criterionforum.org

I don't think so. Maybe Barry Lyndon, but Dr. Strangelove is Sony and Criterion just did another print run of it (it was out of stock everywhere a couple months ago.)

I doubt many people are going to go out picking up Barry Lyndon so I'm certain it's safe. I love the film to pieces but it's doesn't have the same pop culture relevance that The Shining or A Clockwork Orange do.

From the outskirts it looks as Eyes Wide Shut is staying with Warner sadly, being one of my favorite films and that needing a much higher picture quality and more extras.


I'll echo that Lyndon home video rights will be kept put.

Jack Kubrick wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2019 8:42 pm From the outskirts it looks as Eyes Wide Shut is staying with Warner sadly, being one of my favorite films and that needing a much higher picture quality and more extras.


I'll echo that Lyndon home video rights will be kept put.

If Eyes Wide Shut is announced at this point, it will surely be a UHD or a 4k remastered Blu at the very least. So, I don't think we have to worry about picture quality.

Hmmm. The announcement is slated for Thursday. Criterion is going to reveal Spine #1000 this week.

Maybe I’m wrong. That Kubrick box looks somewhat like the Bergman box, doesn’t it?

](*,) ](*,) ](*,) ](*,)

They better be in the correct aspect ratios.

Site just went up. 4K UHDs of Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut plus bonus disc with HD-remastered A Life in Pictures and a 200-page book.






Just kidding, it's just a webstore with a bunch of tacky t-shirts based on Kubrick films with a custom box.

Wow can't believe there's no Eyes Wide Shut t-shirt SMDH.

FlickeringWindow wrote: Thu Jul 25, 2019 1:11 pmJust kidding, it's just a webstore with a bunch of tacky t-shirts based on Kubrick films with a custom box.

I assume the custom box is modelled after the one SK commissioned from a box storage company as described in Jon Ronson's Stanley Kubrick's Boxes doc?

New info on early 50s screenwriting by Kubrick:
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/fea ... rly-works/

Kubrick wanted to film Dr Zhivago:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/n ... vie-rights

Upcoming book about Kubrick as producer:
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/ ... 1978814875

Stefan Andersson wrote: Tue Nov 10, 2020 12:22 pm Kubrick wanted to film Dr Zhivago:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/n ... ovie-right

I'm really shocked that this is the first time we're learning this (Douglas only died this year) considering the film did get made and was by most metrics a hit. Though I love the majority of Kubrick's work and will be in the minority here, I'm not overly enthusiastic for Barry Lyndon despite my anecdotal observation on the internet of its reputation having grown over the decades. I do really like Lean's film version of Dr. Zhivago though, so I don't lament too much that this didn't play out this way. On the other hand, Kubrick was doing some of his best work during this period so this might have been incredible.

The 4K Blu is Full Metal Jacket is rather impressive. I have an odd history with that one, from first seeing it at a very young age, transfixed by the first half. I remember being bummed out a few times catching it on cable that I missed it, but right around my early 20's I watched it the whole way through and understood where the two sides meet. Hearing that music towards the end is still un-nerving 30-odd years later.

Over time I've come to think the second half works far better than the first part. The anti-narrative drop-in to somewhat bland, shielded, unknowable characters, on a mission without an impetus or earned build-up of motivation, feels appropriate for a film about Vietnam in all its rudderless individualized disorientation.

They both work for me, but you could definitely have made a better two-hour movie of the latter half. That said, for me the first half feels as complete a story that could be told for the time it's told in. Once you start stretching that out, the thread would come apart and it would just either wind up being cumbersome and/or schmaltzy.

I used to think the first half is a lot better than the second, and that the film as a whole suffers from that, because as a general rule it's better for a narrative film to have a superior second half than vice versa. I was also of the opinion that the two halves are almost totally disconnected from one another, and that this too damages the film's overall effect.

I rewatched the film recently, and I now politely but firmly disagree with myself.

Jay Cocks on the commentary track is a bit grating, with his mispronunciation of "Vietnam" and R. Lee Ermey's name.

J M Powell wrote: Wed Feb 10, 2021 1:35 pm I used to think the first half is a lot better than the second, and that the film as a whole suffers from that, because as a general rule it's better for a narrative film to have a superior second half than vice versa. I was also of the opinion that the two halves are almost totally disconnected from one another, and that this too damages the film's overall effect.

