Remembering Kubrick

By Steve Evans

I remember exactly where I was 20 years ago today when I learned that Stanley Kubrick had died. First order of business was to phone in a bogus illness at the office and squander a sick day. I spent the balance of that morning and afternoon watching Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, his four greatest films. Over the remainder of that week I watched the rest of his films, developed a newfound appreciation for the artistry of Barry Lyndon, discovered some interesting symbols and subtext in The Shining, and marveled at how the man managed to make such a sly and gleefully perverse film of Nabokov’s unfilmable novel, Lolita, considering the censorship restrictions of the day. I watched The Killing for the umpteenth time, once again shaking my head at how Tarantino shamelessly lifted the non-linear plot structure and adapted it for use in his film Reservoir Dogs. In-between these screenings, I endured a dial-up Internet connection to glean any information I could find about Kubrick’s swansong, Eyes Wide Shut, which would be released four months after his death. He made only 13 films in a career spanning 45 years, mainly because he spent years making them. The man was meticulous.

The world was a more interesting place when Kubrick was alive, making films and cultivating an air of mystery about his methods. I believed then as now that wherever he was at any given time, he was always the smartest guy in the room. His films positively pulsate with intelligence, with trenchant observations on the human condition. The jackals of bourgeois sensibility often criticized Kubrick for what they perceived as a cold misanthropy in his work. Nonsense. No intelligent man would devote so much time and obsession to the perfection of his life’s work – and then share it with millions – unless he had a passionate concern for the fate of humanity. If there is a connective thread woven throughout his films, it is this: every single one of them follows a protagonist whose fate is impacted by the random insanity of a world beyond his comprehension or control.

Existential fatalism is the dominant theme in all of Kubrick, except one film that turns the idea upside down: A Clockwork Orange. This is the only Kubrick film (and it is his best film) where the antihero gets his life back, albeit through a pitch-black paradox. Here, the film itself is a meditation on free will raging against the forces of fate in a dystopian future where everyone is unpleasant. The protagonist loses his freedom of choice due to government brainwashing only to regain free will through that most ironic of choices, an attempted suicide. “I was cured alright.”

Stanley Kubrick. July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999. Irreplaceable. Sorely missed.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Another Tarantino Western? Is that all ya got?

By Steve Evans

Coming on the heels of his financially successful D'Jango Unchained, Quentin Tarantino revealed this weekend the working title of his next film: The Hateful Eight. It's another western. Word is, this won't be a D'Jango sequel. The title actually suggests nothing so much as a variation of Inglourious Basterds, which was, like most of Tarantino's work, a mashup of elements from long-forgotten films.

Maybe the title is a riff on John Sturges' western classic, The Magnificent Seven (1960), itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa's tremendous action film Seven Samurai (1954).

I've long since lost interest in Tarantino's reworked homages to mostly obscure genre films. Were it not for his gift of writing dialog, I would probably stop watching his stuff. His best films, now two decades behind him, delight the viewer with non-linear plotting and a narrative structure that coils around itself like a snail's shell. It's no coincidence that Tarantino's major industry awards come from his writing, not directing and certainly not his acting.

Considering that dialog and narrative structure are his strongest traits, D'Jango was a surprisingly straight-line revenge tale peppered with as much violence as the current R rating can withstand. Basterds was told in a similarly linear fashion, with none of the meandering whoop-de-doo that makes other Tarantino films more interesting to watch.

I write this not to bash the guy, but to put forward the modest wish that if he insists on stirring up another cinematic equivalent of Mulligan's Stew, that he at least write a more engaging and clever script -- always his strong suit -- to justify another Tarantino trip down movie-memory lane. You've seen a lot of movies, Quentin, but so have I. Your work of late has the whiff of familiarity.

Honor and revenge are the thematic foundations of all Tarantino films. Especially bloody revenge. I suppose someone could make a career out of payback fantasies, culling the best parts from old movies that a majority of your audience has never seen. Truth be told, that's exactly what Tarantino's been doing for 20 years, to curious acclaim and great financial reward. Well, bully for him. It's getting stale.

What else ya got?

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2014 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Run Run Shaw Gone to Kung-Fu Heaven

By Steve Evans
Run Run Shaw, prolific producer and pioneer of cinema in China, died today at 106. Best known for ultraviolent kung-fu movies in the 1970s (and I do mean ultraviolent), he was also a producer on the Ridley Scott science fiction classic Blade Runner. 

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies would not exist without the towering influence of ShawScope pictures. It's a whole other world of cinema.

The New York Times has a comprehensive obit here.

Shaw's life story would actually make a pretty good movie. With his brother, he made his first film in 1924 and both were millionaires by the 1940s. As noted in the Times obituary:

"Their business boomed until the Japanese invaded the Malay Peninsula in 1941 and stripped their theaters and confiscated their film equipment. But according to Run Run Shaw, he and his brother buried more than $4 million in gold, jewelry and currency in their backyard, which they dug up after World War II and used to resume their careers."

A Shaw trailer from 1977's The Brave Archer:



Cinema Uprising copyright © 2014 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

A Glimpse of Django Unchained

By Steve Evans

Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz team up to fight Leonardo DiCaprio’s evil slave owner in Django Unchained, an upcoming revisionist Western by Quentin Tarantino, the leading practitioner of flat-out-wrong history in the service of exploitation cinema.

