly love the films of Guillermo del Toro. And what happens today? It is almost officially announced that del Toro will be helming the Hobbit movies. Oh, Guillermo! Tolkien’s killed off directors of comparable quality, and aside from that, working on this garbage is nowadays the equivalent of licensed crap. Unlike Hellboy, though, Tolkien doesn’t fit your visual motif, at all.

The biggest indicator that this is artless whoring is that it’s been seen fit to split The Hobbit into two separate movies. Who thought that was a good idea? That reeks of some money-hungry executive that hadn’t even read the book, realizing that more money comes from two movies than from one.

I’m trying to think of ways to spin this that make Guillermo not look terrible. Maybe he thinks he’ll get to make his own overly indulgent personal project if he delivers the goods? That would be cool. The not-so-cool part is that at this rate, the overly indulgent personal project that is close to his heart might be a relaunch of the Inspector Gadget film franchise.

Finished up with Pan’s Labyrinth in HD last night. I absolutely consumed that disc. Watched it twice, once with commentary; watched all the special features. Such a wonderful and gorgeous and dark movie–authentically dark in the way that children’s fairy tales seem when adults look back at them with a somewhat critical eye.

It’s good to have a gutsy director that knows how to put together beautiful visuals, visceral imagery, and strong stories. I’m not sure anyone else in the game today does that. I remember some Jodorowsky quote about how beautiful and terrible things go together, and del Toro might, might just epitomize that axiom.

During a recent message board rant bemoaning the fact that the state of modern criticism (not any specific form, just criticism in general) sucks, I decided that I should put Eyes Wide Shut to the tacks fairly, since so few seem to have done so.  I’m not saying that no one has done so, but in light of the recent Kubrick HD releases, it’s far too apparent that people have generally taken the shitty criticism from the time of EWS’s release to heart permanently.

Before I get to the meat, I think it is important to note that most Kubrick movies have not been huge successes at the theatres, and only a relatively tiny subset of them won any sort of unanimous acclaim from the critics.  His early films, before he was king, seem to have done well critically, but when he got big, he was apparently either very divisive, or an easy target for bitter critics to try and earn themselves a name with via negative reviews.  I am going to assume the former, that Kubrick’s movies are divisive, because that more logically follows than assuming that critics have been bitter for the last, oh, 30 some years.  2001?  It was a hit, but not a critical success at the time of release.  A Clockwork Orange? Divisive to critics of the time, possibly due to the scandalous content.  Barry Lyndon?  Actually did decently critically, though by no means unanimous; however, it was a flop.  The Shining? Like 2001, a critical wash-up, but a commercial success.  Full Metal Jacket?  Well, this fared better critically than most of his movies; oddly enough, it’s bar none his worst movie, so I’m counting this as a hit by my math.

So looking at the pattern, my case is pretty cut and dry before I even get to talking about the movie:  the criticism is mixed, so it must be fantastic, right?  Well, that is right, but of course it is–I said it, and I am very smart and I listen to classical music.

It’s not beyond criticism, but I firmly believe that not only is this movie great, but it is among Kubrick’s very best.  The movie had a lot of hype coming out, fueled by prominent magazine covers, and then, probably the kiss of death for the movie critically, Kubrick’s death.  You see, Kubrick’s death, at the time, could be seen as poetic.  Just dying days after delivering his cut of the movie!  The film just had to be a punctuation to his life and career, and what a Romantic notion it is to believe that his last movie was going right over the grandstand!  And then the movie came out, and the critics had their eyes on the sky, looking for the grand slam, missing completely the swift double Kubrick knocked, unnoticed, between their legs.

Maybe critics missed the settings, or the genres.  You can’t really give EWS a one or two word genre.  It’s not a war movie, a horror flick, a period piece, or science fiction.  It’s not an overt satire like Strangelove, nor a weird comedy like Lolita.  It’s not really a thriller.  It’s a sort of mystery.  It’s vaguely Hitchcockian.  The one thing it definitely is, from beginning to end, is Kubrick.  There is no way you could mistake this movie for another director’s film.  From the impeccable soundtrack to the bathroom shots to the car tracking shots to the lack of dialogue, its genre, is Kubrick.

Kubrick liked to work with big themes.  Eyes Wide Shut is no different, but it doesn’t appear to be making fairly clear (but still interpretive) statements like Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, or Full Metal Jacket.  As far as meaning goes, I think it is like 2001 in meaning.  It gives you the big themes, like trust and fidelity, and it gives you a scenario, a meditation on said theme, and while everything, or most of the things, in the respective pictures seem to say something about those themes, what they actually say is left for the viewer to define and interpret themself.  You can ask ten different people to give an interpretation of 2001 and probably come up with as many different meanings.  Eyes Wide Shut is no different; I believe that it is as interpretable as 2001.

