I may get killed for this. I know there are several friends who may never speak to me again. Coming home to find red paint splashed on my front door is not out of the question if I go forward with this, but hell, the meek don’t inherit squat, so here goes.
I hate Stanley Kubrick.
But he's made some films that just didn't work for me. Films that were too calculating, too cold, too unemotional.
Barry Lyndon? Ah, yes. The f 0.7 lens that Kubrick "developed" so he could shoot by candlelight. Which is nonsense because Kubrick didn't develop anything. He wanted a lens that fast, found some still photography lenses that met his needs and turned them over to an optical engineer who then adapted the glass to work with a 35mm motion picture camera.
That is great, but how does that help the movie? Has any human being on Earth ever walked out of a film saying "hey, that movie was boring as shit and Ryan O'Neill's part might as well have been played by a 2x4 with a wig stapled to it, but did you see that they used real fucking candlelight! Wow!"
The Shining, based on the classic horror potboiler by Stephen King, is (to me) an utter failure. Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrence is crazy at the start of the movie, and crazy at the end of the movie. The only character development is that he’s found himself an axe to wield. Shelly Duvall’s Wendy is a useless, insipid dolt utterly unworthy of our sympathy. If a viewer doesn't care what happens to her and her creepy, annoying kid, what reason is there to watch the movie?
His next film was Full Metal Jacket, which begs the question, why did Kubrick feel the need to wait seven years between movies? Are his movies that amazing, that groundbreaking that society can only handle one every decade or so lest an overabundance of Kubrick’s vision topple the world order?
I liked Full Metal Jacket when I saw it, but I’m pretty sure that was peer pressure. I know I liked R. Lee Ermy in it, that dude rocked the house. But seeing the film again recently it just did little for me. In saw it for what it is: overwrought and pretentious as hell. All that slow-mo of people getting shot, their screams of agony reduced to low growls, give me a break.
Eyes Wide Shut? Barf. There were moments in that movie that I honestly thought I was watching a student film. And a bad one at that.
So I'm not a fan of some of his work. But is that any reason to hate a man?
So it's not the reason I hate Kubrick.
I hate Kubrick for the way he screwed Jim Thompson.
For those who may not know, Jim Thompson was an American crime writer from the 50’s who crafted some of the most brilliant pulp fiction in history. Don’t believe me? Read The Killer Inside Me or The Getaway. Getaway contains what may be the most horrifically visceral scenes in all of crime literature, a scene so upsetting it is almost unreadable.
Desperate for cash, Thompson continued to work with Kubrick and was burned to a lesser degree on Paths of Glory, receiving third billing behind Kubrick and Calder Willingham despite a pre-existing contract ensuring that he would receive top screenplay credit.
So yeah, Kubrick hosed one of America’s greatest writers. He wasn’t the first and wasn’t the last to mess with Thompson, but the filmmaker so many hold up as a paragon of cinematic virtue actually turns out to be just another ego-maniacal, petty Hollywood scumbag.
And it is for Jim Thompson, may he rest in peace, that my heart burns with hatred for the “great” Stanley K.
Though I won’t turn down an opportunity to watch Dr. Strangelove. Freaking LOVE that movie.