Miramax just released these stills from the film, which is set for a Christmas Day opening:

Foxx plays the liberated slave of the title who joins forces with a bounty hunter (Waltz) in an odyssey across the Antebellum South. Their quest involves finding Django’s wife, the improbably named Broomhilda, now owned by the wicked Calvin Candie (DiCaprio, sporting a Mephistophelean goatee). Tarantino regulars Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell provide support, along with Don Johnson, legendary makeup artist Tom Savini and Borat, um, Sacha Baron Cohen. Because this is a Tarantino film, when Django catches up with Calvin you know blood is gonna flow like Ol' Man River.

Revenge is the recurring and dominant theme in all of Tarantino’s films, which are looking progressively better as his budgets have increased. Waltz and Foxx, in particular, come off especially bad-ass in their Old West garb. Check out the bowler and tiered duster on Waltz, who could bring back fashions from the 19th century and make them popular once more with just his attitude.

No matter. Fine costumes and production values cannot obscure the fact that Tarantino’s one-note oeuvre becomes more preposterous with each film he makes. Here’s hoping Django Unchained marks a return to form. Let this picture be as taut, crazed, politically incorrect, hilariously profane and violent as his best work, which for my money is still his first picture, Reservoir Dogs (1992).

Tarantino launched himself 20 years ago as a genuine maverick with a disappointing penchant for producing derivative films. It is a well-known fact among those who care about such things that even his finest film, Reservoir Dogs, is little more than a mash-up of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and the original Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, with some references to obscure Japanese thrillers thrown in to season the stew. Tarantino took the basic ingredients of better films, ramped up the profanity and violence, and called it macaroni. Audiences said “cool” and Tarantino basked in the wonder of it all. In the years since, after breathing too deeply of his own fumes and indulging too often in his own fan worship, the man still makes derivative films that are now as silly as his own chatterbox interviews.

Tarantino movies have all the substance of a dove feather, but to be fair, they’re often ridiculously entertaining -- at least for one viewing. It depends on your appetite and mood. A cheeseburger and cold beer are not in the same league as duck à l'orange and Veuve Clicquot, but both will take the edge off your hunger and slake your thirst.

So get back to where you once belonged, Tarantino. Grill me a cheeseburger, bloody rare, and pop a beer. You really need to get mean and nasty and daring with your audience once more. Push it to the edge (well, at least to the outer limits of a contracturally-obligated R-rating). Rub our noses in your Mandingo outrageousness and we’ll buy tickets, if for no other reason than many of us are bored. The sorry truth is most contemporary cinema is a snore. But knock it off already with the self-indulgence. You’re not the equal of Kubrick, Clouzot or Pabst, even though you like to name-check the masters. Just entertain us for a couple of hours with that pluperfect dialog you write so well and give up trying to make some kind of lasting artistic statement. Do that, and that'll do.

Oh, and to Waltz: love the coat.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2012 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Wild Turkey: Aronofsky's "Black Swan"

By Steve Evans

Nothing flatters an artist so much as an homage, which can sometimes be a fancy word for plagiarism. It was with this in mind that I saw Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” at the umpteenoplex last night with the lovely Claudia.

If “Black Swan” isn’t exactly a rip-off of that 1948 Technicolor wonder, “The Red Shoes,” directed by the brilliant team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it’s still impossible to believe that a devout film student like Aronofsky hasn’t studied the Powell-Pressburger playbook with slavish attention. Homage is indeed a delicate term.

(Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs)

Give credit to “Black Swan” cinematographer Matthew Libatique for framing exquisite images that elevate this B-movie psycho-thriller a notch above the grindhouse exploitation fare that once unspooled in sleazy cinemas along Times Square, not too far from New York City‘s theater district and the world of the ballet that serves as the milieu for Aronofsky‘s crazed candygram.

Yes, “Black Swan” is a good-looking film. Yes, Natalie Portman delivers a heroic performance rife with eye-bulging fear, homicidal urges and masturbatory self-indulgence as she pursues perfectionism in the self-destructive way of the obsessive-compulsive personality. But my gripe has more to do with the constant sub-referencing and obvious influences from other, better, films that Aronofsky borrows to pump up this sad and rather obvious exploration of a delicate psyche in the Big City. I was led to believe that "Black Swan" was a fresh, vibrant work of original filmmaking.

What I got was a mash-up of “The Red Shoes,” cross-pollinated with some of David Cronenberg’s nastier visions and some genuinely repulsive metamorphosis sequences with jazzed-up CGI. Sprinkle liberally with Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” (1965), and you can witness head games galore in "Black Swan," though it's still just another trumped up tale of an artist driven to the brink by her own unquenchable thirst for perfection.

If originality was part of a filmmaker’s own quest for perfection, going to the movies would be a lot more fun.

Since the audience who saw “Black Swan” with us spent more time texting, talking and inhaling hotdogs slathered in pickle relish than in watching the show, it’s doubtful they caught even a fraction of the influences Aronofsky deploys in the creation of his own films. He‘s no better than Tarantino, that other post-modernist whose “inspirations” are all drawn from better artists.

On the way out of the cinema I overheard a woman tell her date that Aronofsky is “a true original.”

Oh, please. Shut up and eat your hotdog.

Cinema Uprising copyright c 2011 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.