Ebert called A Clockwork Orange an ideological mess when it was first released.  I find that incredibly strange since ACO is fairly cut and dry when it comes to meaning.  If any of Kubrick’s movies can be called ideological messes, they’re 2001 and EWS.  But still, the mess label is not quite correct; both movies throw ideas related to their individual themes at you at an alarming rate, too fast to give enough time to on just one viewing, but they are intended (I believe) to stimulate thought about their stated themes, not say anything definitive like ACO and Strangelove.EWS gives us a theme of fidelity and trust.  Although those two words can be considered synonyms, there is a slight difference here.  Fidelity, as in marital or sexual fidelity, and trust, as in the trust of friendship.  Several other themes can be picked up, going into things as vague as truth and reality (much effort is put into creating a dreamlike atmosphere, and the reality of how certain events happen is sometimes, at best, obscured), but I don’t think many would disagree that the movie is mainly about fidelity and trust.

For fidelity, we have Tom and Nicole.  To put things bluntly, the events of the movie largely occur because, well, Tom Cruise is trying to cheat on his wife because she once contemplated having an affair.  Tom is tempted several times, once by a grieving woman, once by a hooker on the streets, at the weird notorious orgy, and finally by the earlier hooker’s roommate.  Each time he is interrupted before he can make his move.  At the end of the movie, he tells his wife everything that’s happened, sort of completing the “trust loop” that she began by telling him of her near infidelity.  This is oversimplifying a few things, but that’s the unbent truth of the events. For trust, we have Tom and Sydney Pollack, playing his friend Ziegler.  I only ever hear people talk about this movie being about sex and fidelity, so I don’t think many even look beyond that, but there’s a fairly significant arc between Tom and Pollack.  To the credit of other observers, I have developed this theme after several viewings, and after a fairly careful analysis of most of the scenes Sydney Pollack is in.  Bear with me a bit, because I have to lay a bit of groundwork before I get to the payoff.Tom and Pollack are friends.  At the beginning of the movie, Nicole makes a comment asking why Pollack invites the couple to his Christmas Party every year (it is clearly an upper echelon of society event), and Tom replies that it’s because he makes house calls.  Later on, when Tom privately helps an ODed attendee in Pollack’s private quarters, it becomes apparent what those “house calls” could have been.  Although we have no idea how Tom and Pollack became acquaintances in the movie (Pollack’s character is significantly older than Cruise’s), they have enough of a rapport that there is significant trust.  Pollack knows that Cruise will keep mum about his potential legal snafus, Cruise knows that he gets an invitation to a swank party (and other benefits, like lots of 25 year old scotch [very pricey!]).  Skipping the events of the masked ball (see the end of this post for a link to another page with my careful analysis of the ball), Pollack at the end of the movie tells Tom the truth; just like how Tom completes the the “trust loop” with Nicole, here Pollack seals the “trust loop” (opened when Tom rescued the ODed patron) with Tom by revealing the truth of what happened at the ball, exactly.Of course, the Pollack thing is a sort of sub-story of the main fidelity thing, but oddly enough it is more complicated to decipher, since it involves understanding exactly the events of the masked ball, which is unlikely to happen on a person’s first viewing, since they will be, uh, distracted by the scene.

Recently, a number of director Stanley Kubrick’s movies were released in both of the major high definition video formats, HD-DVD and Blu Ray.  This rerelease has had me view several of his classics that I had not seen in several years, and in one case, a movie I had never seen before.  These viewings were an absolute revelation to me in a few different ways.

To get some details that apply to all of my viewings out of the way, I watched all of the movies in the Blu Ray format.  The reason I went with Blu Ray over HD-DVD is a fairly simple one:  The single HDMI port on my television is being used by my Blu Ray player, and HDMI is a nice bump in quality over component, which my HD-DVD drive is using.  I am sure the picture and sound quality is equal between both formats, but for my setup, right now, Blu Ray wins.  And in the case of these movies, the extra oomph in picture and sound was worth it.  The remastering of the movies was absolutely phenomenal; it was like watching these movies again for the first time.  Some of the best remastering I’ve ever seen.  Aside from costumes and titles and obvious dated bits, going by technical quality, any of these movies could have been made in the past decade.  Previously, the obvious iconic shots stood out, but the quality of these discs coupled with my big screen HDTV made every frame seem like a work of art.

The movies I will be discussing here are 2001: A Space Odyssey (which I had never seen before), A Clockwork Orange (which I had seen a number of times, between the ages of 14 and 16 or so), and The Shining (which I have seen many, many times).  One of the most interesting things has to do with the varying levels of experience I’ve had with each movie; each of the three, freshest to me to the most well known, felt completely new as I watched them this time.  I feel so utterly naïve for saying so, but I think the true greatness of Kubrick had actually eluded me before these revelatory viewings.

But as with many things while growing up, this elusion wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Kubrick’s movies clearly mean different things when viewed at different ages, and this is one of the indicators that confirm his status as one of the all-time greats.  In contrast, someone like Antonioni might make movies that touch on themes of similar depth to Kubrick, but watching one of his movies without a firm grasp of cinematic and storytelling language will leave one bored and in the cold.  Even without that knowledge, Kubrick’s movies are thought-provoking, and more importantly, entertaining.  Despite loving the movies of Bergman and Antonioni, it would take me a few minutes of spitting different caveats before I could call them truly entertaining on anything but a high and developed aesthetic level.  Kubrick brought depth to the table, but he also brought highly entertaining, deliciously cynical movies that were not afraid to dip into visual and storytelling “wows” that might have been written off as crass, superfluous, and ephemeral by other auteurs.  As is commonly (but largely incorrectly) said of the plays of Shakespeare, Kubrick’s movies held deep truths for those in the balcony, and cheap thrills for those on the ground.

