biglove wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 6:12 pm
A movie of which I have never heard?
Barry Lyndon I saw in college in 1980 or so, about five years after it's release.
It's director, Stanley Kubrick, was considered the finest American film director by many through the turn of the century (that sounds weird right there). He was the last of the rogue film directors, who started with Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah back in the sixties; they were the "auteur" directors, who stamped their names indelibly on American cinema back then.
Kubrick made his name with
2001, and next with
A Clockwork Orange. He was renowned for making his actors work like hell, and filming fifty takes of a simple scene was not out of the ordinary; he was looking for the actors to do something in each scene to make that scene perfect and special. Naturally, this made his productions absurdly long, and he averaged four or five years between each film.
Barry Lyndon took two years to film, and costs ended up at $11 million. It was a box office bomb, which led Kubrick to picking
The Shining as his next project, which he considered to make himself more bankable, as the auteur directors were pretty thin on the ground by then.
The Shining did well, making Warner Bros a profit.
In form, Kubrick took another seven years to release his Vietnam film,
Full Metal Jacket. A great film, it made plenty of money and showed the director's general appalling distaste for all things human.
Then, Kubrick fans had to wait another eleven years for the last opus,
Eyes Wide Shut. Filmed, like most of Kubrick's movies, in the UK, the movie was set in New York City, and starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (one movie poster proclaimed "Cruise Kidman Kubrick". Kubrick died a few days after delivering the final cut to Warner Bros. It was the end of one of the last great American directors, who managed to add his imprint on the art.
We won't see his likes again.
