Barbie opens with a parody of The Dawn of Man, the wordless opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. On Saturday, you can see the real thing at the Time Warp Drive-In’s July edition, A Real Horrorshow: The Dark Visions of Stanley Kubrick. It’s a redo of one of the most popular programs in the Time Warp’s ten-year history. Here’s the fabled “3 Million Year cut” that Greta Gerwig appropriated with a wink.
The auteurist evening begins with The Shining, another of Kubrick’s films that has been endlessly parodied since its release in 1980. People have been trying to approach the sheer creepy power of this scene for the last 40 years, and no one has got it right yet.
Both The Shining and the third film of the evening, A Clockwork Orange, have been featured on my Never Seen It series — which I swear I’m going to get back to soon! The 1971 film is a pioneering work of dystopian sci fi, and features one of the greatest opening shots of all time.
On Thursday, August 3rd, Crosstown Theater’s film series presents Five Easy Pieces. The film by director Bob Rafelson cemented Jack Nicholson’s reputation as the best actor of his generation.
Shelley Duvall takes a bathroom break in The Shining.
For this edition of Never Seen It, I asked Memphis musician Louise Page what well-known film she had missed over the years. First she said Jurassic Park, but by the time we got our act together, she had already watched it at the Summer Malco Drive-In’s reopening double feature. Then she suggested The Shining.
The Shining was my original “never seen it.” For years when I would have movie nights with my friends, I would propose watching it, but everyone else had already seen it, so to me, it existed only as clips of Jack Nicholson beating down a door with an axe. When I finally saw it, it became my favorite horror film and cemented my status as a Kubrick fanboy. We watched the film together at the same time in our respective domiciles and conducted the following interviews on the phone. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, and Jack Nicholson
Chris McCoy: So, what do you know about The Shining?
Louise Page: All right, I know some things about The Shining. I actually know it came out in 1980, and I wanted to look up when the exact 40-year anniversary of the film is because, for all we know, we’re close to it. [note: Louise was right. The Shining was released on May 23, 1980.] I know it was based on a novel by Stephen King that came out in the ’70s. I know that it’s directed by Stanley Kubrick and stars Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. And I vaguely know what it’s about. I’ve seen the famous scene where he’s busting through the door. I know it’s about a family that is somehow isolated in, I think, a hotel. And he is trying to write something, and he goes insane. That’s what I know.
Chris: Okay! Well, you know a lot! So, what is your relationship with horror movies? Do you generally like horror movies, or are you not a fan?
Louis: It totally depends. I do not do well with very intense gore — like, I’ve never seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and likely never will, because any sort of body horror or really gory stuff, I just feel it in my bones. It really gets me. It’s not so much that I don’t like horror movies, but I’m very judicious about when and how I watch them because I have strong reactions to them. You know, if there’s a jump scare, I’m gonna jump. Something stupid happens, I’m going to be scared. I thought I saw a clown in the corner of my room after I saw It. So, it’ll get me, but that doesn’t mean that I do not like horror films. So I think I’m probably fun to watch horror movies with because I freak the fuck out. And this is totally due to being sheltered when I was a child. I’m not desensitized. I’m fully sensitized.
Chris: I think we’re in for a good night.
144 minutes later …
Chris: All right, Louise Page! You are now someone who has seen The Shining. What did you think?
Louise: I’ve been nervous for two hours. I think I said out loud “I’m nervous!” like 10 to 18 times in the last 30 minutes. I loved it. It was beautiful. I mean, honestly, I was really struck by it. Even though it’s a horror film, it was really beautiful. There were so many artistic shots and a lot of really beautiful things done with color and pattern and light. I really enjoyed watching it a lot. It’s a great movie.
Chris: It’s really uncomfortable though, isn’t it? A lot of people hated this movie when it came out, like Stephen King. Do you read Stephen King?
Louise: I’ve read some Stephen King, but I’ve never read this particular work. But my movie buddy [Cameron] is a really big fan, and he’s seen The Shining a ton of times and he told me that it’s different in the book in several ways … That’s the funny thing about it, though, is that there really are moments of like beauty and almost like serenity. For moments that would make you nervous, it’s the music that makes you nervous. The soundtrack was really, really good.
Never Seen It: Watching The Shining with Louise Page
Louise: The parts that were genuinely super hard for me to watch [were] where Jack interacting with Wendy early on in the movie when he’s just being a condescending little asshole. Those are even honestly more disturbing than Danny having creepy and violent visions. I was really uncomfortable with those very loaded interactions.
Chris: This is a movie about abuse, isn’t it?
Louise: It totally is. It really is a movie about an abusive husband and father. I kept thinking, too, there’s some allusions in this movie to fairy tales and classic literature. I think I’ve talked to you about this before, outside of being a musician, I was an English major in school. I was thinking about Faust a lot during this movie. When he’s yelling at Wendy at the end, he’s like, “You don’t think about my responsibilities! I signed whatever I signed!” And when he’s getting the drink at the bar, he’s like, “I would sell my goddamn soul for a drink!” That’s sort of when things start to really turn, and I feel like it is an allusion to him selling his soul to the hotel and the furious beings there.