But let’s start looking at those movies before I spit out any further laudations that might be a bit superfluous

2001: A Space Odyssey

The first movie I watched was the only one with which I had no previous viewing experience, but similar to the “have I seen this before, or have I just seen it referenced that much?” effect that one gets when watching classics by the likes of Hitchcock and Wells, it felt like I already knew the movie like the back of my hand within a few minutes.  The significant difference between this effect in 2001 and other classic movies is that 2001 felt familiar not just due to its clear, far-reaching influence on other films and television shows, but in other respects as well.

It’s impossible to watch this movie without thinking about David Bowie’s Space Oddity, which was, I’m sure, Mr. Bowie’s intended effect.  What I never realized before this viewing was that Space Oddity does a fairly impressive job in making one think of the movie in ways other than song title.  Kubrick has long been said to use a disconnected style, and this style is even more present in 2001 than in his other movies.  Bowie’s song shares a similar disconnected feel.  The song, again like the movie, is telling a fairly straightforward narrative, but its narrators, both ground control and Major Tom, both sound disconnected from the story, as if they are reading their lines from a script as flatly as possible.  Eventually, the song reaches a coda, and the sound of desperation is heard in the voices on both sides of the conversation.

In 2001, the disconnection is abundant.   In the opening section, “The Dawn of Man,” the prehistoric men, more simian than human, live as a tribe in a desert that reaches far and barren in all directions, empty and alone.  A bit later, the monolith, stark black and iconic in appearance appears, standing out, completely out of place.  Later on, the desolate desert is replaced by cold, slow outer space, where man is similarly alone.  A bit later, Bowman’s communications are literally disconnected.  The “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” section of the movie, in a metatextual move, leaves the viewer disconnected and momentarily (hopefully it’s momentarily!) confused.  After a movie filled with disconnection and isolation, the last scenes illustrate a sharp contrast between an elegant Victorian room and the emptiness and strangeness within it.  After so much sterile space, the coda we get is that room, and the brief star child sequence after it.

What does it all mean?  Depends on whom you ask.  It’s brilliantly constructed, and over the past few days, I’ve come up with a few interpretations of my own, and seen even more online.  It may be the most interpretable, but still entertaining and coherent, movie of all time.  It can be, as taken at face value, a story about the stages of man.  Or it can be seen as a parable about the relationship between mankind and technology, his tools.  Or it can be seen as a series of musings on man’s ambitions.  It can be taken in on a metaphysical, or even religious level, about fate, or god, and how those invisible hands guide us.  Of course, it can also just be a cool science fiction story with a trippy ending.

The movie is also clearly notable for its place in the evolution of science fiction as a form of storytelling.  It’s a bit late to the game, since key players like Asimov, Dick, Heinlein, and Kubrick’s 2001 collaborator Clarke had been hitting homers for several innings at the point of the movie’s release, but it’s clearly had as much influence in the genre as any of the writings of those authors.  Some of them had done some work in the field, but 2001 does appear to be something of a pioneer in the metaphysical school of science fiction.  Even if it didn’t invent the fields outright, it certainly raised the bar both in that field, and in making the public at large recognize science fiction as something more than flying saucer stories and cheap thrills.

The movie also has plenty of technical merit on its own.  When I was younger, I remember the Discovery Channel showing specials about how various movies did effects shots.  It was very interesting back in the days before the time computers ruled the movies.  Even after seeing many of those shows, there are still effects shots in 2001 whose execution is a total mystery to me.  If this movie were done today, they could use computers and green screens to film the elaborate shots where gravity is (quite literally) turned upside down.  Back in the 1960s?  I really have no idea.  It’s always something of a pleasure to be surprised by special effects in an older picture.

The soundtrack to the movie is as famous as anything else about it.  Kubrick would frequently use both famous and not so famous classical music in his movies, and here it works sublimely.  It’s interesting to view movies and short films from the 1960s and 70s and see things that very clearly were an inspiration on the dawn of the music video in the 80s, and such fingerprints are all over 2001.

There’s more I can talk about, even after one viewing, but I don’t want to write a million words on the first movie I watched in my little Kubrick marathon, especially a movie that so much has already been said about over the decades.  There are its “predictions,” which are probably more amazing now that some of them have come true than they were when the movie was released.  There’s the movie’s stunning economy:  absolutely everything that occurs, everything you see, everything said, means something on a heavy thematic level, no matter what your end interpretation is.  It’s like a short story—nothing here is really superfluous.  That’s an absolutely amazing achievement for a movie, and I can’t think of a feature-length picture that does anything similar.  I can’t believe this movie was critically mixed upon release.  It’s thought provoking, it’s entertaining, it looks gorgeous.  There are few other movies that have it all in the same way this one does. 

My only disappointment is that I waited this long to view it.

