The Thunderbird Double Feature: Stanley Kubrick

       When I first started doing this blog I had always intended to avoid big names. Movies, directors, actors, what have you, I always wanted to keep at least a step or two out of the mainstream. So rather than doing the original Universal Frankenstein film for example, I did the relatively obscure Bride of Frankenstein, and when I felt like covering The Transformers I steered clear of anything resembling Michael Bay. The greats have already been talked about after all, the books have been written, the podcasts recorded, the blogs written, so what would throwing one more opinion on the pile really accomplish in the grand scheme of things? You had to get weird and obscure and cult, my mind told me, because that was where the action was, that was the way to get attention that I so desperately craved. Write about the movies that no one else is talking about and by default you gain a monopoly on the subject. For better or worse, I mean The attention my review of Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin has gotten over the years has always made me feel a little paranoid.

Of course nothing ever lasts forever, and sooner or later some bigger and bigger names started creeping in. David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, John Carpenter, et cetera, I’ve grown such an obsession for film over the years, and since I rarely watch films anymore without reviewing them, I couldn’t help but dip my toes into that inviting water. Not that I thought that my worthless opinion would be the deciding factor in someone seeing Vertigo mind you, but that such historic films would provide a great backdrop for me to stretch the mind muscles a bit and work my way through a thought that I might not have a chance to otherwise. That’s why I write movie reviews in general I suppose, even if they’re shit and the only people who’ve read them are a couple of bots that hit the right string of key words in the search algorithm: It’s self-expression, just as painting a picture or performing a song is self-expression for someone else. I like writing and I like cinema, and it makes me happy to combine the two. Nuff said.

In the past I’ve used the Double Feature model to showcase some of those big names I’ve mentioned (and also the folks who made Dollman) and since it’s been so long since I’ve used it I figured it best to dust off the proverbial cobwebs with one of the biggest names of all: Stanley Kubrick, director of a good portion of the most iconic movies in American film history, making his debut appearance on this blog. Narrowing things down to just two was a bit of a hassle, but in the end it seemed appropriate to go with his very first feature film, 1953’s Fear and Desire, and his last (not including the stuff he did for A.I.), 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut. You can’t judge a decades long career on only two movies, like reading the first chapter of a book and then skipping to the last page, but I’m interested to see what, if anything, got its start in ‘53 and what managed to stick around until ‘99. Who knows, maybe I’ll unravel that vast web of conspiracies that Kubrick apparently shoved into all of his movies, if that documentary on The Shining is anything to go by. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that he staged the Moon landing after all. Guess I’ll see.

Fear and Desire (1953)

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "This is War", by Thirty Seconds to Mars

While his filmography technically begins two years earlier, with the short documentaries Day of the Flight and Flying Padre, Stanley Kubrick’s directorial debut truly began in 1953 with the film Fear and Desire. Set in a time and place removed from our own, yet still familiar, the film centers around a quartet of soldiers (Frank Silvera as ‘Mac’, Kenneth Harp as ‘Lt. Coby’, Paul Mazursky as ‘Sidney’ and Steve Coit as ‘Fletcher’) who have been stranded 6 miles behind enemy lines after their plane is shot down. With the pressure of being spotted by a passing aircraft constantly looming over their heads, the soldiers locate a nearby river and decide to build a raft in order to float across into home territory, only to discover a nearby enemy base and airstrip occupied by troops and a mysterious general. Mac wants to go after the general, Coby just wants to get the hell out of Dodge, but when it comes to war you’re never going to end up getting what you really want.

