Category Archives: Stanley Kubrick

Eight Nights of Hanukkah, Eight Entertaining Jews: Night #7

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The old insult goes, “Jews run show business.” To that I say “thanks.” 

Jews make up about 0.2% of the world’s population yet they have always been a loud (emphasis on the loud) and prominent voice in film, television, music, and comedy. 

The next eight days are Hanukkah, which is not the most important Jewish holiday, but we do get presents. For each night of Hanukkah, I will share one Jewish entertainer who has had a big impact on me. For the seventh night of Hanukkah, let’s talk about Stanley Kubrick:


Stop the presses! Stanley Kubrick was Jewish?

Yup.

(Glass Shatters)

That image of a quiet, reclusive Englishman may have now disappeared. This is precisely why I wanted to include Stanley Kubrick on this list: he does not fit the normal characteristics of a Jew in the film industry. He doesn’t parade around and declare that he’s Jewish. Even those who didn’t grow up religious (like Apatow) still incorporate Judaism into their work. If Kubrick ever did it, it was in a subtle way.

Like any good Jew though, Kubrick had a dark sense of humor about everything. Even in his most harrowing works, he still kept his sense of humor. After all, he did direct “Dr. Strangelove,” one of the most famous black comedies of all time. Black comedy is something that Jews seem specifically good at. Jewish history is marked by tragedy and bleak events. Besides work ethic, having a sense of humor was key to survival.

Even though he released so few films. Kubrick was as hard a worker as any director who releases a film every year. He just spent all of his time meticulously researching his projects. He is the complete opposite of Woody Allen: instead of putting out something new every year, Kubrick took extra long on each of his projects, which is probably why almost all of them were so masterful. 

If anybody was lucky enough to catch the Kubrick exhibition in Los Angeles (its traveling to other cities, if you can catch it you have to), then you would have been floored at the amount of thought and research that went into every film he made, as well as every film he worked tirelessly on that ultimately never got made. Among those were a Napoleon project (which will soon be a miniseries on HBO) and a very unique take on the Holocaust. 

Kubrick was intensely private, but that does not mean that he was this oddball hermit as many seem to think. I think he just liked to let his work speak for him. And while he doesn’t seem like somebody who’d be on a list of the most important Jews, I think it is important to have him on here. While he had no religious upbringing and no mention of Judaism in his works, boiled down, he was a Jewish kid from the Bronx who loved “Seinfeld,” boxing, and (American) football. 

Movie Review: The Tree of Life

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Unless you love, your life will flash by.

Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is the most highly ambitious film to come out of this year, many past years, and many years in the future. It comes from what must have been years of obsessive thought about both life and film. Only someone this in love with the craft, and with nature, could make this film, and somehow make it masterful.

“The Tree of Life” begins in a small Texas town in the 1950s, in what must be loosely based off of Malick’s own upbringing. Brad Pitt plays the tough patriarch of a family of three boys. Pitt, who is never given a first name, continually fights his wife (Jessica Chastain) over the best way to raise their family.

Throughout the film, they explore loss of innocence and the possible meaning of life. Usually, trying to find the meaning of life is a cheap storytelling technique. But if you’re as good of a filmmaker as Malick is, the answer doesn’t come in one sentence. The film takes us from Texas to the cosmos to the creation of the life, and back again. Somewhere in between, an older version of one of the sons (Sean Penn), comes back to explore it all. The sum of “The Tree of Life” is nearly impossible to explain. After one viewing, any interpretation could be right.

Malick’s latest is a reminder of his films from the past: it takes its precious time, and it is very quiet. “The Tree of Life” is reminiscent of a brief time when films told entire stories through images. Malick’s story, which covers basically the entirety of existence in just two and a half hours, manages to be the cinematic sequel to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Like “2001,” “The Tree of Life” is nothing short of a cinematic opera.

Malick, while echoing Kubrick, also does something that few filmmakers have done this well: capture the flawed beauty of nature. Light shining on a bed, tall grass being ruffled by human hands, and flies buzzing around a lake at dusk have never looked this stunning. He captures both the sights and sounds of the natural world to a perfectionist degree. This is naturalistic filmmaking at its finest. Through a camera lens, he encapsulates Thoreauvian philosophy.