Never Seen It: Watching The Shining with Louise Page (2)
Louise: But yeah, it really is a movie about abuse. I think the most uncomfortable scene in the entire movie is when they’re going up the stairs and she has the bat.
Chris: It’s a hard to scene to watch.
Louise: That could be taken out of context of the movie, which has these paranormal things, and just straight-up be an abusive interaction.
Chris: Oh yeah it is! I think the increased awareness of the prevalence of domestic abuse has been one of the positive social developments of the last decade or so. Before, it was just so invisible. But this is about psychological torture.
Louise: Absolutely. Totally.
Never Seen It: Watching The Shining with Louise Page (3)
Chris: I love the scene where he’s playing handball in the big ballroom. There’s something about it that it’s so animal-like. He’s testing the limits of his cage. And it comes early because this movie is all about the slow burn. Like the Scatman Crothers gag, when Mr. Hallorann is killed.
Louise: Oh, that made me so sad. Okay, so you called this guy out here, and then he got murdered, and you steal his car! That kind of sucks, I think, for that guy.
Chris: That’s one little murder — or one really gruesome murder. From the time he’s called in Florida, it’s like 45 minutes of work in the movie.
Louise: The slow burn is real. It’s about psychological torture And that’s really interesting that you said a lot of people didn’t like the movie when it came out, and I said it made me so nervous. It’s almost like — not even almost — it is like he’s including you, the viewer, in the psychological torture.
Mr. Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) recieves a psychic message.
Chris: You know, Shelley Duvall really sells this movie.
Louise: I love it, but it makes me so … I’ve read somewhere that Stanley Kubrick kind of intentionally gave her a hard time in certain moments while filming, to increase her agitation.
Chris: Yeah, that’s the legend
Louis: Terrible. Right now, I know she’s not mentally well. Also, that makes me really sad because her performance in this movie is beyond amazing
Chris: You know the “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scene? She sells that scene because she sees what’s on the page long before you do, and you just watch the horror of realization creep over her face. “Oh my God, my husband is completely, murderously insane, and I’m trapped here with him.” And typography also sells that scene. Two things: Shelley and typography.
Never Seen It: Watching The Shining with Louise Page (4)
Chris: You were talking about point of view, how Kubrick pulls you in and makes you sort of the subject of the abuse. One thing I noticed this time that I’ve never noted before is how he uses the Steadicam. It had just been invented, and this movie is like the first movie that extensively used one. Now, we’re used to it. But, at the time, it was crazy that he could just move the camera through these environments and there was no dolly track or anything. A lot of directors would be like, “I’m gonna stage a big action scene with this thing!” But the first thing Kubrick does is basically reinvent the “walkie-talkie,” or the reverse track. He sees this new technology, and he’s like, “I’m gonna shoot dialogue with it.”
Louise: That’s the first thing Cameron told me as the credits were rolling in the beginning. So I was trying to look for it in the movie, and you’re totally right. He kind of uses it in a way that builds tension and builds up your personal investment.
Chris: When he’s showing Jack and the hotel manager walking and talking, it’s all shot from the front. They all are, right up until you get to Danny in the Big Wheel rolling through the hallways. That’s shot from behind. You are seeing Danny’s point of view there, and I think that’s very deliberate. He pulls you into Danny’s point of view. That makes the movie even more about family trauma because it’s about you watching your parents fight.
Never Seen It: Watching The Shining with Louise Page (5)
Louise: At the end, when [Wendy] was seeing all that spooky stuff, and specifically the scene where she looked into the room, and there’s all these skeletons and cobwebs, I thought, “Damn, whoever the set designers were for this movie probably had the greatest time of their lives!” There’s so many beautiful carpets and beautiful costumes and visually striking moments. And the scene with the maze from above? Oh man! That was just so beautiful. I was like, how did they do that?
Chris: Did you feel like this is a good quarantine movie? Did it feel relevant to the quarantine experience for you?
Louise: It’s time for me to get rid of my axe. I don’t think it’s safe for me to have around anymore. [Laughs] I thought about that in the very beginning, when Jack’s interviewing for the job, and the guy interviewing said something like, “The solitude is what some people find the most difficult.” That made me think of the quarantine, and that Jack is like, “Well, I really need time to work on my novel anyway.” And I feel like that’s kind of what a lot of us thought at the beginning of all this. Like, “Oh well, I’m gonna get a lot done that’s been on my long-term to-do list.”
Louise: I did! And I got my website up. You know, people are getting some stuff done, but I just think it actually is a pretty apt comparison. You think that all you need is time to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish, but I think a lot of people are running into some walls during quarantine. It’s not like a writer’s retreat — there’s kind of a global trauma going on. And this ended up not being the writer’s retreat that Jack expected, either.
What a failed writer’s retreat looks like.
Louise: You know how it latches on from the jump to the fact that Jack is a writer? And of course it’s based on a novel, so it’s a writer writing about a writer. I think there’s something really interesting with words going on. It starts off with them having writer’s block and being unable to write. And then his language devolves into the “all work and no play” thing. And then at the very, very end, by the scene in the labyrinth he’s hardly using language at all. He’s just kind of yelling Danny’s name. He loses his language, like this writer loses words. I thought that was one of the creepiest parts of the whole thing. It’s like watching his humanity and his mind kind of drain out.