A Clockwork Orange

Its reputation precedes it, and for good reason.  I saw this movie for the first time when I was a younger teenager, and I believe this was the first time I had viewed it in approximately a decade.  It felt like the first time I had ever seen the movie, really.

Some people will frown at me for saying so, but the movie reminded me of Fight Club in how ripe it is for misinterpretation.  As a matter of fact, when I watched this when I was 14, I am sure I did take away the wrong message from the movie.  Much like Fight Club, A Clockwork Orange is a meditation against the things it shows on screen, but it shows them more explicitly than most movies out there, giving it a high transgression factor, something stupid teenagers love.

A Clockwork Orange is about evil and human nature, and a pretty common sense response to Skinner-esque conditioning.  As a response to Skinner, the movie (and book) tells us that conditioning might (might!) eliminate bad behavior, but when taken to extremes, it robs people of their freedom, dignity, and possibly even their ability to function normally in society.  Good satire thrives on taking stupid ideas to their logical extremes, and that’s what A Clockwork Orange does.  Alex’s behavior, pre-conditioning, is as extreme as it gets.  He’s basically a caricature of a real young man, but oddly enough, he resembles, rather closely, the common descriptions of bad young people that your parents tell you about.  When the authorities get him, they use the one and only thing he actively cares about, Beethoven, to condition him.  The conditioning gets rid of his bad behavior, but at the expense of the thing he loves most.  Having that stripped away from him, he becomes rather sensitive and affected, hurt and rejected by both his friends and family (both of whom he had burned bridges with earlier).  He’s left an easily abusable little puppy.  Eventually, one of his former victims extracts sick revenge for Alex’s previous transgressions against him.  The state already considered Alex punished, and this punishment beyond his appointed punishment (along with the threat of a changing political climate) gets the state to not only return Alex to his pre-treatment state, but also give him a cushy job.  Thus, in the end, Alex is rewarded for his bad behavior at the beginning of the movie, and all he had to go through to get there was a couple of days of mistreatment.

(The movie indicates that the conditioning took, at most, two weeks.  After the conditioning, Alex was released.  The events of the movie after his release only take place over the course of a few days—possibly only two or so.  When Alex had it bad, post-conditioning, it wasn’t for a very long time.  He really didn’t have to go through much to get his reward at the end of the movie.)

It is often pointed out that Kubrick did not have a copy of the novel with the last chapter in it.  This is only a half truth.  During the course of writing the script, he did gain access to the last chapter, but he chose not to incorporate it.  People that have read the book point out that this changes the entire theme of the book.  It does, but Kubrick’s take is superior to that of the book’s.  Kubrick’s take is cynical to the core:  Alex is rewarded for his bad behavior.  In the book, the final chapter shows Alex reevaluating his life and making a conscious decision to turn “good.”  The book’s final chapter may be more accurate to real life in that many delinquents do eventually make peace with the system and become productive citizens, but the cynical take of the movie is much more fitting considering the nature of the satire.  Conditioning, in the movie, not only nearly kills Alex, but then it ends up inadvertently rewarding his bad behavior.  In the book, it could be read that the conditioning ended up working in a very roundabout way.

In choosing to use the dialect presented in the novel, the movie makes use of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect, or Verfremdungseffektv.  This device keeps the viewer disconnected from the characters in the movie.  This serves several purposes.  It prevents the viewer from relating or identifying with the delinquent main character.  It indicates, quite clearly, that although the world presented in the movie is similar in several ways to our own, it is a different place.  It creates a bit of natural confusion, keeping the viewer at a distance so they naturally have to think harder, and concentrate on the events on screen in order to interpret and make sense of them.  The effect is employed well for all of those reasons.  It keeps the audience guessing, and in doing so it encourages viewers to think independently about the events on screen.In addition to the Beethoven pieces used in the movie, the soundtrack is also notable for its use of Moog for its synthesized score.  The Moog is often used in the score unaccompanied, or almost completely unaccompanied.  This makes the score sound somewhat sparse by today’s standards, especially today’s standards concerning synthesized music, but it fits perfectly in that A Clockwork Orange takes place in a 1970s retrofuture.  The set design also reflects this.  The movie is clearly a product of the 1970s, but it is definitely the future as envisioned in the 1970s.  Depictions of the retrofuture are always entertaining 

The Shining

For whatever reason, this HD reissue campaign has skipped over the period piece Barry Lyndon, but it picks up again with The Shining.  I have seen this movie many, many times, but much like with A Clockwork Orange, seeing it in HD was like seeing it with new eyes.  I was almost hesitant to watch this instead of moving on to Full Metal Jacket (which I have only seen once) since I had seen it so many times, but I was sort of committed to watching the movies in chronological order.  I made the right decision, though.

I forgot about those insane shots of the car riding through the mountains on the way to The Overlook.  Beautiful, beautiful shots.  I have no idea if they were any sort of technical milestone, as are the famous tracking shots in the movie, but I’ve seen little else like them in cinema of the period.  The shots show wide vistas, and they are very steady.  There’s a lot of picture, a lot of miles, going into the eyes at one time.  They are some of the first shots in the movie, and it was nice to have something that made me say wow jump at me right away, especially considering how hesitant I was to put the movie in at first.

