Word: kubrick
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...there for contemplation. Thus Kelvin must not only reconcile himself to the idea of dreams incarnate, but to a materialized, breathing, caressing version of his former wife, who had committed suicide on Earth. He becomes sucked in by his desire to love this bionic apparition, neutrinos or no. Stanley Kubrick may have meant to convey this same space-subconscious analogy in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he abstracted too much, and became boring. Tarkovsky doesn't; he clutches us in the gut with emotional ambiguities, and he is not using scare tactics. Hari, the returned wife, kills herself again...
What should one think of all this: the disturbing psychology, the terrifying moments, the obviously scientific atmosphere that fills bit by bit with a powerful spirituality? Bergman meets William Peter Blatty? Or Kubrick meets Kierkegaard? Actually, an academic search for allusions and comparisons will not stick here, because Solaris is an unsettling, spooky and unfamiliar world. Or put it this way: You know how it feels to come out of a movie that creates a compelling, comfortable reality and to return into the yapping, yawning crowd, step in the stale popcorn and walk into the unalluring street, still as noisy...
...Strangelove. I've always suspected Stanley Kubrick of basically despising human beings. His sets tend to resemble the Mather House courtyard, done in that intimidating style intended to give people the feeling that they are insignificant. In Strangelove, though, his contempt for people isn't particularly noxious, because he's portraying a particularly contemptible group--the American military-political elite. George C. Scott satirizes the character of military men brilliantly--at heart, they are adolescents who never grew up, infatuated with the noise and destructive power of weaponry, and strangely naive...
...kind of satire, always clear-eyed and almost never derisive. Mazursky is a good spirit, and this is perhaps the most closely autobiographical of all his movies. Like Larry, he was a scuffling New York actor (he showed up as one of the leads in Fear and Desire, Stanley Kubrick's first feature...
...title of your review of the new Kubrick film, "The Titanic Sailed at Dawn," is appropriate, since when any film runs into the iceberg of Crimson editorial cynicism, the only survivors will be those who insist on forming their own opinions rather than slavishly following those of a fellow classmate who happens to be able to turn a phrase...