Chris: A thought just occurred to me: He’s a total bully. But all she has to do is hurt him a little bit, and he withdraws. It happens twice: She hits him with the bat, which is not even really a very strong hit. The first time, when she gets in with the bat and grabs his wrist, he’s vulnerable for a second. And then she whacks him on the head. And then the second time, he’s reaching in and she just kind of scratches him with that knife.
Louis: Yeah, she doesn’t get him very deep.
Chris: He’s kind of a paper tiger in the end. Because he’s a bully.
‘Here’s Johnny!’
Louise: And to return to the comment about the psychological torment, that’s kind of part of it, too. He talks down to her a lot, you know? When he’s talking to Grady near the end, and they say the thing about, “We should have given your wife more credit. She’s got more fight in her than we gave her credit for. She seems to have gotten the better of you.” It was a satisfying part. It’s like, yeah! Shelley Duvall has some a spark in her! She’s fighting back, and you, kind of even as a viewer or, I don’t know, I know at least for me, I was kind of proud of her! She had a little bit more scrappiness and fight in her than I expected her to have.
I feel like it’s clear from really early on in the film that Jack fucking hates his wife. He just doesn’t like her. She’s like, “Hey, I made breakfast in bed!” and he’s like “Oh, hello Wendy.” You can just tell he resents her so much, and she’s trying so hard.
Chris: It’s absolutely heartbreaking. She’s always trying to do everything she can to make it okay with him. She’s trying to make up for him and trying to make it okay. And once again, here’s the abuser dynamic.
Louise: Yeah! Oh my God! You know what really made me think about abuse is when she finally locks him in the pantry and he immediately starts with the “Wendy, baby I’m hurt real bad. I think you really hurt me. I need a doctor.” That is like a textbook abuser thing, where like once they think that you’re slipping out of their clutches, they turn sweet and soft. They try to make you think they’ve changed and try to apologize. You know, that was like a total metaphor for the cycle of abuse. Abuse happens, and there’s this apology phase and a honeymoon phase like in the movies. Then it happens again. And then the apology phase, the honeymoon phase. It gets the victim back into the fold. It keeps them from leaving their abuser because it’s not nightmarish constantly.
Danny Lloyd retired from acting at age 10. He is now a biology professor at a Kentucky community college.
Chris: So, bottom line: Would you recommend The Shining for other people who haven’t seen it?
Louise: Yes, I absolutely would! There were several pop culture references in The Shining, like the redrum thing, and the creepy twin girls in the blue dresses. I didn’t realize that these came from The Shining. So it will connect those pop culture dots. I think it’s the most aesthetically beautiful horror movie I’ve ever seen. And as a fan of vintage fashion to the core, I was truly living and thriving in that film. Shelley Duvall’s wardrobe!
Chris: It was like the Seventies vomited all over her.
If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.
Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed
Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed
In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”
Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX
The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.
Chuck, the canine star of Alpha
Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha
Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.
KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk
Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk
Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.
Rukus
Best Memphis Movie: Rukus
Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.
Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.
Best Screenplay: First Reformed
Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.
Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther
MVP: Michael B. Jordan
Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.
Regina Hall in Support The Girls
Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade
In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.
Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade
Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.
Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.
Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.
Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood
Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.
Sorry To Bother You
Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You
Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.
The Discovery on its way to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey
The first time I saw a Jackson Pollock painting in person was at the Art Institute of Chicago. The amazing thing about Greyed Rainbow was not necessarily the patterns that seemed to emerge from the visual chaos—it was that the closer I got to the 8-foot-tall canvas, the more patterns emerged. No matter how close you look, the spell is maintained. It’s art that works on both the gigantic and intimate scale.
I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on a beat-up VHS tape I rented from a small-town video store. I could barely understand what was happening in the story, and, to a kid raised on a steady diet of music videos, it moved very slowly. But it was absolutely fascinating to me. Even if I couldn’t say I loved it like the way I loved Star Wars, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I had to admit, it looked better than Star Wars. This was not space fantasy. It was a documentary from the future.
David Bowman (Kier Duella) confronts the rogue computer HAL.
Only after I read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, which was developed in parallel with the film, did the real scope of the story sink in. This was not sci fi in the “what if flying cars?” sense, but a work that treaded in spaces usually reserved for religion. Why are we here? What is our purpose? What comes next?
As the years passed, and technology developed, I saw 2001 on bigger and bigger screens. VHS gave way to DVD, which progressed to Blu-Ray. Tube TVs went HD (yes, I had a 1080p capable CRT), then gave way to plasma and LCD flatscreens and 4K. At each turn, I made a point of watching 2001 again, and every time it looked better and better. This was not the case with all beloved films. (Remember the terrible masking job in The Empire Strikes Back that gave the TIE fighters little moving frames?) Like Greyed Rainbow, the spell was maintained no matter how close you got. Special effects created during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration have held up better over time than The Phantom Menace.
Sunrise over the Monolith
Part of the reason is because 2001 was made on 70 mm film—twice as wide as standard 35 mm film—and designed to be projected in places like the 86-foot wide screen at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. The theater industry’s answer to television has always been to build bigger screens, and Cinerama was the ultimate expression of that idea. 2001 seems slow because it is designed to be immersive. Kubrick wants to give you time to look around.