Maybe it was watching the movie on a standard definition TV, maybe it was that so many times I’d seen this movie, it had been on broadcast, but I didn’t remember this movie being such a wonder to look at.  It probably doesn’t compare to 2001 or A Clockwork Orange, both visually perfect movies, but The Shining was definitely much, much better looking than I recall it being.  Lots of excellent close ups.  Lots of spooky, atmospheric, empty shots of that hotel.  Great split-second scare shots. 

Beyond the looks, it’s also a great movie, but it’s also what I consider the first of the lesser, late period Kubrick films.  It looks better than I remembered, but it doesn’t stand up to his previous greats.  The soundtrack is again great, but not as great.  The story is spooky and its own take on the source material, but it really lacks the depth of his previous work (although for depth, it whips the pants off most horror movies).  So the movie is fantastic stuff, but when I have to make the hard decisions when ranking all these movies, it will probably be the first flick to make the bottom half of the list.  That said, I have to once again emphasize the quality of the movie.  I have seen it so many times, and I still see and recognize new things.  I feel guilty using “lesser” at all in the description of this movie, but trust me, that’s saying a lot more about the greatness of his previous movies than it is about the lack of quality present in The Shining.

A significant portion of the narrative rests on the “is this real or not?” trope that pops up semi-frequently in horror and suspense flicks.  Yes, it’s something I’d call a trope, but this is Kubrick, and he makes good use of it.  During the course of the movie’s Kubrickian slow build, what appear to be the blatantly supernatural elements spread amongst the 3 living in The Overlook, like a sort of sickness, a flu, a contagious cabin fever.  Danny has his imaginary friend, but his ominous messages towards the beginning of the movie can’t really be accepted as 100% supernatural, although the movie sure wants you to think they are.  No, it is Jack that has the initial “supernatural” encounters in camera, and over the course of the movie, they spread to Danny, and during the climax, at fever pitch, they spread to Wendy.  This makes it unclear whether there’s really a supernatural force at play,  or whether the happenings are a sort of shared delusion that started from the deeply troubled Jack.

The movie seems to enjoy giving the viewer reasons to suspect the supernatural, whether it has to do with axe murders, Indian graveyards, or the Donner party.  The fact that the movie gives you several possible explanations for supernatural activity leads me to believe the exact opposite: there are no spooks, but the characters sure think there are, and their delusions and familial issues make for damned fine entertainment.

No matter what interpretation the viewer chooses, the ending, the picture of Jack in the Gold Ballroom, works best on a metaphorical level, similar to the ending of 2001.  I find it curious that Kubrick did one movie each of the two most common kinds of genre movies, horror and scifi, and both of them have endings that work best on a metaphorical level.

I’m not going to waste words reiterating Stephen King’s horrendously wrong opinions about the movie, but I will state that I find it interesting that, once again, similar to A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick took an author’s work and turned it into something that was totally his own.  This is also a good time to point out that Kubrick made entire genres his own.  Science fiction, horror, satire, the man never worked in the same field for two movies in a row, and during this period he always totally conquered the genre he was working in.

To follow along that thought and begin wrapping things up here:  Kubrick also conquered themes.  Most great artists do their best work within a set of consistent themes.  Not so with Kubrick.  Every one of his great movies tackled a different set of ideas.  2001 did science fiction, futurism, and metaphysics.  A Clockwork Orange did good and evil, and sociology, and satire.  The Shining examined the fractured family, the ghost story, and insanity.   It’s not just these 3 movies either; they just happen to be the ones freshest in my mind.

If there were one theme shared amongst the three movies I have just gone over, it would be the disconnected feel.  Maybe it’s not an intentionally a shared theme; I get the idea that this may be a sort of side effect of Kubrick’s style, or his choice of projects.  I have spent a good number of words going over the disconnected feel of 2001, and it’s definitely thematically intentional there, or else Kubrick was emphasizing the vast visual emptiness of space and the desert a bit too much.  Although it doesn’t figure in as obviously, disconnection and the feeling of being alone are significant parts of A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining as well.

In A Clockwork Orange, there is disconnection on a character level.  Alex is disconnected from society.  Another disconnection is the viewer from the movie, by use of the alienation effect.  Through the use of the conditioning, Alex is also disconnected from his true nature.  In the end, there is an incongruence from the world depicted at the beginning of the proceedings, as society “accepts” Alex.

In The Shining, the central conceit of the movie is that the Torrances are disconnected from society.  This disconnection is in more than one way, too.  The Torrances are physically disconnected from society at The Overlook (and Jack, similar to HAL in 2001, literally disconnects the radio, their one plug into society), and they are also removed from society in general due to the cracked nature of their family.  Jack’s drinking problem has caused them to move once, and this dislocation from a (I assume) previous job and life has left the family somewhat desperate, and alone.

