November 27, 2004
It's a Ku-brick...house...
I had the opportunity to watch my favorite Stanley Kubrick movie, Barry Lyndon, again last night with Mark, and again I was totally destroyed by how awesome it is. Mark liked the movie a lot, but it's a crap shoot sometimes whether friends will get into its groove or start fidgeting, snickering, making popcorn, and taking phone calls after whispering "don't stop the DVD" with a hand over the mouthpiece.
I'll be the first to admit: it's not everybody's movie. You either feel it or you don't. Even among Kubrick fans, it's pretty devisive, with avowed lovers of Kubrick's icy avant-garde worlds finding Lyndon's lockstep redcoats and sumptuous (but no less frozen) European mansions perhaps a bit too...avant-garde? Barry Lyndon was Kubrick's follow-up to the era-defining 1-2 punch of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. Most Kubrick fans come to those touchstones first. And to viewers that fire up Barry Lyndon with expectations of 18th-century ultraviolence or of going somewhere, you know, beyond the monolith...there's the sound of screeching as they start a guided tour on a slow moving platform through an increasingly tragic series of beautiful paintings in a gallery that somehow feature the guy from Love Story.
As for me, I never tire of the tour. I love Michael Hardorn's odd, dry narration, and Handel's mournful, processional Sarabande [clip - 30 sec], one of many period compositions used on the soundtrack and the one that sets the tone and speed of the entire picture. It's heard in full form at the beginning and the end, and in myriad variations throughout the story. I can imagine Kubrick giving each actor the record and telling them, "walk at this speed." The movie's slow, somber pacing is essential to the experience of being in that place and that time. Kubrick doesn't bore just to bore, and there's devils in the details.*
I'm not feeling all that well today (cough, cough) and something tells me that detailed Stanley Kubrick analysis probably isn't germain good health or good spirits (except maybe to those at the Overlook). So in true American tradition, I'll let others do it for me. I found a great website last year called, appropriately, The Kubrick Site with many detailed and scholarly articles about Kubrick's entire oeuvre, from his days as a photographer up to "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing." Naturally, it's a bit 2001 heavy, and some theses are a little twee, even for an egghead like me ("The Herd & Self-Reflexiveness", anyone?) - but there's a surprising number of good articles on Lyndon, a bomb-diggety analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, and some archived newsgroup discussion analysis that far surpasses the usual "buh-feh-suck-rule" parlance of discourse one usually finds in forums devoted to subjects like this.
*There's a scene in the second half of the movie where Lord Bullington delivers an ultimatum to the drunk Barry at a middle-class social cub. Look at the patrons of the club behind the Bullingdon/Barry action, all the partons stare at the action, entirely frozen...cards are held in full-fan display and...the bodies just don't move. It's as scary as anything in The Shining and by the end of the scene I want to draw my legs up to my chest and scream 'They're not f------ moving!" My personal sense of style demands, however, that I remain blithely composed. And I do. But the fear remains.
I'll be the first to admit: it's not everybody's movie. You either feel it or you don't. Even among Kubrick fans, it's pretty devisive, with avowed lovers of Kubrick's icy avant-garde worlds finding Lyndon's lockstep redcoats and sumptuous (but no less frozen) European mansions perhaps a bit too...avant-garde? Barry Lyndon was Kubrick's follow-up to the era-defining 1-2 punch of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. Most Kubrick fans come to those touchstones first. And to viewers that fire up Barry Lyndon with expectations of 18th-century ultraviolence or of going somewhere, you know, beyond the monolith...there's the sound of screeching as they start a guided tour on a slow moving platform through an increasingly tragic series of beautiful paintings in a gallery that somehow feature the guy from Love Story.
As for me, I never tire of the tour. I love Michael Hardorn's odd, dry narration, and Handel's mournful, processional Sarabande [clip - 30 sec], one of many period compositions used on the soundtrack and the one that sets the tone and speed of the entire picture. It's heard in full form at the beginning and the end, and in myriad variations throughout the story. I can imagine Kubrick giving each actor the record and telling them, "walk at this speed." The movie's slow, somber pacing is essential to the experience of being in that place and that time. Kubrick doesn't bore just to bore, and there's devils in the details.*
I'm not feeling all that well today (cough, cough) and something tells me that detailed Stanley Kubrick analysis probably isn't germain good health or good spirits (except maybe to those at the Overlook). So in true American tradition, I'll let others do it for me. I found a great website last year called, appropriately, The Kubrick Site with many detailed and scholarly articles about Kubrick's entire oeuvre, from his days as a photographer up to "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing." Naturally, it's a bit 2001 heavy, and some theses are a little twee, even for an egghead like me ("The Herd & Self-Reflexiveness", anyone?) - but there's a surprising number of good articles on Lyndon, a bomb-diggety analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, and some archived newsgroup discussion analysis that far surpasses the usual "buh-feh-suck-rule" parlance of discourse one usually finds in forums devoted to subjects like this.
*There's a scene in the second half of the movie where Lord Bullington delivers an ultimatum to the drunk Barry at a middle-class social cub. Look at the patrons of the club behind the Bullingdon/Barry action, all the partons stare at the action, entirely frozen...cards are held in full-fan display and...the bodies just don't move. It's as scary as anything in The Shining and by the end of the scene I want to draw my legs up to my chest and scream 'They're not f------ moving!" My personal sense of style demands, however, that I remain blithely composed. And I do. But the fear remains.