For the next week, Memphis audiences will get a chance to see 2001: A Space Odyssey the way it was intended to be seen in a special engagement at the Paradiso IMAX. The Dark Knight director and Kubrick superfan Christopher Nolan has championed the film in its 50th anniversary year by striking new 70 mm film prints that have screened in theaters nationwide still equipped with the necessary monster film projectors, and the program has been so successful that MGM expanded it into digital IMAX theaters.
The myth of 2001 has grown larger than the Cinerama Dome. Countless words have been written about it by critics of all stripes. (I once did 20 pages about the anthropomorphization of technology in the film—how the machines seemed to become more human, and the people became less human.) Beginning with Clarke’s own The Lost Worlds of 2001, every book-length effort to explicate its mysteries has only added to them. Michael Benson’s recent Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece is the first one I’ve read that treats the film less like a quasi-religious text and more like a work of art made by flawed human beings. Particularly moving is the portrait Benson draws of Clarke as a deeply closeted homosexual who fled his native England for Sri Lanka after the prosecution of computer scientist and war hero Alan Turing for indecency. Clarke’s intellectual life may have been spent in the highest orbits, but his personal life was a string of hustlers and grifters taking financial advantage of his emotional naiveté.
Astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and David Bowman (Keir Duella) discuss the fate of their sentient computer crewmate HAL 9000. This composition is a reference to a shot from Citizen Kane.
Kubrick comes across as considerably less sympathetic. His ruthless business dealings drove his presumed partner Clarke to the brink of bankruptcy, and his unforgiving creative methods drove the people around him beyond the brink of madness. For four years, Clarke wrote and re-wrote narration intended to explain the action on the screen, only to have Kubrick decide at the last minute that it wasn’t needed. In the scene where astronaut Frank Poole’s body is recovered in space, the stuntman in the space suit had actually passed out from lack of oxygen because Kubrick wouldn’t allow air holes to be drilled in the helmet. The editors assembled the film without a script, because Kubrick had the whole thing in his head and refused to write it down. After the production was over, Kubrick demanded that the one-of-a-kind, slit photography machines Douglas Trumbull designed and built by hand be smashed to bits so no one could ever replicate the climactic Star Gate sequence.
But all of Kubrick’s instincts turned out to be right, and Clarke forgave him in the end. After all, if 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t the highest grossing film of 1968, Clarke wouldn’t have been on TV sitting next to Walter Cronkite when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969. The film’s financial success was far from guaranteed. The opening night in New York was such an epic disaster that Kubrick moved to England and never came back. But like The Beatles or Kanye West, it turned out to be one one of those rare times in pop culture history when the market and the cutting edge met.
Choreographer and mime Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher. The rest of the hominids in the wordless Dawn Of Man sequence were played by teenage girls from a BBC dance troupe.
Clarke and Kubrick set out to make the “proverbial good science fiction film,” and in many ways, the future they envisioned came true. Maybe we don’t have a moon base, but the astronauts on the Discovery get their daily news from things that look a lot like iPads, and rogue computers are indeed a major problem here in the 21st century. But it also points to the limits of the Western science fiction vision. Global climate change, the most pressing scientific issue of our time, is not mentioned, and while there are women scientists (who are presumed to be Soviet Russians, by the way), there are no black people in space.
Bowman uses a tablet computer to catch up on the daily news from Earth. The iPad made its debut in 2010, the year when the sequel to 2001 was set.
Yet every other film that has dared to shoot for the same Clarke orbit as 2001 has gone down in flames. The Soviet response, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, is much more human sized. The sequel, 2010, made with Clarke’s influence but not Kubrick’s, is a mere footnote. Nolans’ own attempt, Interstellar, falls apart at the end under the weight of the director’s sentimentality and instinct to explain himself. 2001 remains a singular product of a particular time, when the American future seemed bright and limitless, and capital could still be brought to bear for great works of art. But its awe is tinged with fear, as are all good religious texts. If we are to be transformed by our technology and our knowledge, will our wisdom follow? If we are to become more than human, what will be lost? Like Hal’s red eye, 2001: A Space Odyssey looks unflinchingly at these questions, and reveals the paucity of our answers.
The Lost World of 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey plays at the Malco Paradiso IMAX Theater August 23-30.
