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VIDEO STANLEY KUBRICK BOX SET
yes Wide Shut was a joke. It must E have been. For a director who had
been so brilliantly succinct with dialogue, Stanley Kubrick put so much waste and nonsense and, let’s face it, rank drivel into his final movie. So much so, that it’s hard not to conclude that he somehow knew that it would be his swansong, and he was hellbent on going out with an epitaph of confusion. Nicole’s final parting shot to Tom (‘Let’s fuck’) may well have mirrored Kubrick's intention: he was screwing with our heads.
No doubt the Kubrick connoisseurs will be distraught that this box set includes none of the boy from the Bronx's 19505 works, but 61’s Lolita (O... ) was truly the moment when the former photojournalist arrived. Kubrick filmed the unfilmable on several occasions and Nabakov’s tale of unspeakable desire, a
STANLEY KUBRICK COLLECTION
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STANLEY KUBRICK COLLECTION
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EYES WIDE SHUT
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STANLEY KUBRICK COLLECTION
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horrible betrayal and the slow drip towards insanity was his first. We also have Peter Sellers doing a funny voice, an act brilliantly revisited two years later with Dr Strangelove (“0”). Playing three men (the humane but indecisive US President, a stuffy British officer and the insane Nazi with the hyperactive limb), Sellers drives Kubrick's most blatantly absurd anti-war statement and a wired comment on the early 60$ mania for the bomb.
2001: A Space Odyssey (0....) saw Kubrick's own paranoia and manic state getting out of control. His attempt to insure against the discovery of aliens on Mars before his film came out was just one sign of his frenzied mindstate; the over-long LSD-tinged trip into infinity being another. Yet, this is undoubtedly the definitive modern sci-fi movie, as bleak and beautiful as cinema gets. A description that could also be attached to A Clockwork Orange (0... ), the movie he ordered out of circulation. For a man who never shirked into compromise in the creative process, it still bamboozles that he should bow down to a few tabloid stories of copycat beatings and withdraw his film. Maybe it’s easier for us to handle that he just thought
the movie was too duff to be seen anymore.
Never one to rest on his laurels, Stan moved forward by going back in time with 1975’s Barry Lyndon (O... ). Snail-paced, austere and lush, it has been unfairly dubbed by some wags as Boring Lyndon, but its majestic feel and unbearably moving closing half hour make it a grand Kubrick curio. And Ryan O’Neal (the Tom Cruise of his day), makes an intriguing stab at an Irish brogue. There is little tedium apparent in The Shining (000”), one of the finest Stephen King adaptations yet. Jack Nicholson is in his element as the tortured, axe-wielding Jack Torrance and the images of the twin girls in the corridors of blood are still among the most chilling in modern horror.
Full Metal Jacket (.0. ) has its fair share of ketchup flying around too, but the film suffers from context; for once, Kubrick wasn’t alone in spotting a trend, the Vietnam movie being ten-a-
His attempt to insure against aliens on Mars was just one sign of his frenzied mindstate
penny in the mid to late 80s. A sex drama with scenes straight out of a Ferrero Rocher ad are not quite so common but Eyes Wide Shut
(0.. ) still contains enough sequences of grandiose Kubrick-isms to keep you watching. However, the let-down felt by all was overwhelming. When I went to see the movie, a cry of ‘rubbish’ came up from one audience member as Kidman’s indecent proposal cued the credits.
For a man who adapted the works of some of literature’s crack heavyweights (Nabakov, Burgess, Thackeray, King), no one who ever told Stan what to do. We can only thank him for telling Warner from beyond the grave that the time was nigh for the definitive box set.
(Brian Donaldson)
I [‘(lC/l fi/m IS priced 5‘1295) VHS, £319.99 DVD; the box so! If; priced l‘()‘9.99 V} IS, 5799.99 [)W ). /l// [If/(‘5‘ awn/able {mm Warner 0/) MOI) [0 Sup.
(3 20 Sept 2001 THE LIST 99