Tag: Stanley Kubrick
A bit of background: Why the screen should be the star
Whenever I see a screen used properly in a movie, I want to jump up and down while doing the Macarena. OK, maybe that verges on the impossible. But it speaks to my love of this lowly, oft-used tool – which usually takes the form of a flat surface on which images are projected behind…
Stanley Kubrick: Remembering the past, present, future, and the eternal return of the family in four films
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick may have been correct in assigning Richard Strauss to the apes and Johann Strauss to the spacemen. Standing somewhere in the middle of this evolution, I wonder which creature has it worse, the screeching primate or the cosmic amphibian. Certainly, our robotic dullard of the future could…
Robots in Cinema: Artificial Intelligence and the Moving Image
The recent release of the trailer for the new Robocop remake started me thinking about the many films that deal with notions of artificial intelligence and robotics. From Frankenstein to Transformers, the creation of consciousness (accidental or otherwise) has been a part of the popular imagination for well over a century. While many have merely…
A look back at the moving image: From Silence to CGI
There is no doubt that this is the era of the moving image. Since the 1860s, with the invention of the zoetrope, an unstoppable wave of innovation has taken this infant technology and built it into the definitive mode of communication for the twenty-first century. Now we are increasingly unlikely to go a single day…
A bizarre and mediocre ode to Stanley Kubrick
What could I possibly write about Kubrick that hasn’t been written before? Today at least… absolutely nothing. And so, in the interests of filling a blank page with some kind of Kubrick-esque blog, here is a series of hurriedly composed haikus, chronologically ordered, on the films of Stanley Kubrick. Flying Padre: An RKO-Pathe Screenliner…