My last Kubrick post was well-received so I’m going back to Rob Ager to share another one of his videos deconstructing the master. Ager has done lots of analysis of Kubrick’s work, and this take on A Clockwork Orange is good for October because it touches on a contemporary horror…

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Getting the week started correctly, here is another scary cinema post in this last week before we’ll all celebrate the season with treats or tricks. I might argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey is Stanley Kubrick’s most innovative, ambitious, and visionary film. But The Shining is my favorite Kubrick flick, and it’s one of the best horror films of all time.

Here’s a great examination of two of the film’s creepiest elements by one of my favorite film analysts, Rob Ager. Ager’s done lots of great breakdowns on Kubrick’s films and here he looks at the terrorizing of little Danny Torrance as well as the mystery of the bear-suited man. Fair warning: Ager’s analysis brings up themes of child abuse.

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If you live in Nashville and read The Contributor you’ve probably come across my weekly film column, “Moving Pictures.” One of the most interesting things about cinema nowadays is the way our definition of what a movie is has continued to evolve as we’re presented with projects across multiple platforms. It’s also interesting how streaming services often provide something that feels like repertory programming, debuting or re-streaming films with a particular cache at a particular time. Netflix just started streaming Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket just in time to celebrate that film’s 30th birthday. If you’re in Nashville visit your local vendor and pick up a copy of the new issue this week. Here’s a taste…

Full Metal Jacket is one of the most unique war films ever made. Like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket comes down clearly on the side of soldiers versus incompetent bureaucrats and sadistic military leaders. And while it’s not as completely bonkers as Kubrick’s Cold War masterpiece, Full Metal Jacket shares its more satirical sensibilities with Dr. Strangelove. The tonal break after Full Metal Jacket’s boot camp beginning comes as the film shifts to the actual war in Vietnam. The artificiality in these scenes — it’s shot in a Vietnam-ized English countryside — speaks to both the unreal nature of a chaotic, confusing war, but also to Vietnam as the first prime time television war. One scene featuring a TV crew interviewing the soldiers in Private Joker’s squad is played for absurdity: the actors look straight into the camera responding to questions as if they’ve been given written answers to recite.

If you’re not in Nashville and can’t grab a paper for yourself, please read the full review here. Here’s a cool video illuminating the behind-the-scenes making of Full Metal Jacket…

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Every now and then I try to make my list of the ten best films of all time, but the best I’ve been able to do is to come up with my favorite films by my favorite directors. Stanley Kubrick has lots of great movies, and they’re all worth watching over and over again. That said, my favorite Kubrick movie is The Shining. As you might imagine I was immediately intrigued when I stumbled across an Open Culture tweet about digital artist Claire Hentschker’s virtual reality deconstruction of Kubrick’s masterpiece. Here are some of their words…

In other words, the project allows viewers to move around, using 360-degree Youtube video, in a digitally fragmented space built out of the first 30 minutes of the film. Be aware that there are browser restrictions, but if you open the video in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, you’ll be able to navigate through the space using your mouse or the WASD keys.

It’s a very weird experience. The Overlook’s interior exists in contiguous 3D photographic blobs suspended in black nothingness—giving one the feeling of reaching the edge of some previously-believable video game world and finding out there’s nothing beyond it. And it’s made all the creepier by the near-exclusion of the very few people the hotel does contain—with the exception of a kind of residue of partial bodies—and by a droning, one-note ambient synthesizer score.

Last one to the Overlook freezes in the maze…

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Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black satire, Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), is one of the Kubrick movies I hear Kubrick fans claim as their favorite Kubrick movie. 2001 gets a lot of votes and I love The Shining, and Strangelove is an example of the director at his visionary best.

I found this nugget when I was reading some articles for my Flipboard. Here’s a fun featurette that captures the making of Strangelove…

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Earlier this year, Indiewire posted a five-part, three hour documentary covering the career of the late, great Stanley Kubrick. Here’s their introduction to this fantastic project…

For the past little while, the folks at The Directors Series have been putting together an extensive, detailed look Kubrick’s career in a series of video essays, which is now complete. Running nearly three hours long (!!) and spread across five parts, these are some great, deep looks at Kubrick’s work, the evolution of his techniques, and much more. It’s perhaps fitting that the longest essay spans “2001: A Space Odyssey” to “The Shining,” a particularly incredible run for the filmmaker.

You can watch the whole doc at the Indiewire post, but in keeping with my spooky Halloween-inspired October posts, here’s the “The Masterworks” chapter of the doc which includes Kubrick’s scariest and goriest visions: A Clockwork Orange and The Shining…

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In the late 1960′s, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke teamed-up to create what is generally acknowledged as the greatest science fiction film ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, Taschen has released their massive tome about the making of the film, and its pages capture all the spirit, effects, sets, costumes, concepts and the impact on its audiences of this unprecedented cinematic vision.

