Café Cinema: 1895 - 1999

All non-Nolan related film, tv, and streaming discussions.
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Single most fantastic thing I held in my hands. Couldn't afford the latest Kubrick Blu-ray set (I already have most of his movies individually dou) but this was simply a must. Incredible stuff inside.

Details: http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalog ... chives.htm
Special features

Part 1 features 800 film stills scanned directly from the original prints and interpositives
Part 2 presents about 800 items from the archives, most of which have never been published before
essays by Kubrick scholars Gene D. Phillips, Michel Ciment, and Rodney Hill
selected articles and essays, including interviews with and essays by Stanley Kubrick
illustrated Kubrick chronology
audio CD featuring a 70-minute 1966 interview of Stanley Kubrick by Jeremy Bernstein

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Yeah, I have this. Fascinating stuff.

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Bought it for my brother for Christmas. Terrific book. Chickens out on opening with shots from Fear and Desire though. ;)

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I recently watched Nosferatu in preparation for Herzog's, and was so taken with it I decided to write a review and analysis for my "classics" series on my site. Had a blast with this one.
Nosferatu (1922)-

The original German title reads Nosferatu eine Symphonie des Grauens , which translates to Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Axing the sub-head of the title makes sense for a cleaner, harder hitting name on a poster, but the original communicates something essential and true. Nosferatu is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of horror cinema, embedding a genre with the narrative, thematic, and visual ideas that will come to define it. It is a horror opera on the most epic of scales, with a minimalist story that’s more elemental than narrative. Henrik Galeen’s screenplay collaborates with the shadowy alcoves of folklore, with simple straightforward storytelling carrying an undercurrent of depth. No scene is wasted, with many suggesting a broader supernatural universe than the frame of Count Orlok’s tale. Patrons inside an inn warn Hutter of werewolves, and Murnau cuts to (what appears to be) a devilish hyena stalking a nighttime forest. What is the nature of this beast? The film does not say, but the hint is enough.


Like 2001 established for movies the issues of man versus machine, free will, God, and our place in the universe, all with an unblinking stare, Nosferatu unsuspectingly started as many traditions. Anyone who has watched a supernatural themed horror movie in the last 40 years will recognize tropes Nosferatu started or helped solidify. Horror movies often show a primary character finding a journal or (sometimes ancient) book that describes the otherworldly evil that will inevitably descend. The character, usually sharing a reality meant to be synonymous with our own, dismisses the writings as lunatic ravings. Often, they laugh. Equally as often, they later wish they didn’t. It’s amusing then, that a movie released in 1922 might have been the first film in the history of cinema to introduce this. At the same inn Hutter is warned of werewolves, he finds a book descriptively detailing all there is to know of vampires. We learn, for example, that vampires must carry with them, and live in, the tainted dirt of the Black Death. After reading, he gives out a full-bellied hearty laugh only to then literally throw the book onto the ground. What hogwash! What an odd thing this scene became a horror staple.


Murnau is fearless and treats his material without an ounce of camp (or at least outside what was normal for silent cinema, which begs actors for the louder style of theatrical performance). What should seem silly is hell personified on the cinema screen, and his reverence for mythology gives us no other option. We must treat the vampire, and so then the terror he brings, with seriousness. The vision on display is staggering. The stylings of German Expressionism, with its long contorted shadows and disfigured clashing shapes, has never found a more complimentary subject than the vampire. A terrifying, bone-shaking masterpiece.

A+

Full Review and Analysis
http://themetaplex.com/reviews/2015/nos ... d-analysis

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Murnau hits overdrive mode with Sunrise, IMO. Love that film.

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I'm fairly certain Stanley Kubrick knew something that we regular people, audience members, can't even imagine. Eyes Wide Shut is like an invitation to a sacred ritual with the higher ups... magical, dark, thought provoking, unforgettable experience riddled with symbolism and new-millennial ideas. In a way I always felt it's his sequel to 2001, minus the starchild finale... like this is our society, in mirror darkly, right now.

Edit: Now would someone even try to explain this extreme contradiction?
Stanley Kubrick regarded Eyes Wide Shut as a “piece of shit” that had been ruined by the interference of its A-list stars, a friend of the director claimed this week. The character actor R Lee Ermey starred in Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket and remained in close contact with the director until his death in March 1999. He described the film-maker as a “shy, timid” man who was effectively bullied by his stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

“Stanley called me about two weeks before he died,” Ermey told Radar Online. “We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him – exactly the words he used.”
and
When asked about Ermey’s comments, Todd Field responded:

“Probably the polite thing I would say is “no comment,” but the truth is is that—let’s put it this way, you’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient, and prostate themselves at the feet of a director. Stanley was absolutely thrilled with the film. He was still working on the film when he died. And he probably died because he finally relaxed. But it was one of the happiest weekends of his life, right before he died, after he had shown the first cut to Terry Semel and Tom and to Nicole. And he would have kept working on it like he did on all of his films. But I know that, from people around him, personally, my partner, who was his assistant for thirty years, and—I thought about R. Lee Ermey for In the Bedroom, and I talked to Stanley a lot about that film. And all I can say is Stanley was adamant that I shouldn’t work with him for all kinds of reasons, which I won’t get into because there’s no reason to do that to anyone, even if they’ve said slanderous things that are, by the way, I know are completely untrue—"
Why would Ermey say such a thing? Kubrick was well known for detaching from their former actors after filming.

More important question, is this really the final cut of EWS?
More on that here: http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id79.html

There's also this...

Who is misterious girl behind the mask? Mandy, or... (10:00)
More on that here: http://www.collativelearning.com/mybb_1 ... p?tid=1474

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Another excellent article on Eyes Wide Shut...
In the introduction to Kubrick: The Definitive Collection, Martin Scorsese writes:

If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones) you'll see that his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since.
http://nofilmschool.com/2014/07/is-eyes ... -us-to-see

After couple of hours, reading through several articles on his editing process and the 'final' state of EWS after that first internal screening... I'm convinced it would've been 20 minutes shorter, tops. Nothing added, only cut, and probably from the infamous Sydney Pollack scene, which I didn't mind.

***

Pollack on Kubrick:

http://www.gwhatchet.com/2004/04/08/recalling-kubrick/

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I rather like EWS. I imagine the old fella was getting himself into some Lynch. Fantastically mysterious and uncomfortably erotic.
I wish SKub told Kidman to speak a little faster though.

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