I rewatched the film recently, and I now politely but firmly disagree with myself.

While it's common to refer to the "two halves" of Full Metal Jacket (as numerous posters have done in this thread), I see the film as a three-parter, or three acts, with the more scattershot second act being the series of vignettes showing what life is like for these soldiers in Vietnam. Where the third act begins, and re-grounds the film, is the mission where the soldiers encounter the sniper. This third section plays all the way through as it's own story much like the first section of the film... and, of course, comments ironically on that first section by contrasting the young Vietnamese sniper with the delusional Marines-trained snipers Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman extolled by Sgt. Hartman. I think the film's structure appears stronger when understanding that the middle, looser section is a reprieve from the two longer sections on either side.

Roger Ryan wrote: Tue Feb 16, 2021 5:33 pm While it's common to refer to the "two halves" of Full Metal Jacket (as numerous posters have done in this thread), I see the film as a three-parter, or three acts, with the more scattershot second act being the series of vignettes showing what life is like for these soldiers in Vietnam. Where the third act begins, and re-grounds the film, is the mission where the soldiers encounter the sniper. This third section plays all the way through as it's own story much like the first section of the film... and, of course, comments ironically on that first section by contrasting the young Vietnamese sniper with the delusional Marines-trained snipers Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman extolled by Sgt. Hartman. I think the film's structure appears stronger when understanding that the middle, looser section is a reprieve from the two longer sections on either side.

Yes, certainly, I agree.

One theme, I think, of this film is the return of the repressed. (It's hardly the only Kubrick film to take up this theme, and it's a dominant theme in all three of his final features.) What you call the second act is riddled with moments, images, lines of dialgoue, etc., in which the traumatic content of the first act threatens to become manifest; and, in what I've come to see as the film's greatest structual achievement, even in the third act, when a less mature talent probably would have re-manifested that content, instead the content is fully re-staged without ever re-manifesting.

Kubrick thought a great deal about narrative structure throughout his career, in his typically cerebral and analytic fashion. I think many of his films have narrative structures that by all rights just shouldn't work, and that probably wouldn't work if his genre films really were the pure genre exercises that some viewers (including that younger me I mentioned) mistake them for. But they do work, without exception.

Hans Zimmer talked on Alec Baldwin’s podcast about being hired to do FMJ “when he was 18” (which would have meant production started on it in 1975 or 6), but being fired from it and being asked later by Stanley if he could assist Vivian with it which Zimmer turned down.

Variety on Fear and Desire screening in Venice, Italy, 1952:
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/stan ... 235287953/

In honor of his passing just over 30 years ago, I highly recommend this wonderful article on Full Metal Jacket co-writer Gustav Hasford. It was written by Grover Lewis, whose Rolling Stone article on the production of The Last Picture Show is essential reading, too

Tony Zierra, who made Filmworker about Leon Vitali, discusses his upcoming Eyes Wide Shut documentary, SK13. The doc was set to play at Cannes last year but Zierra says it was pulled because Tom Cruise's presence at Cannes - implying the doc would be too uncomfortable or unflattering for Cruise's image so the decision was made to just avoid the potential headache.

Anyway, the real big news about the doc is that Zierra claims that there was a single shot that he observed in EWS when it first premiered in 1999, but the shot was removed when he saw the film again shortly after. (The shot is supposedly nothing already known about by Kubrick fans, i.e. the cameraman seen in a reflection which was later removed from the DVD). Zierra says the shot is pivotal to understanding the film, but that it wouldn't make sense out of context and clearly he doesn't want to give up his big trump card before the doc is released, understandably. He also says he's talked to Vitali and many others in the Kubrick circle about this and implies that they're clearly aware of such changes to the film.

But according to Zierra here, the doc will focus on a lot of different aspects of EWS and Kubrick generally. Zierra seems to be implying that the "final cut" of EWS screened for execs and Cruise/Kidman just before K died was (as is obvious despite WB's spin) far from final, and/or that there were more alterations made before or after the premiere which have been unremarked upon or unknown to this point. But Zierra is VERY cryptic and cagey in this interview, to the point that I wonder just how explosive this new doc could possibly be. (Either that or it's all just hype and exaggeration, but I tend to find Zierra credible thus far). Anyway, thought this was very interesting but I guess we'll have to wait and see.