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Originally Posted by demonrail666
Sure but Au Hasard is a story about the human condition (from a religious perspective) told using a donkey. It isn't rwally 'about a donkey', though. (IMO).
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the donkey is god, no? when god is there everything goes well, when god is not, everything goes down the shitter. is it god the father or is it jesus? i don't know. but cmon, alex is a cypher but balthazar isn't?
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Originally Posted by demonrail666
I just think with Kubrick, his emphasis on technical matters effectively treated humans as props. He treated them that way not because he saw people as props (necessarily) but because his directing style couldn't accommodate them any other way.
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since he was a chess aficionado, we could call them chess pieces. but i don't think they're the robots you're making them out to be. actually, speaking of robots, HAL turns out to be quite human in the end.
maybe kubrick knew that humans are machines.
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Originally Posted by demonrail666
ACO and FMJ don't have characters so much as cyphers. The most memorable 'character' in FMJ is a cartoon drill sergeant required to do no more than shout for an hour. That's less the case earlier in his career. I'll grant you The Killing and PoG have some very good characters ... but it could be argued that Kubrick hadn't quite become 'Kubrick' at that point.
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pvt pyle's mental breakdown is not human? his friend private joker is not human? yes, i know what you're saying (i think) that none of these characters is going to start breaking shakespearian soliloquies about mortal coils and such things-- and that's my point w/ the comparison to bresson. kubrick doesn't do filmed theatre. and he's certainly not lyrical-- he's not concerned much with inner states-- his stuff is out there on the frame and the shot.
even with "cartoonish" movies like strangelove (turgidsson being the most cartoonish character of all of them) there are some hugely moving moments in that film-- like when the wing commander, who has been acting like a fucking machine trying to drop his nuke as rationally as possible, mounts that bomb on the way down and howls like a cowboy on a wild buck? maybe that was a mockery of american yahooism, or maybe that's the guy who is required to act like a killing machine facing his death with some very human bravado. i choose the second reading (though the first one also applies).
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Originally Posted by demonrail666
Then why choose such a dynamic actor as Tom Cruise? Love him or loathe him he's never gonna be first choice if you're going for a 'flat' performance. Harrison Ford is flat, Elijah Wood is flat. Tom Cruise couldn't do flat if his life (or a scene) depended on it.
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cruise has energy, but zero depth. by flat i didn't mean a deadpan style, i meant lacking in emotional depths, humanity, nuance. cruise does either cocky smile or earnest chin push forward. that's it. he's pretty, so he looks good on screen, but he's as empty as ryan o'neal was. if you had put somewhere with more "soul" in that role, say someone like willem dafoe, it could never work to conceive of him as a naive fool. tom hanks would have-- he did play a dumbshit in that zemeckis atrocity.
the point with the cruise character is, he's like an overgrown boy, he has no idea what goes in the world, he has no idea about his wife's inner life, and he's shellshocked when the real world is exposed to him. as i said before, kidman eats cruise alive in that movie. she blows him out of the water. she's all instinct and fury and he's... a nice boy... trying to be nice always with his stupid smile, or looking forlorn with his chin and sad eyes. and yes, he's saved because he was nice to someone who could help him but he also has to run back to mama who understands the dark. to me, it fits perfectly.
anyway, speaking of horror movies-- eyes wide shut is one of my favorite horror movies. the thing is i'm not too interested in the supernatural (man possessed by ghosts the little boy can see). it's the natural (power, violence, hierarchy) that scares me shitless. so i read EWS as a kind of that. nature as demon. apollonian boy meets dionysus.
ha ha, okay, anyway. kubrick's chess. not lyrical but epic.
(for melodrama, almodóvar all the way)
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change of subject: yesterday watched some 60's version of dh lawrence's "women in love". the movie itself was okay, though a bit confusing in the portrayal of gudrun and gerald's relationship. whatever. but glenda jackson! oh mmmm-mmmm! if i had a time machine, ha ha ha.