Word: kubrick
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...thing we ought to clear up right away: Stanley Kubrick was not, as careless journalism always insisted, reclusive. Elusive was a better word for him; seclusive the best one, implying, one hopes, that his refusal of fame's odious and stupefying obligations was a conscious, clarifying choice he had embraced, not a neurotic compulsion to which he had surrendered...
...Internet--and, indeed, in person, if you happened near the admittedly narrow British realm where he had sequestered himself since 1961. Among this group in the days after his sudden death, at 70, on March 7, there was a more powerful need than usual to talk fondly about Kubrick, as if by so doing they could fill the sudden silence that had descended on their lives...
...course, there is Kubrick's magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a science fiction film unrivaled in its scope, majesty, and depth. Indeed, the black monoliths that from the centerpiece of Kubrick's masterpiece have become a cultural symbol of sorts, a sign of something powerful but unknown. And the voice of H.A.L. will haunt our experiments with computers and artificial intelligence for years to come...
What we see in all of Kubrick's work, as varied in subject and style as it may be, is an attempt to create something more than a movie. Kubrick was known for his attention to good storytelling in a screenplay, but the real impact of his films is not in the tales that they tell but the ideas they present. he has often been criticized as being too clinical in his treatment of troubling subjects, of not taking a moral stand against the problems he portrayed. But that distance Kubrick maintained from his subjects was perhaps his greatest strength...
Whether it was sexual taboos in Lolita or individual and societal violence in A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick used his films to examine the unspoken problems in our modern world, to step back and look honestly at the issues no one wanted to confront in the open. We'll look for the same fierce realism in Eyes Wide Shut, his last movie, due in July and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (see clip below). In a way, Kubrick was the most moral of filmmakers because he was not afraid to be called immoral, not afraid to tred where audiences didn...