As a critic, it is important to try and avoid overanalyzing. However, for a film like “The Tree of Life,” overanalyzing is crucial. Through his film, Malick is trying to find more than just the meaning of life, because life doesn’t have just one meaning. “The Tree of Life” is about what is out there, and what brings us all together.

Some might call Malick’s film a religious one. While religion seems to be a big factor, I would say that the film straddles the line between spirituality and atheism. It asks these essential questions: when it comes to dealing with the biggest questions in life, who (or what) do we turn to? Do we look to nature, the possibility of God, or our friends and family? No choice we make is a decent or right one, unless it is done out of some form of love.

“The Tree of Life” is not a film that offers easy answers. Within a half hour, many people in the audience had walked out, something I haven’t witnessed since “A Serious Man.” After “The Tree of Life” ended, one woman remarked that the film was reminiscent of a bunch of Windows screen savers. A friend of mine compared it to the greatest “South Park” episode ever.

While both of these interpretations are funny, they do not do Malick’s film justice. The cinematography is the result of years of careful work, not stealing. Meanwhile, overanalyzing is the act of finding meaning in the meaningless. Malick surely had some deeper purpose in trying to discover how life exists and thrives.

“The Tree of Life” is hard to be in love with the first time around, but I feel a need to recommend it. I can’t get over the brilliant way in which Malick speeds up, and then slows down, the story at just the right moments. Many films made nowadays try to think up and balance big ideas, but few are ever this meditative.

Minimalism: The New Way to Market a Movie

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Today, I want to talk not about a movie, but about a poster. Well actually, many posters.

The art form known as Minimalism has become a phenomenon on the interweb. It’s not new; artists have been using it for years. However, it’s been given a new use: movie posters.
The idea behind Minimalism is to create a work of art that takes a concept and strips it down to its most basic form. When something is stripped down to its most basic element, there is something strangely deeper that can be found in it. It would basically be saying so much by showing so little.
Some of the posters make a lot of sense. A lot of them involve a great knowledge of the film involved to truly understand. Take for example, one poster for “Inception.” It simply shows an outline of four of the main characters’ faces and their totem placed inside each of them. It is simple and effective. It also shows how each totem is psychologically linked to each character, objects of how their brains work.
Others are confusing, yet portray something so important to the movie. One of my favorites is the one for “The Deer Hunter.” It shows six circles. Five are empty, and one is shaded red. Even people who love the movie will be confused at first. Think. Think very hard. Yes, it is portraying a gun with one bullet in it, loaded for Russian Roulette. With this image, such a deep and complex film is boiled down to its most basic, yet most important idea. Who needs an image of helicopters flying through Vietnam when you can just have a picture of the barrel of a gun?
There are others in the spirit of the “Inception” poster. The “Blade Runner” poster has no epic image of futuristic Los Angeles. All it has is that little origami unicorn. The poster for “Inglourious Basterds” shows two hands holding up three fingers in different ways. It’s the German three and the English three. It’s yet another small detail that made a very big difference in this movie.
Some posters are even more thought provoking and even more creative. The pattern on “The Shining” poster is the carpeting of The Overlook Hotel. The “Titanic” poster is not just a white triangle, it’s that deadly iceberg. Some add on to certain movies as well. “The Godfather” poster shows the rest of the horse’s body without the head. That is, if you really wanted to know what a headless horse looked like.
At the moment, Minimalist posters are fan art. They are made by and for people who truly appreciate movies. Yet, I feel like this new art form has a bigger potential. Why not actually use Minimalist posters to market movies? They’re better and more original than most of the generic crap passed off as posters nowadays. As a marketing tool, movie posters should draw people into a movie with a curiosity factor. If someone sees a “Kill Bill” poster with nothing but footsteps, they might wonder, where do those footsteps lead?
But posters shouldn’t just be for marketing. A movie poster should serve the same purpose as an album cover. They should converse with the art, and emphasize a central purpose behind it. A poster of the incredible futuristic Los Angeles from “Blade Runner” might draw more attention, but that unicorn is much more important to the story. You could compare that to the cover of “London Calling.” It could’ve just been an image of London being caught in the middle of the apocalypse. While the simple image of Joe Strummer smashing a guitar may seem out of place, it’s really there to show the raw, unbridled power of true rock and roll that the album is partially a metaphor for.
That simple image of a mythical creature, or the inside of a gun are not the first things you’d expect to see on a good movie poster. But like that album cover, they show the strange, mesmerizing magic of truly amazing cinema. The poster is meant to encapsulate an entire film in one image. In so simple an image, so much more can be said.
I couldn’t find the “Inception” poster I was referring to earlier, but here is another cool one.