Tonight at Malco Ridgeway, Indie Memphis presents Filmworker, the story of Leon Vitali. An actor who landed the part of Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, Vitali gave up a promising acting career to become Stanley Kubrick’s right hand man through the 1970s, 80s, and 1990s. The documentary is a story of creativity’s highs and lows, and a warts-and-all account of the making of some of the greatest films ever. Tickets are going fast for this one. They are available over on the Indie Memphis website.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot
Meanwhile, over at the Paradiso, there’s a 25th anniversary screening of The Sandlot, a cult coming-of-age film about a young boy who moves to Los Angeles and wants to learn to play baseball.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (2)
On Thursday at the Paradiso, there’s a filmed version of a Broadway musical version of a film: Newsies.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (3)
This week, the Orpheum Theatre’s Summer Movie Series hits a trio of high notes. First on Friday is the all-time classic The Wizard of Oz. If your kids have never seen it, they need to. If you haven’t seen it in a while, it richly rewards repeated viewings. If you don’t know anything about it, educate yourself with this trailer:
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (4)
Once you’ve gotten your fix of Judy Garland fighting witches, head on over to the Midnight at the Studio, where Mike McCarthy is presenting one of the most unlikely onscreen love stories ever made, Harold and Maude. The film about a May-December romance between a young pessimist and an old optimist plays at the witching hour on both Friday and Saturday.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (5)
Saturday night, The Orpheum returns with a sorely needed double feature for our superhero-obsessed times. At 5 PM, it’s Superman. Richard Donner’s 1978 film is a tour de force of pre-CGI special effects. Even 40 years and literally hundred of superhero movies later, no actors have come close to either Christopher Reeve’s performance as Superman or the recently departed Margo Kidder’s turn as Lois Lane.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (6)
Then, after you freshen your soda and popcorn, The Orpheum presents Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Often considered the first modern superhero movie, its success in 1989 was by no means a sure thing. That’s why Warner Brothers attached their biggest musical star to do the soundtrack. It doesn’t get much attention now, but “Batdance” was Prince’s fourth song to hit #1 on the Billboard pop charts, the R&B charts, and the dance charts all at the same time. Check out this batshit crazy video, directed by Purple Rain helmer Albert Magnoli.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (7)
In this installment of Never Seen It, I sat down with the boss, Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden, to check out Stanley Kubrick’s infamous, 1971 low-budget masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. We were joined by my wife Laura Jean, and a couple of bottles of red wine.
BEFORE THE MOVIE
Chris McCoy: What do you know about A Clockwork Orange?
Bruce VanWyngarden: I’m sure back in the day I read a lot about it. I know it’s Kubrick, I know about the Droogs, and I know there’s a lot of violence, and it’s set in some kind of futuristic Great Britain.
CM: Why didn’t you ever get around to seeing it?
BVW: I was probably stoned. When it came out, I was probably 17 or 18. When did it come out?
CM: 1971. After 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick was going to do Napoleon. It was going to be huge—there was going to be 40,000 extras, he was literally going to recreate Waterloo. It never happened. I have a .pdf of the script on my hard drive, but I’ve never actually read it. The whole thing fell apart, and he said, “Screw it, I’m going to make a movie with one light kit.” And that’s what this is.
BVW: My wife’s mother made her watch this over and over again. She was really into it. They were living in France out in the country, and it was one of the few VHS tapes she had. I asked her if she wanted to come see this, and she said no, she had seen it too many times already. She was like, I can’t believe you never saw this! I said, That’s the whole point of the column…At the time, there was suddenly a lot more nudity in movies. I was watching stuff like Blow Up, and my mind was being blown. How did I miss this one? I don’t know.
Never Seen It: Watching A Clockwork Orange with Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden
DURING THE MOVIE
[Alex returns to his bedroom after a long night of rape and pillage to listen to Beethoven]
BVW: The micro cassette was advanced technology in 1970!
[Alex’s mother is revealed to have purple hair]
CM: People in the future really do have purple hair!
BVW: That woman has Eileen Townsend hair.
[Alex picks up two girls at the record store]
BVW: Everyone is sucking on popsicle dicks!
CM: There are a lot of dicks in this movie.
[The infamous time lapse menage a trois]
CM: This has got to be one of the greatest single takes in movie history.
BVW: I wonder how long that really took?
(I looked it up: 23 minutes)
[Alex is sentenced for his crimes]
BVW: 14 years for murder. He got off easy.
CM: You just wait.
[While reading the bible in the prison library, Alex imagines himself as one of the Roman guards taking Christ to the cross.]
BVW: Oh my god! Do you know how many movies he’s been in? He’s acted in 258 movies! That’s an average of 7 movies a year! That guy works.
CM: He works. And that was because of A Clockwork Orange. Every single director wants him to do Alex.
BVW: He should have gotten the Oscar for that eyeball thing alone.
CM: They scratched his corneas and he went temporarily blind.
BVW: You couldn’t get away with that today. That would be CGI. I hope he got paid a lot of money for this role.
AFTER THE MOVIE
BVW: It started out just as intense and crazy and violent as I had expected, except for the cartoonish character of the violence. I watch violent movies now, and I just turn away. I can’t stand it. But like in the early scenes where they’re fighting and beating up the old man, there’s nothing I can’t look at. It wasn’t as horrible as I thought it was going to be.
Never Seen It: Watching A Clockwork Orange with Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden (2)
Laura Jean Hocking: When the woman gets killed with the big penis sculpture, I can’t watch that.
BVW: I couldn’t watch that, either.
CM: He went totally abstract during that killing.
BVW: There was no visual of it.
CM: t’s like a comedy and a horror at the same time.
BVW: That’s what I expected: Horrible violence and drugs and futuristic shit. But the rest of it, by the third act, I was ready for it to end. I was not as compelled by it by the time it ended as I was in the beginning. It’s totally front loaded…Halfway through the third act, I had to pee. I was like, I’m done with this. But you said it was almost over, and my bladder made it. I was thinking, where is all this going to go? Alex is obviously going to be an evil fuck again. I get it.