So that was my recent Kubrick adventure.  It’s not over yet.  I still have Full metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut to watch.  In a way, I am most excited to revisit those movies since they are frequently viewed as his worst.  I mean, maybe when I watch those movies again, now, they won’t be his worst at all.  I’ve already seen so many new things in the movies of his that I have seen before that it is also possible that those two are better than I recall.  Also, especially with Eyes Wide Shut, it is important to remember that nearly all of Kubrick’s movies received mixed critical receptions upon initial release.  Maybe the world has had time to grow into Eyes Wide Shut.  I really shouldn’t raise my expectations like that, though.

Not to sound like an advertisement, but if it weren’t for HD video, these viewings probably wouldn’t have happened.  None of these movies were on my DVD buy list because I knew they were all middling packages.  The HD reissues were hyped to heaven and they have great special features.  So this was all a case of believing the hype being a good thing.  Believe the hype, people.  If it weren’t for this somewhat arbitrary technical improvement in home entertainment, I’d probably still think that Kubrick was merely great.

I ended up watching Caligula last night; a little sick, a little under the influence of medicine, a little sleepy-headed.  I only intended to watch the first 20 minutes or so, but, well, after Peter O’Toole tearing up the scenery, I was hooked.  The other day, I indicated that it might be difficult for me to write something about Caligula, because, really, what hasn’t been said before? Moreso than other movies, Caligula really puts all it’s got up on the screen, and aside from going into production troubles or the circumstances that lead to such talent getting attached to something so. . .bacchanallian, what else is there?

It became evident while watching the movie that there were indeed things that needed to be said.  I am not a pervert; I am not an aficionado of fringe pornography; but what I am, is a Caligula defender.  And in my years and years of reading of this legendary fiasco, the one thing I really haven’t seen is one of those.

That’s probably a difficult position to hold, and I sort of feel like I just admitted that I was an alcoholic or something.  I’m not even sure where to start, so if this starts looking like a chronological synopsis, please put up with me.  Another warning: this movie is sort of impossible to talk about without getting into, er, um, details.  Let’s just say that you basically see some women, uh, turned inside out, basically, as the movie goes on, and that might be repeated.  I won’t make this pornographic or anything like that, but it’s just really difficult to adequately describe this movie without getting into how ridiculous it is.

Now, first things first, I have read a significant amount of material about this movie.  I have gone years and years without seeing it for several reasons.  For one, everything I had read about the movie indicated that it was a total fiasco.  And it is, but amongst all that text, I never received any implication, implicitly or explicitly, that this is a fiasco that’s worth witnessing.  I’m guessing that most of those reviews and articles I read did not want to risk being seen as peddling porn, or they didn’t want to waste their word count swearing that they weren’t perverts.  If you want a good synopsis of the movies well-documented, numerous troubles, check out Wikipedia.  Wiki will also make it clear that there are many, many cuts of this movie. 

I’ve been sitting on a Planet Terror write-up for about a week now. I know what I like, and looking at the facts about the movie in an objective manner, this movie was pretty much made for me, but at the same time, something about it just left me nearly totally nonplussed. If you’d asked me while watching the movie, I might’ve sung a different tune, because on the surface, it delivers as spectacle. It moved along at a great clip, never lingering on a scene for too long before the next. It was acted in the way a movie like this should be. There was violence–even better, stylized violence. After the it concluded, though, I guess there was just a nasty, difficult to identify aftertaste that made me question whether what I’d just sat through was really quality, or whether I’d just witnessed a 90 minute illusion of quality.

To give a bit of background that anybody reading this already knows but is necessary for written flow, the two films that comprise Grindhouse are supposed to be throwbacks to the days of 70s exploitation flicks. In this respect, Planet Terror is a very impressive effort. In comparing it to those notorious movies of the 70s, it’s only held back from being a perfect copy in two respect: anachronisms (intentional, part of the plot, but still shook the ambiance), and the movie and effects were a little too well put together. So, the movie met its stated goal admirably, and it delivered on all of the important ephemeral things that made these movies “classics” today. What’s the problem? What didn’t I like? What’s keeping Planet Terror from being the raging thumbs up I wanted to give it as the movie was going on?

Was it the ending sequences, where the movie got too over the top for its own good? It took a good schlock flick and cranked the ridiculous to an 11 in the last act. A fairly straightforward zombie flick reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead turned into something patently ludicrous, with guns attached to amputated stumps and two, count em, two self-consciously overly sentimental death scenes. Yes, yes, on a project like this, some level of ridiculousness is intentional, but in those last scenes, limits were really pushed. As much as I want to like the concept of Rose McGowan busting shit up with a gun leg, the way the movie pulls it off is too dumb; dumber than any 70s exploitation flick would even attempt to pull off. Humorous, entertaining, and hip irony was at the heart of this project’s inception, but Planet Terror’s ending presents a clear line when hip, ironic “I can’t believe they used to make movies this dumb” turns into “This is dumb.”

