1924's Best Movies: 100 Years Later

I raise my eyebrow at the (male, always) fans who praise Kubrick exclusively on those terms. For a certain kind of fan, a director is great because he (male, always) shows his work.

Well yeah, there's Kubrick and then there's Villeneuve

That's common with any director with that kind of visual flair, whether it's Kubrick, Scorsese, Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson - they draw a lot of fans who are just into those superficial pleasures. Life on the Record just did a podcast on the 50th anniversary of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (FWIW, one of my absolute favorites, certainly my favorite album of that year), and she makes a brief comment that she's averse to long guitar solos, associating it with some phallic impulse among men. I can see someone making a similar comment on long camera moves, specifically long Steadicam shots that snake through long hallways and corridors, etc, not just for the physical aspects of that work but as some kind of one-upmanship meant to floor the audience.

They may be true of how some people view Kubrick's work, but I don't think that's actually what he's doing. I think Christopher Frayling called Kubrick "relentlessly logical" (IIRC as part of his explanation as to why Kubrick drove Ken Adams to a nervous breakdown - should be on the Criterion extras for Barry Lyndon) and that feels like a pretty perfect description of Kubrick's methods - he doesn't do anything unless he's got a solid rationale behind it. At least to me, everything he does stylistically is an integral part of his worldview in any given film.

Barry Lyndon can be a beautiful film, but it's also very unsettling. I always felt like the tragedy behind the climax and ending is how someone finds it in himself to remain merciful only to find that the world is anything but. A lot of the twists and turns of Barry's fortunes throughout the film seem rooted in his warmth and decency and whether they're ultimately to his advantage or whether they make him that much more vulnerable to being knocked down. My favorite moment is when he knowingly drops his guard and puts everything on the line at the beginning of a dangerous mission, leaving himself completely at the mercy of fate or really one fellow human being. (A lot like the climax in many ways.) I get knocked out by the film's beauty, either as an epic painting come to life or as something akin to time travel where you see a long-past era as if it was happening now, but a lot of that beauty is tied to how straitjacketed this world seems to be, from the clothing, makeup and ornate decor to the social mores and customs that seem kind of cruel and dehumanizing. That's in so much of the picture and it can look suffocating. That feels very fitting given Barry's path in life and how he's at heart a beautiful human being who's navigating a pretty treacherous world that has made its cruelty acceptable, a part of how people are expected to live and thrive.

*That may be true

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Think I voted Léger or Sjöström just to shake things up a bit, though this is clearest case where voting Keaton would be a total no-brainer

It's a delight to watch Sherlock, Jr. blow away my students.

I'm not going to vote since I've only seen the two Keatons but Sherlock Jr. did blow my mind when I saw it for the first time last year. I was not at all expecting anything like this in a movie from the 1920s.

Going through the Brussels 12 and just finished The Last Laugh... wow

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