The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s ’2001: A Space Odyssey’
was born from a partnership between the Kubrick Estate, Paris-based design agency M/M, and writer Piers Bizony. The resulting volume is a massive, weighty black bound book shaped like the iconic monolith from the film. This version of the book contains all of Bizony’s writing from the Limited Edition version. The tall, skinny pages are full of tiny print — it makes the dense reading difficult to manage, but Bizony’s years of acclaimed, groundbreaking research make it worth the effort.

The text sections are broken up by loads of photographs from the set and stills from the movie. Concept drawings and painted designs offer first glimpses of the film they inspired and close-up stills of instrument panels, costume details and architectural flourishes constitute a kind of pornography for Kubrick geeks who’ll pore over every detail.

There are a lot of fold-out images here, which is novel and adds a sense of discovery to the leafing, but, like the reading, it’s also a little awkward and the thin paper had me nervous about tears when I first cracked this one. Taschen actually offers a fascinating apology for this and it’s worth quoting. You could call this The Making of The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey…

It is very rare that our design approach takes such an individual and strong position, since we usually strive not to steal the show to our contents/artists/artworks, but rather serve all our subjects with subtlety. In this case however, we agreed after a longer discussion (which included the publisher, the author, and also the Kubrick Estate) that simply reproducing the surface of this fabulous movie in a conventional, glossy book wouldn’t do justice to the more profound reflections that are inherent to Kubrick’s masterpiece – which can be perceived as “cold” in some regards in its monolithic, uncompromising execution, or even “brutal”.

So our designers – M/M (Paris) – conceived the book like an entire symphony of fold-outs (preferably experienced with the Blue Danube playing in the background), which requires active intervention by the reader, rather than the “classic” leaned-back consumption. We were convinced that this approach would do justice to Stanley Kubrick’s vision and methods, since 2OO1: A Space Odyssey (by the way also produced in the same unusual – horizontal – aspect ratio) was never intended to be an ordinary, shallowly consumable experience in the first place.

Actually, the book and its pages have held-up just fine and when the book is in its protective slip cover it looks great displayed length-wise on a shelf, making this volume a great conversation piece for any film lover. Despite the difficulties posed by the design, this book is challenging, beautiful and unique, just like its subject.

This spring my favorite Stanley Kubrick film is celebrating its 35th birthday. The Shining was beat up pretty badly when it debuted in 1980 — Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall’s performances were panned and Kubrick was held responsible. Of course, years later, the film is considered to be a classic by the master.

In celebration, here’s a great little video game that allows you to follow the ill-fated Torrance family to the Overlook hotel. It’s a great celebration of the film that recalls many of its most famous scenes and tropes: steer the car though the mountain pass that opens the film, help Jack type his novel, navigate the hedge maze and progress through the game as each level is designated with a day of the week title card just like the chapters in the film.

Let’s Play: The Shining Video Game here…

In addition, here’s Rob Ager’s analysis of spatial anomalies in the layout of the Overlook Hotel, one of the best documentary videos uncovering secrets in Kubrick’s masterpiece. It’s a particularly apt video for this post as the secret spatial anomalies were first revealed when a video game designer tried to recreate the setting and found it to be impossible to reconcile with itself…

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Today we celebrate the birthday of Arthur C. Clarke. We lost Clarke in March of 2008. Before that, Clarke discovered an ancient temple while scuba diving in Sri Lanka, invented the geosynchronous communications satellite, penned the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick, and — along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov — established himself as one of the three great titans in the field of science fiction during the genre’s second golden age.

Clarke seemed to master everything he turned his attention to, but his cross-discipline expertise never found him loosing his imagination or his sense of curiosity. If anyone might have understandably thought to himself “I have all the answers” that guy would have been Arthur C. Clarke — but Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t that guy.

To prove the point, Clarke lent his name to and hosted three different BBC series that investigated unexplained phenomena: Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe. One can imagine the science writer and the fiction author within Clarke reaching an impasse and declaring a draw on subjects like the supernatural, cryptozoology and the possibility of alien life.

Here is a great YouTube playlist featuring episodes from all of Clarke’s series and offering an opportunity to spend time with this brilliantly intelligent and ceaselessly wondering man…

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On November 28, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was re-released in remastered, digital form in the UK. I haven’t been able to confirm when it will be screening in the U.S. but I’m hoping that some form of BFI’s sci-fi celebration will be making its way to the states soon.

While the spacefaring film might be the greatest of the director’s towering, groundbreaking achievements, even Kubrick had his off-days, and this documentary about the films he attempted to make can only leave us wondering at the places Napoleon, The Aryan Papers or the original A.I. may have assumed within the master’s pantheon…

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