But that’s just the ending, that can’t be the issue. There are tons of movies that lose it in the last act but are still, on the whole, good. I just watched The Prestige, a movie with an ending that had elements insulting to its audience via unnecessary exposition, but I’d still say it was one of the more enjoyable movies of last year. No, no, it takes more than a questionable third act to sour an entire movie.Maybe Planet Terror’s strict, nearly religious following of its targeted genre’s formula was its downfall. It’s a clone so perfect that it almost feels like I’ve seen it before. They even get the period synthesizer music right, for chrissakes. Could it just be that the movie was a somewhat generic patchwork of things I’ve seen over the years? I think this is closer to the truth. Whenever I think of “original” scenes in the movie–the movie’s distinctive parts, the director’s signature–they are generally parts I don’t like. The only things this movie gets right are the things I’ve seen before. When it mixes in its own elements, it fails to impress. We all know that Hollywood, heck, entertainment in general, is all about the art of the ripoff. The reason why Pulp Fiction gets away with it and Planet Terror doesn’t quite is that Pulp does a good job of adding as well as stealing. Planet Terror fails at that aspect. Planet Terror is less its own movie, and more of a checklist of generic “grindhouse” situations, qualities, and moods.

So shoot me, I missed premiere weekend by two weeks. Can you really blame me? Opening weekend for anything even remotely popular in an urban area is a nightmare, and it’s been fairly clear that the Simpsons was going to be, if nothing else, a very successful flick at premiere. And it was, and somewhat surprisingly, it was also a hit with critics. I know it’s not something that can be cited in an encyclopedia (but it is good enough for Wikipedia), but the movie is rating just under 90% at Rotten Tomatoes, a phenomenally high rating that is usually reserved for children’s films that are formulaic to the point of being beyond criticism. Most movies widely considered to be good rank in between 70% and 90% on the site, and I was somewhat surprised to see the Simpsons sitting at the top end of that scale given the constant criticism I hear of the series these days.

Anyone that’s been on the internet for a bit knows that opinions on modern day Simpsons are totally mixed. Nobody will deny that the show changed its style when it started approaching those double digit seasons. It went from being a sitcom about a very American family, their life and their town, and  turned into something closer to a slapstick comedy featuring an expertly cultivated cast of stock characters. My opinion? I haven’t seen a new episode since 2004, but I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that a very vocal group of folks think it’s gone downhill since then, and looking at my DVD sets, I think eight (96-97) was the last season I’d declare a full-on humdinger.

As an aside, I frequently hear people describe the Simpsons as a satire during its golden years, but I mostly think that sentiment is way overblown. There were definitely some satirical episodes, and jokes, but when people make this comment, they tend to paint the good ol’ days as satire with a very wide brush. It’s simply not the case. If the Simpsons was a satire in its glory days, then so was The Cosby Show, or I Love Lucy. It was an animated sitcom, and yes, sitcoms do tell jokes that tread into satirical. Calling the Simpsons a satire on the strength of (to pick a commonly cited example) its criticism of religion is like calling Seinfeld a comedy of manners because of that episode where they spend the whole time lost in a mall parking lot. The way people talk about the earlier Simpsons episodes, you’d think it were written by Jonathan Swift.

Back on track, the movie entertained. The first 20 or 30 minutes killed, and then a plot got in the way and the funny got less common. That first bit of the movie was largely made up of little vignettes of Springfield life, Simpsons life, and they were pretty great. Homer daring Bart to skateboard through town naked is probably the best bit in the entire movie, and heck, maybe one of the best Simpsons bits that relies on animation quality ever. The people I saw the movie with were confident in saying that the beginning was better than the show has been in recent memory. The plot that eventually kicked in was, in contrast, woefully out of place and served to introduce character interactions that sometimes didn’t seem quite appropriate. Rather than going over the movie moment by moment, I’m going to make this easier and stick to a neat set of main bitching points.

President Arnold Schwarzenegger? Did they forget that they already have an Arnold character? He looks exactly like McBain, he sounds exactly like McBain, and he even alludes to being in a fake McBain-esque movie. I am guessing Arnold was inserted into the storyline as president a year or two back, when there were slight rumbles about insane Republicans trying to get the Constitution changed so Arnold could run for president. But if Arnold was indeed slipped into the movie because of things happening in reality, why did the movie only allude to a Haliburton-esque company during the scene where Albert Brooks’ character is talking about placing the giant dome over Springfield when it could have brought reality in again and named the company he was so obviously referring to? The presence of Schwarzenegger as a character is just puzzling.

In true testament to how old the show is, multiple plot points from the series are reused. The show has been airing for nearly 20 years, so I can forgive some overlap, but off the top of my head, the episode reused plot elements of at least four different episodes. The multi-eyed animal and ecological disaster angle turned up in the early episode with the three-eyed fish. Lisa gets a completely arbitrary love interest (in the movie, this subplot had nothing at all to do with the movie. It seemed so out of place). Ned has been a surrogate father to Bart before (oddly Bart hated it when it happened in the series, but he wants Ned to be his surrogate here), and Bart also similarly got attached to his Big Brother at one point. Marge fighting the urge to leave Homer has happened a bunch of times. I’m sure there are some things I’ve missed, too. The true faithful may write some of this stuff up as references to the television show, but it just feels old hat. It reminds me of the old Itchy and Scratchy movie episode, where the commercial for the movie advertises that it’s like 25% new animation. We’ve already seen a lot of this movie before.

