Slant. Kubrick.

Warners' Stanley Kubrick Collection has practically sparked a mini-Kubrick festival at Slant. To follow the films' chronological order, start with Rob Humanick on 2001: A Space Odyssey: "Central to the profundity of the film is the notion that few things are more meaningful than a child's first steps, the emotive impact of this scenario manifest in every one of the film's dizzying set pieces, albeit multiplied to epic proportions. At its core, 2001 is a journey (or, as indicated by its subtitle, an odyssey), a summarization of those questions that are both the simplest in their inquisition and most profound in their answers: who are we, where do we come from, and where are we going?"

"If there's an inherent problem in Clockwork Orange, it's that Alex's cruelty is depicted with such bravura cinematic technique and such harsh irony that there's a whole audience that tunes in just for the shock and awe," writes Jeremiah Kipp. "But I don't hold that against Kubrick's film, which in fact is about uninspired moral negligence, and about its hero tuning into violence as entertainment and institutions using violence and brainwashing as a means of control. It's Kubrick's most prescient work, more astute and unsparing than any of his other films (and he had more where that came from) in putting the bleakest parts of human behavior under the microscope and laughing in disgust."

"It's the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror," writes Eric Henderson. "Having conflated the sadistic struggle between a man and his family into a horrific epic tragedy, Kubrick ultimately slaps the film back into a reversal of 2001: A Space Odyssey's coda, swapping accelerated evolution in favor of a regression so primordially violent it disrupts the fabric of time."

"Somehow after the decadence of Barry Lyndon and a philosophical look at horror in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick settled into a film of unrestrained vitriol and aggression, and - once again proving his genius as a cinematic storyteller - made it intellectual and appealing," writes Arthur Ryel-Lindsey. "Full Metal Jacket states its primary concern fairly loud: Private Joker (Matthew Modine) is grilled for wearing a peace pin on his combat uniform while having 'Born to Kill' scrawled across his helmet. He responds that it is a comment on the duality of man, warring and peaceable - or, in this case, the Marine-brand, courageous, thoughtless, instinctual killer, the human beneath it, and the difficulties if not the futility of one suppressing the other."

"The great joke of Eyes Wide Shut is that the star with the megawatt smile plastered across the covers of tabloid magazines as the sexiest man alive is made to run around the streets like a jerk, desperately in need of a good fuck," writes Jeremiah Kipp. "If the film seems to be a morality play drifting along with the erratic rhythms of a dream, then it begs the question of what is the moral, and how much we're meant to relate to these nervous cosmopolitans."

Posted by dwhudson at November 20, 2007 9:19 AM