LJH: I loved the paparazzi swooping in.
CM: The press is the ultimate bad guy in this movie.
LJH: They validate everyone’s bad behavior.
CM: The motivation of the journalist whose wife was raped and killed in the first act was to ultimately distort society. It’s arguably the greater evil than this thug at the center of the whole thing. As a journalist, that’s weird.
BVW: Oh yeah. I think, after seeing it, Malcolm McDowell should have gotten an award for the greatest physical abuse ever taken by an actor. It was amazing the shit he went through.
LJH: The eyelid thing! Aaaahhh!
BVW: The eyelid thing, and the drowning! He was underwater for a long time!
CM: There are all these huge, long takes, but it ultimately drags. The individual scenes work, but it really doesn’t hold together in the end.
BVW: Maybe it was the wine, but I was dragging at the end. There were not enough tits, not enough beatings, just a whole lot of close ups of people’s faces, leering.
CM: Something I noticed this time was, Kubrick was really excited about his lens choice….When we went to L.A. In 2013, there was a Kubrick exhibit at LACMA…
LJH: There was an entire room that was just his lenses. It was like pornography.
[Extended, largely incoherent discussion of Carl Zeiss lenses, Watergate, Trump, and mid-century modern architecture ensues.]
CM: So, here’s what the ultimate point of the movie, or the text, is supposed to be. Anthony Burgess, the writer, his wife was raped and beaten by a bunch of drunk American soldiers during World War II.
BVW: Americans?
CM: Yes. The novel came from that experience. The central question is, what if you had a technology that could change a person from a criminal to an ideal citizen? Whoever gets to decide what an ideal citizen is. Is Alex actually able to exercise free will and do good, and do his good works have any meaning, as Christian morality would suggest? Or is he just faking it? Is he a robot? It he like an orange, an actual orange that you could eat, or is he a clockwork orange, a fake orange that you can’t eat and therefore has no value? So that’s supposedly the deeper meaning of all this violence and stuff. The one scene when he’s in the theater and he’s the entertainment and they’re all debating about the Luduvoco technique, the priest stands up and says, “If he can’t make a choice between good or evil, this doesn’t matter. Why are we doing this?” That’s the most crucial scene in the movie. Did you get any of that from the movie?
BVW: No. Hell no.
Never Seen It: Watching A Clockwork Orange with Memphis Flyer Editor Bruce VanWyngarden (3)
Vladimir Lenin supposedly said “There are decades when nothing happens, then there are weeks when decades happen.”
Although it was not evident at the time, the 1960 film Spartacus was at the center of one of those historical nexuses Lenin had in mind. The story began in 73 BC, when a group of 78 escaped Roman slaves led by a former gladiator named Spartacus gathered marauded through Italy. Eventually their movement grew into a force of about 120,000. After two years of rebellion, the Roman armies, led by eventual Triumvirate member Pompey, cornered the slave army in the toe of Italy’s boot and massacred them, crucifying at least 6,000 of Spartacus’ followers on the Appian Way.
The story of Spartacus’ rebellion, which became known as the Third Servile War (yes, there were multiple slave rebellions in Roman times), was overshadowed by events that followed, when some of the war’s major players were involved in the transformation of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. The defenders of Roman slavery became the biggest enemies of Roman democracy. But there was a subset of people who never forgot about Spartacus: Socialists. It seems natural that Karl Marx, the guy who told workers to rise up because “you have nothing to lose but your chains”, counted Spartacus as a personal hero. During World War I, when it became obvious that the German cause was lost, a Communist faction called the Spartacus League agitated to end the war and institute socialism in the country. But, just like its namesake, the Spartacus League was crushed after the war by the nascent Weimar government and its leaders executed.
The Communists had better luck in Russia, of course, and after allying with the Capitalist West in World War II, mutual suspicions and opportunistic politicians on both sides made America and the Soviet Union enemies in the Cold War. Hollywood, a supposed nest of Communist subversives, was one of the first targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). There were a lot of leftists in Hollywood, and some people, such as screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, had actually joined the Communist Party of the United States while Russia and the U.S. were still allies in the war. Trumbo was no subversive: He wrote the classic 1944 war film 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, and rightly considered publicly advocating for his political views as his Constitutional right, no matter how unpopular they may have been at the time. When Trumbo was called in front of HUAC in 1947, he refused to name any other writers, actors, or directors who had been members of the CPUSA. As a result, Trumbo was convicted of contempt of Congress, and, after losing an appeal to the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds, sentenced to 11 months in prison. He was kicked out of the Writer’s Guild and became the most prominent member of the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, unable to work in the industry.
Trumbo’s story was dramatized last year, when he was played by Bryan Cranston on the big screen. Much of the running time of Trumbo is dedicated to the 1950s, when Trumbo ghostwrote dozens of films, including pulpy titles like From The Earth To The Moon and Oscar winners Roman Holiday and The Brave One.