It also seems like the people making the movie thought the whole spider pig thing was a lot funnier than it was. The song plays again during the ending credits and the movie continues to reference it after it is no longer relevant to the plot. Despite this, we never learn the fate of the pig in the end. I thought that was a weird detail to leave out since the film team was apparently enamored enough with the one-shot gag to make an actual soundtrack song out of it. That’s going to be really hilarious in five years, since we’ll all still be talking about how awesome that gag was then. Right?

The movie wastes potential good usage of Albert Brooks. They try to make him a villain, no doubt because of his classic Hank Scorpio, but his screen time is insignificant enough that you basically forget about him between his appearances. His performance is decent enough, though he is clearly channeling the previously mentioned best one-shot character ever. Maybe Brooks could have gotten more time if they had cut out Lisa’s pointless love interest, or the female shaman. The latter character was completely useless and apparently created for one sight gag. Oh, and Homer having a spiritual, visually psychedelic journey! We’ve had that before, like the time he hallucinated and was guided by a fox, his spirit animal. Another bit that was already done in an actual television episode.

It’s also a tragedy that so many great characters are so underused. A lot of the movie takes place outside of Springfield, and many would tell you that the Simpsons is as much about the people of the town as it is about its titular family. Mr. Burns, who should by all means be the villain of any Simpsons movie (aside from maybe Sideshow Bob), is limited to one scene, which is more than I can say about Skinner and Krabappel, who only appear briefly during the Green Day concert scene at the beginning of the movie, from what I recall. Willie, Apu, and Barney are all pretty much absent. I mean, they appear in the backgrounds of some scenes, but they have no bits.

Some of the animation seemed off, particularly the abundantly used computer generated, 3d effect stuff. What should have been one of the crowning animated sequences in the movie, the angry mob descending on the Simpsons home, featuring over 300 different characters, was rendered terribly. By using a sweeping shot, zooming through the crowd, all of the characters looked like flat pieces of paper, like something out of Parappa the Rapper. The 3d effects were very out of place, and very noticeable when they were used.

With all that in mind, it still was very watchable. It would be even more watchable if I didn’t have intimate (very intimate) knowledge of the television series, and thus the ability to recognize the bits that they’d already done. I imagine that the second movie will happen more quickly than the first (if I recall correctly, when contracts were being signed for things, everyone signed on for three flicks), which is kind of worrying since the script for this merely decent movie has been in the works since 2001, and was apparently tweaked up until just a month before release. Still, some advice for the second movie: Keep it in Springfield, and either give us a villain we already know, or make it a movie of short vignettes, similar to the first act of this movie (also known as the best part).

Zabriskie Point (1970) - Experience the Italian-filtered ennui of the counterculture movement in the United States.

The Passenger (1974) - Experience the ennui of. . .Jack Nicholson.

Blow Out (actually by Brian de Palma, inspired by Blowup, 1981) - Experience the de Palma-ing of Antonioni. Starring John Travolta and the Chick from Robocop.

To conclude, if I didn’t start watching Michelangelo Antonioni movies, I probably would have watched something else. With that said, you will get extra bonus jokes from the Austin Powers movies if you watch Blowup, so you should check it out quickly since every day that passes is yet another day closer to the time when Austin Powers will be completely culturally irrelevant.

In the opening scene of buzzed Korean monster movie The Host, we are in some sort of medical lab, possibly a morgue of some sort, on a (and this is important) *US* military base, where a (again, important) *US* man in doctor’s scrubs is telling a (important!) *Korean* dude that speaks broken english to pour formaldehyde down the drain. The Korean man objects, saying that formaldehyde is a TOXIC CHEMICAL and regulations say that. . .POUR THEM BOTTLES RIGHT DOWN THE DRAIN, MR. KIM says the white devil! After a few more lines, the Korean lad relents, pouring the toxic chemicals, jar after jar, into a drain that feeds into the Han river. Talk about heavy handed. I’ve seen less blatant Very Special Episodes of Blossom. Do they have Blossom in Korea? Maybe that’s the problem here.

Anyway, the incident described above more or less actually happened, back in 2000. Although the American fellow that forced the order has been tried in absentia, he has never served the sentence that was delivered. With an opening setup like this, it’s very easy to draw a direct comparison between The Host and another big ol’ famous monster from another part of Asia.

 But wait, there’s more! The Host doesn’t just limit getting its America hate on just to the opening, either. A little bit into the movie, after the unnamed monster’s first kill crazy murder spree, a Korean news report informs everyone that the aquatic beast, aside from being astonishingly violent, is the host for some sort of nasty new virus that gets transmitted to those that come into physical contact with it. The *US* has obtained a sample of this mysterious virus and sent it to the CDC, but they aren’t being so kind as to share their findings. Those bastards! Later on, the *US* imposes some sort of control over Korea in order to try and stomp out the virus, since in the eyes of the *US*, the Korean government has failed at successfully quarantining the virus or capturing the monster vectoring it. Something called AGENT YELLOW, some sort of anti-viral megaton bomb, is being used to hopefully wipe out the virus. Now that’s what I call subtlety! They could have at least picked a color more than one letter away from orange on the ROY G BIV scale.