"A Kind of Awed Testimonial to the Power of Madness"

"Kubrick wanted to shoot in New York, but no sound stage was big enough for the Pentagon war room, where much of the film is set, so he went back to England, where he had shot his previous film, 'Lolita' (he never really returned to the United States). Almost the entire film was shot at Shepperton Studios, outside London, where Ken Adam, the brilliant production designer on several of the Bond films, created the war room as a monster a hundred and thirty feet long, a hundred feet wide, and thirty-five feet high. In the center, the President and his advisers sit at an enormous circular table. Kubrick and Adam wanted to suggest a slightly loony forum, a place where furious debates over the future of existence would take place. An atmosphere of science-fiction irreality would be punctuated by preposterous intrusions of everyday life: the petulance of the President; his wheedling conversations on the telephone with Kissoff, the Soviet Premier; the squabbles, tantrums, and jockeying for position among diplomats and military men; the petty human ego struggling for precedence right up to the moment of apocalypse."


David Denby at The New Yorker marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

"As If in a Careful Dance with Its Audience"

"Wandering through the exhibit, one is reminded of the filmmaker's beloved tracking shots, which accompany protagonists through trenches, corridors and hedges, influenced by filmmaker Max Ophüls, whose death, the exhibit notes, Kubrick memorialized on the set of 1957's Paths of Glory. Intensified by the filmmaker's fondness for wide-angle lenses, they emphasize the singular travels of his protagonists moving through time and space."

Doug Cummings in the LA Weekly reviews "Stanley Kubrick" at LACMA.

"Literally Confronting Themselves"

"Unseen for decades, it started to surface at festivals and revival theaters in the 1990s, at which point one especially scathing assessment declared it 'a bumbling, amateur film exercise, written by a failed poet, crewed by a few friends, and a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.'
"The source of that harsh judgment? Kubrick himself."

Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times looks back to Stanley Kubrick's first movie, Fear and Desire.

A Bit of the Old Ultraviolence

"For Burgess, and the character of the prison chaplain, it's a matter of liberty to choose between good and evil, wherever it takes us: the author claims to have sickened himself by having to depict such garish atrocities to forge his argument. Kubrick talked instead about how Alex 'represents the id, the savage repressed side of our nature which guiltlessly enjoys the pleasures of rape', a reading for which the director had to find rampant and joyful stylistic expression. This emphasis leaves the film open to attack on, above all, feminist grounds: it revels in what are ecstatic fantasies of the released id for men only, with women as titillating props."

In The Telegraph, Tim Robey marks the fortieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

The Sentinel

Gerald Jonas in The New York Times reports the death of writer Arthur C. Clarke.

"To Sap and Impurify All of Our Precious Bodily Fluids"

As the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California begins to fluoridate the water for eighteen million people, Mike Anton in the Los Angeles Times reports from the frontlines of the suprisingly continuing anti-fluoridation movement.

A Real Horrorshow

"Kubrick even suggests that this is a happy outcome: better an authentic psychopath than a conditioned, and therefore inauthentic, goody-goody. Authenticity and self-direction are thus made to be the highest goods, regardless of how they are expressed. And this, at least in Britain, has become a prevailing orthodoxy among the young. If, as I have done, you ask the aggressive young drunks who congregate by the thousand in every British town or city on a Saturday night why they do so, or British soccer fans why they conduct themselves so menacingly, they will reply that they are expressing themselves, as if there were nothing further to be said on the matter."

In City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple looks back on Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.