Word: kubrick
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...decades. Von Neumann also became an icon of the cold war. Disabled with pancreatic cancer, he stoically continued to attend AEC meetings until his death in 1957. The wheelchair-bound scientist with the Hungarian accent who mathematically analyzed doomsday is said to have been a model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove...
...black comedy that perfected the form, the late Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is more about nuclear war -- and of course bodily fluids -- than the kind we're fighting now. But take the alternate title, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and you've got a decent description of Bill Clinton's foreign policy. No endgame? No vision? No problem. Just push the button and let those smarties fly. Kubrick found Peter Sellers in Lolita; the U.S. found let-'er-fly diplomacy in the Gulf War. And you know what? They've both served us pretty...
...that the latter had carelessly missed. To a filmmaker desperately behind schedule, he might offer to share his state-of-the-art editing suite to speed things up. To a harried studio executive, he might provide an evening of baseball nostalgia, centered on the New York Yankees, beloved since Kubrick's Bronx boyhood. Maybe Warren Beatty caught the delicious dynamic of those encounters best when he observed, "You always assumed Stanley knew something you didn't know...
That was clearly true of many facts and ideas. But the significant thing about Kubrick was that he built his life-style and life's work around a few simple, widely acknowledged verities: that our universe is ruled by chance, that life is too short, that movies are, or ought to be, primarily a visual medium. The difference between him and us was that he didn't regard these as mere talking points. He acted on them. Obsessively...
Take the question of chance, for instance, and recall The Killing (1956), the first true Kubrick movie. The elaborate heist of the day's handle at a race track, a model of rational planning, goes perfectly. And then, at the last moment, the sappy lady and her yappy little dog appear--mischance absurdly personified--and ruin everything. Remember 1964's Dr. Strangelove as well. How delicately the title character and his ilk poised the balance of terror, how little they considered the possibility that there might be someone out there like General Jack D. Ripper. Best of all, think...