The same year Trumbo was blacklisted, a young actor named Kirk Douglas made a splash playing next to Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past. By the late 1950s, Kirk Douglas’ star was rising, and he wanted an iconic role to play after being passed over for the lead in Ben Hur. Douglas chose Spartacus, and brought on Trumbo in secret to adapt a biography of the revolutionary. Trumbo, a noted aficionado of amphetamines, cranked out the epic length screenplay in two weeks under the pseudonym Sam Jackson.
The historical epic proved expensive and logistically very difficult to pull off. After a week of production, Douglas, who was serving as exec producer, fired the director Anthony Mann and persuaded Stanley Kubrick to take his place. Kubrick at the time was an acclaimed b-movie director who had worked with Douglas on his anti-war film Paths Of Glory (which really should be the subject of a Politics and the Movies column on its own), and at $12 million, Spartacus would be the biggest project of his career. It was also the first time Kubrick had worked without total creative control, and to say he hated the process is a dramatic understatement. He famously sidelined the cinematographer Russell Metty, forbidding him to get near the camera. (Metty got the last laugh when his name was on the Oscar for Best Cinematography Spartacus won.)
When Douglas realized he had a hit on his hands, he publicly outed Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter. The American Legion protested the film’s premiere, but when newly minted president John F. Kennedy crossed the picket lines, it effectively ended the Blacklist, and Trumbo worked openly in Hollywood until his death in the 1970s. Kubrick’s hard feelings didn’t stop when the film proved to be a huge hit and garnered acclaim as one of the best historical epics ever produced. He disavowed the picture and never worked with Douglas again.
Viewed today, the combination of Trumbo, Douglas, and Kubrick is fire. Game Of Thrones owes much of its formula of action, gore, sex, and politics to Spartacus. The screenplay is equal parts sword and sandals potboiler and thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom. If you didn’t know the history of Spartacus as leftist icon, the politics are mostly confined to the distance between Roman opulence and the cruel lives of the slaves. Coming as it did on the eve of the Civil Rights movement, the subject of slavery held special resonance with American audiences.
As a director, I look at the huge battle scenes Kubrick staged with equal parts envy and horror. On the one hand, wow, who wouldn’t want to command a literal army of 20,000 Romans? On the other hand, they had to feed and clothe 20,000 people for what amounted to about five minutes of screen time.
Politics and the Movies 4: Spartacus (2)
But of course, the film’s most lasting legacy is in its final scenes, among the most iconic and deeply moving moments in American film history. The cry of “I’m Spartacus!” has been adapted by many movements, and parodied many times. But the scene has lost none of its power, and in context, coming after two hours of triumph and tragedy, it’s absolutely devastating. They just don’t make ‘em like Spartacus any more.
Full Metal Jacket (1987; dir. Stanley Kubrick)—Kubrick is a cable television hypnotist; stop to watch a scene or two, and the next time you check your watch, two hours of your life have vanished. Part of this comes from Kubrick’s distinctive mixture of precision imagery and ambiguous human agents; his shifty films, which often concern the breakdown of orderly systems, always feel like you can eventually figure them out if you could just see them one…more…time. Like The Shining, Full Metal Jacket is a horror film, but it’s more matter-of-fact about the world’s terrible things than its predecessor. Its main subject is the way people like Matthew Modine’s Private Joker and Vincent D’onofrio’s Private Pyle are ground up in the human being lawnmower that is the U.S. military-industrial complex, embodied in the film by R. Lee Ermey’s mad-god drill instructor. Ermey’s florid, obscene litanies of abuse, which he delivers nonstop at maximum volume, coexists uneasily with Kubrick’s tightly composed images of military harmony, including a shot of Marines climbing ropes in the twilight as beautiful as anything in a Miyazaki film. For most viewers, Jacket’s merciless first forty-five minutes overshadow the film’s second half, which takes place in Vietnam and includes a little thing called the Tet Offensive. But it shouldn’t: one look at Animal Mother’s 1000-yard stare ought to keep you locked in. And in the age of CGI, Kubrick’s meticulous craftsmanship stands tall. Just think; they had to set those building on fire during the battle scenes every single day. Grade: A+
Hot Fuzz (2007: dir. Edgar Wright)— Edgar Wright is another filmmaker who stops me in my tracks whenever I’m idly channel-surfing. Hot Fuzz, about a London supercop (Simon Pegg) who thinks something fishy is going on in the small English village where he’s been reassigned, is the only action-comedy anyone needs to see, a triumph of verbal and visual wit more immediately accessible than anything Wright, Pegg and co-star Nick Frost have done so far. But for genre connoisseurs interested in a bit of fun, this pastiche offers endless treasures. Its network of cross-references and allusions are bewildering, edifying, inspirational: the Lethal Weapon theme music, the Silent Rage lookalike who can only say “Yarp”, the Straw Dogs shotgun violence played off as a joke, the casting of The Wicker Man’s Edward Woodward as the town’s security head, all the songs from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, the A-Team like way in which the bad guys aren’t killed. To say nothing of Timothy Dalton as the guiltiest-looking, most shamelessly wicked murder suspect in film history. Grade: A+