The story goes that Stanley Kubrick hated this movie, which he described as ‘boring and pretentious’, to such an extent that he actually tried to have all copies of it destroyed Star Wars Holiday Special-style. While that might seem a little extreme at first, I can see where he’s coming from to a certain degree. This was a man known for his obsessive perfectionist streak when it came to his craft after all, and Fear and Desire was a film made for around 50 grand and looked like it. The entire cast was made up of seven people (two of whom played dual roles) walking in what looks like about a hundred square feet of state park for about an hour set to music which sounds like it’s from an episode of Gunsmoke, spending whole scenes talking in internal monologues like it’s David Lynch’s Dune. That and some melodramatic flourishes, in particular when they finally introduce the general, does give off something of an ‘amateurish’ atmosphere. A college film project before the advent of college film classes if you will.

Which isn’t to say that’s a film without merit, or one worth destroying. I think the acting, while nothing extraordinary, is solid, with Frank Silvera (a year removed from his film debut) and future screenwriter and director Paul Mazursky (in his film debut) doing most of the heavy lifting. The music, during the moments when it is reduced from the usual bombast to a deep throbbing bass, is incredibly effective during the tense parts of the film. Ahead of its time in that regard you could say, going hand in hand with the overall tone of the film, which feels more at home with the existential dread of the Vietnam era than the Sgt. Rock flag-waving days of the 50s. These are not faceless avatars of patriotism, they are regular people who have been thrust into the meat grinder, where death awaits behind every corner, and their behavior reflects that. Confusion, indifference, a suicidal drive to prove oneself, and even a complete retreat into fantasy in the case of Sidney, it’s a straight line from what we see in Fear and Desire and what we would later see in Full Metal Jacket
  
It’s also just fun to see a young Kubrick experimenting behind the camera. His love of cutting to close shots of people’s eyes and faces, the way he plays with shadows during the scene with the general, the cutaways during the scene where the soldiers raid a cabin, it all feels like things Kubrick saw in other movies and wanted to try out for himself. Particularly silent era films, as it seems that there’s an emphasis on the visual. 

Fear and Desire is indeed a Stanley Kubrick film but the feeling of Kubrick, the essence of what has become known as Kubrick, is not quite there. The pieces don’t quite fit. Because of that I can’t say that Fear and Desire is a must-watch film, but it’s not a huge time investment and it’s impressive enough for a debut outing that it’s worth a watch if you’re in the mood.

Now let’s take a quick stroll around the wheel of time, about 46 years, and see where Stanley Kubrick ended up, with-

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Waltz No. 2", by Dmitri Shostakovich

12 years after the release of the release of the infamous Full Metal Jacket, and several years of projects that were never realized or incomplete (what would eventually become A.I.), Kubrick came out with what turned out to be his final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut. Based on the novella “Traumnovelle” by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, the film stars Tom Cruise (coming off his award-winning performance in Jerry Maguire) as Bill Hartford, a well-to-do doctor living in New York with his daughter Helena and wife Alice (Nicole Kidman). Things seem to be going well, until a bitter Alice recounts a story about her almost cheating on him with a sexy sailor. Disillusioned with himself and plagued with thoughts of Alice in the arms of another man, Bill heads off into the bowels of New York, a city where you can’t even throw a rock without someone trying to hump it. While chatting with an old med school chum, Bill by chance learns about a mysterious club where some supposedly super sexy shit is going down, and decides that he needs to get all up in there. Turns out that secret sex clubs aren’t all that happy about uninvited guests.

So like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or David Cronenberg’s Crash, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is one of those erotic psycho-drama kinda films or perhaps more accurately a part of the ‘white guy discovers pornhub’ genre. Attractive white guy, predominantly rich, who somehow isn’t getting enough sex already get pulled into a seedy underworld of all that weird sex you’re always hearing about. In fact Eyes Wide Shut consciously or unconsciously takes a lot of cues from Lynch and Blue Velvet, what with some off of the off-filter performances, a score that (by Jocelyn Pook) that runs the gamut from isolating to menacing, and there is this attempt at an unsettling, surreal atmosphere that hangs over things, almost as if it were a dream. Which you can tell by all the times they beat you over the head talking about dreams.