Movie Review: Moon

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Of all the movies I’ve seen, even the strangest still give me something to say. It is at the rarest occasion that I am almost at a loss for words. One of these rare occasions occurred as I watched Duncan Jones’ “Moon.”

This doesn’t at all mean that “Moon” is a bad movie; it is in fact quite a good one. It is just so complex and almost non-linear that it will take a lot to explain what I just saw.
The film is a mixture of both the sci-fi and psychological thriller genres. Along with “District 9″ and “Avatar,” “Moon” proves why 2009 was the year that sci-fi made a comeback.
“Moon” is set sometime in the near future. At this point, humans have gone beyond using dirty forms of energy and have found a clean form of energy in fusion from the sun. This form of energy can only be found on the surface of the moon so the company Lunar Industries sends people to the moon to harvest it.
At the moment, the man on the moon is Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell). Sam is under a three year contract and, being the only person on the moon, faces extreme loneliness. He especially misses his wife (Dominique McElligott) and daughter. The only company he has is a robot named GERTY (Kevin Spacey). The only thing that makes GERTY seem remotely human is the little smiley face attached to him, which at times seems more intimidating than friendly.
One day, Sam is involved in a vehicle crash and wakes up to find himself in the middle of Lunar’s twisted, new experiment.
It’s going to be hard to discuss both the thematic and narrative implications of “Moon” without giving away a giant spoiler. Therefore, I will do my best to avoid revealing this huge plot point. What I will say though is that Rockwell does an amazing job dealing with this twist. I always knew he had talent, but “Moon” just proves it even further. He shows some great skill handling a character with a tendency toward both lunacy and normalcy. In the face of the very strange journey he goes on, he manages to seem as realistically perplexed as the viewer is.
Jones’ writing and directing also deserves great praise. I am always fascinated by visions of the future. Where do artists believe we are headed as a species? “Moon” definitely has some interesting things to say on that topic. While a lot of dystopian genres take the bad things of present day society and amplify them in the future, Jones does the opposite and takes the clean energy craze and turns it into something that could doom us all.
However, Jones also does tie in the topic of technology. Sam’s isolation could be a tool to show how our increasingly computerized world can be dehumanizing. In fact, the future of “Moon” seems like a time in which humans are treated more like machines that can be easily programmed and deprogrammed then like actual human beings with thoughts and emotions. The future will quite literally be dehumanizing.
“Moon” also manages to create a convincing futuristic hell through the amazing set designs. A lot of the cold, white hallways of the station were reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This isn’t very surprising, as that film also portrays a future where humans have been taken over by technology. Also, the utter attention and focus put on every detail of this time create a world that seems so vividly real that the viewer might almost feel a part of it. That is the true essence of a Kubrickian filmmaker.
The film also felt slightly like “Alien,” as it pits helpless crew members in space against a corporation with shady intentions. “Moon” also uses outer space the same way “Alien” did and uses it as a tool for being both trapped and extremely isolated. When you’re in space and you’re life is in danger, there aren’t many places you can turn to.
“Moon” will likely leave you feeling perplexed, and shaken up. It uses both genres it combines to compliment each other and create an extremely original and satisfying whole. It’s engaging from its very first shot and it never lets you go from there.
This is a Sci-Fi film not reliant on action but rather on character study and it reveals what the genre does best: use the extraterrestrial or technological world to reveal human nature. When you walk out of this film, you will question what it means to truly be a living, breathing, human being.