A Summer’s Tale (1996; dir. Eric Rohmer)—Although Eric Rohmer’s funny, lovely romance about the romantic adventures of a young man and three women had its long-overdue U.S. theatrical premiere earlier this year, it isn’t coming to Memphis; looks like Kansas City (where it’s currently playing) is as close as it’s going to get. This is a shame, because this is perfect mid-August fare, a chatty couple of hours that records, with grace and equanimity, all the dumb games people play when they’re too young and uncertain to deal with love, sex and commitment. I don’t tend to look to Robert Louis Stevenson for advice about today’s youth, but he’s spot-on about the central dilemma of the clueless dude at the film’s center: “He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His experience is incomplete… He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near trying it as his means permit.” Out of such hesitations and feints are authentic feelings and many painful memories born. Grade: A
Post Tenebras Lux (2012; dir. Carlos Reygadas)—There’s too little to hold onto in Reygadas’ emotional autobiography, for which he won the Best Director award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Its internal logic remains opaque, and its few potent-looking individual vignettes fail to compensate for its many dead spots. I liked the two visits by the devil (I think) and the scene where the guy rips his own head off, but the rest of the imagery and emotions were either hidden or buried. I feel sorta dopey disliking this movie, though. It’s easy to tee off on typical Hollywood product because village-idiot brainlessness is often what it’s selling. It’s tougher to take down something “challenging” or difficult or unconventional. Because these works may require more time and effort for viewers to unpack it mysteries and challenges, you feel like a chump and a simpleton when you finally give up and say, “I don’t get it.” But I don’t get it. Grade: B-
“Friend Like Me,” from Aladdin (1992; dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker)—I didn’t discover Robin Williams’ soul while watching The Fisher King or Good Will Hunting; I discovered it in a Disney cartoon. The connection between creativity and solitude—and the way in which Williams’ manic flights of free-associative fancy frequently exhausted other people whenever he escaped from the prison of his own head—is the subtext of Williams’ Genie’s mantra: “Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space.” Nevertheless, Williams’ magical wish-granter is his greatest role, in part because it best embodies the radical notion of the comedian as world-builder. Wonder, joy and generosity in the movies are all too rare, but these things are all present in this gloriously surreal, genially self-indulgent two and a half minute musical number, which still delights me after dozens of viewings. (Favorite moment: the way the Genie leers, “Well, lookie here!” after conjuring up a tiny harem for his new master.) Before bursting into song, the Genie declares “I don’t think you quite realize what you’ve got here”; that purely expository line will assume new shades of meaning and gravity as we continue to grapple with Williams’ huge (and often frustrating) artistic legacy. Grade (musical number only): A+
The July edition of the Time Warp Drive-In is devoted to a director whose work is more often associated with the art house than the drive-in. On the occasion of what would have been Stanley Kubrick’s 86th birthday, Malco’s Summer Drive-In will host an all-night marathon of the director’s work. Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy, who, along with Black Lodge Video’s Matthew Martin, programs the monthly events, says that Kubrick’s influence stretched far beyond film.
“Kubrick created worlds,” McCarthy says. “A hippie, like David Bowie, could enter the theater, inhabit the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and exit as something else.” The character of David Bowman, the astronaut who ends 2001: A Space Odyssey “lost in space,” inspired Bowie’s first hit, “Space Oddity.” Kubrick’s next film, 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, would similarly inspire the look of Glam rock and the attitude of punk rock.
The evening of films will begin with what is probably Kubrick’s most popular work, 1980’s The Shining, a masterful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. With Kubrick, who started out as a photographer for Look magazine in 1946, the richness of his images conveys the richness of his ideas. A common criticism of Kubrick’s style is that the performances are flat or cold. But that is a misreading of what the director was trying to do, for it is not the actors who are emoting, but the man behind the camera. The Shining, while filled with luscious images, is an exception. In Jack Nicholson, Kubrick met his artistic match, much as he had 20 years earlier when he did Paths Of Glory and Spartacus with Kirk Douglas.
A Clockwork Orange
The evening continues with another literary adaptation, A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess spoke more favorably of the film than King does of The Shining, but Kubrick made both texts jumping off points for his meticulous, arresting imagery. The near-future dystopia is dominated by Malcolm McDowell as Alex, a middle-class street thug obsessed with classical music whose path to redemption is almost as ethically queasy as his ritualistic ultraviolence.
Even though A Clockwork Orange was initially rated X for violence, its body count pales next to Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In 1961, Kubrick set out to make a serious movie about the dangers of nuclear war. But the more he read about the Cold War doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” the more absurd it seemed. So Kubrick made the radical decision to turn his film into a comedy by bringing onboard writer Terry Southern and comedic super-genius Peter Sellers. Even taken apart from its Cold War context, Dr. Strangelove is a clear triumph and still one of the most important comedies ever made. That the civilization-ending mass killing is, in retrospect, somehow more acceptable than Alex’s mundane street thuggery is just part of the joke.
The last film on the drive-in program is Kubrick’s biggest and most intimidating masterpiece. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not only the greatest science fiction movie ever made, it placed second behind only Ozu’s Tokyo Story in the 2012 Sight & Sound Directors’ poll of the greatest films ever. Every shot is a meticulous work of art in its own right, and taken together, they offer too much to comprehend in one sitting. But the pleasure of returning to unravel works of genius is part of what gives Kubrick’s films their enduring power.