       Compared to Blue Velvet or Crash however, Eyes Wide Shut unfortunately comes across as rather sedated. I mean you’ve got Tom Cruise in the lead role, a man who in 1999 was probably considered one of the most attractive men in Hollywood, and he doesn’t do anything. Of course a slow burn in a Kubrick is nothing to be surprised, but in Eyes Wide Shut it seems to be take to a whole new level. To put it bluntly, Tom Cruise’s character is one that doesn’t do anything, doesn’t accomplish anything, and after 2 and a half hours nothing about his life really changes. Even the mysterious sex club, the one part of the movie that has passed over into the popular culture, feels rather toothless in retrospect. I mean this is a guy who had a character blow his brains out with a shotgun in his last film, and the most he can think of for this shadowy clandestine meeting of the rich and powerful is some people wearing masks and having sex? Not weird sex, there’s no bathing in blood or goat sacrifices, the positions don’t go more exotic than Cowgirl, just some sex and a bunch of nudity (almost entirely from women, god forbid we even get the hint of a penis anywhere in the public sex scenes). Like who the hell cares? And if they’re really the major power-holders of the world, and they’re all masked, why would they be worried that some dude happened to sneak in? What’s he really gonna do, realistically speaking? Call the cops, and tell them ?

       Yeah, I already mentioned the references to dreams, so you might be able to forgive things being more metaphorical than realistic or things not adding up necessarily, but the movie is just dull. In Blue Velvet, you go hand in hand with Kyle Maclachlan's character as he gradually loses his innocence, in Crash, even though it’s rather boring as well, you get to see James Spader drag himself and others into this strange world, they are active participants in their stories. Which you could say is a bit of subtext on Kubrick’s part, that Alice’s dissatisfaction with Bill leads him to become ‘impotent’ in terms of his affect on events, but a movie isn’t built on subtext alone. Even if it were the case, you don’t need to take 239 minutes to say Tom Cruise got his dick wet. Most movies do that in half the time, easy.

Of course this is a Kubrick film, so the meat & potatoes part of the film, the guts of it, are excellent. Every scene, from the ritzy hotels of the wealthy to the dingy apartments of the poor, looks as if it were meticulously crafted, a mixture of reality and cinema just uneven to become noticeable. The prominent use of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 is also touch, as it’s a piece that I’ve always found to be both elegant and slightly foreboding, which fits in well with the ‘Great Gatsby’s sex life’ aesthetic that the film is going for. I also like that even 4 decades later there are some familiar elements from Fear and Desire here, shots emphasizing the face that cut to graphic scenes, the music stings, even a little internal voice clip like old Frank Silvera and the boys used to do. Stanley Kubrick seems to have a knack for crafting movies that could work just as well as a collection of paintings or photographs, and Eyes Wide Shut is no exception.

In the end however, whether it’s that oft-mentioned 2+ hour runtime or what, there’s just this...spark missing from Eyes Wide Shut for me. It feels like it should be a thriller, it feels like I should be on the edge of my seat in suspense, but it's not and I'm not. It’s not really a ‘bad’ movie though, the production is solid as I said and the cast is great, so I don’t feel as if I can just dismiss it as bad and say you shouldn’t watch it. So this is another one of those shitty, non-committal ‘play it by ear’ reviews then; If you’re interested, or you saw that one episode of Venture Bros. and you were curious then go for it, but if you’re looking for ‘the’ Stanley Kubrick film to watch, this ain’t gonna be it.

The first double feature in years, covering one of American cinema’s most famous filmmakers, and I end up covering two movies that I didn’t care for all that much. Somehow I’m not surprised. Even if he did make a couple of clunkers (in my opinion) though, there aren’t many people who had a strong an influence on the medium as Stanley Kubrick has had, even after his death. I mean when your style is so well known it’s become an adjective then you know you’re pretty big. I don’t know whether I’d like the man if I ever met him, reading about him ended up making me depressed, but above anything else the man was a craftsman, and I think he’d be pleased to hear that.