(SK) Admiring the Unpredictable Mr Kubrick | June 21, 1987 | New York Times | David Rabe

ADMIRING THE UNPREDICTABLE MR. KUBRICK By DAVID RABE; David Rabe's plays include ''Hurlyburly'' and a quartet of Vietnam works - ''The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,'' ''Sticks and Bones,'' ''The Orphan'' and ''Streamers.'' He has just completed a novel, ''The Recital of the Dog.'' Published: June 21, 1987 IT WAS ABOUT EIGHT MONTHS ago when I first heard that Stanley Kubrick was making a film dealing with Vietnam, called ''Full Metal Jacket.'' Holding Mr. Kubrick's work in the high esteem that I do - and having attempted to write about the war in a number of ways and from a number of angles - I was immediately intrigued. The fact that Michael Herr, who had written ''Dispatches,'' an amazing book about the war, was involved only increased my interest. The person to whom I was speaking said the movie was based on a novel, ''The Short-Timers,'' by Gustav Hasford, and that it contained one of the scariest scenes my friend had ever read. It sounded like this material was right up Mr. Kubrick's alley. Certainly he had shaken me up a number of times. Though I cannot, without reference to a film almanac, recollect the date or where I was living at the time, the experience of first seeing Mr. Kubrick's ''Dr. Strangelove'' rushing to its conclusion is fixed in my mind. It was in a state of near hysteria that I watched the great white plumes of flowering nuclear devastation erupting in gyres one upon the other and heard the eerie, innocent music in the background, the tune being sung by innocuous voices in their sweet but dopey harmony: ''We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day.'' With the cataclysms depicted in the rather abstract beauty of their fury, the image that we had emerged from the 50's sharing as our communal nightmare totem, the mushroom cloud, appeared again and again, a kind of exploding cross when you really looked at it, the plume intersected by the light rushing out in either direction; and with the sappy, nostalgic music beneath it, a kind of cozy and ostensibly sweet, yet somehow lifeless, invitation to a universal and final rendezvous, it seemed to me some dark yet cherished longing of our hearts had been unmistakably depicted. It's from that moment that I date my awareness of Mr. Kubrick. There was a spirit at work, as distinct as the most developed novelistic voice. He seemed a man thinking rigorously and originally about the most crucial issues. What was more, he had control of a film technique flexible enough to render this theme with wit, intelligence and passion. The year, according to the film almanac, was 1964. With the use of that date I can establish my occupation and whereabouts. Having dropped out of school, I was working either as a parking lot attendant at one Philadelphia hotel or a bellhop at another. Prompted by these facts, the street onto which I strode in the aftermath of that experience emerges. It was late afternoon, the theater was in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and I could not shut up. My shock was one of recognition, for nothing I had previously seen had ever portrayed with such precision and accuracy the strange mix of inappropriate emotion, tedium and elaborate rationality that are the ingredients repetitively of our contemporary horrors. In Sterling Hayden, as General Jack Ripper, reason and logic were at a premium as he outlined the cause and effect basis upon which he had set out to start World War III. Mad he might be, but logical he was. In the latter part of the 1950's, films had delivered us a steady parade of bug-eyed, frothing crazies. But this lunatic was professorial and bureaucratic. Every word was measured, the voice confident and calm, however undeterrable. While others might fret, he was serene in the absolute plausibility of his knowledge. Only when he revealed his deepest premises, some construct to do with fluoridation, Commies, precious bodily fluids and sex, could his madness be glimpsed. But even these points he explained patiently as, step by step, he laid out the entire scheme, expecting to be understood, every thought precisely placed before he went into the bathroom and shot himself. In the B-52 headed with the bomb toward Russia, the crew knew nothing of their commanding general's arcane and personal premises. They were lost in a system of technological procedures, cut off from all access in a hermetic world of codes and passwords, like numerological adepts adhering strictly to their doctrines. Shot with a shaking hand-held camera, every angle awkward, the frame crowded, the pans were rushed and sometimes indecisive. The faces of the men inside the belly of this bomber were shot past shoulders, over knees, the angles always clumsy so that the feel was that of a documentary. They spoke almost exclusively in slogans or the jargon by which they fulfilled their functions, and every button, light bulb and switch of their procedures was shown with a mounting sense of onrushing, mechanized doom. I began then to await Mr. Kubrick's movies, looking forward to them with a special anticipation. Memory, operating out of its own prerogatives, suggests that his next film was ''Lolita,'' followed by ''Paths of Glory,'' ''2001,'' ''A Clockwork Orange,'' ''Barry Lyndon'' and ''The Shining.'' The film almanac, however, quickly amends this list with ''Fear and Desire,'' ''Killer's Kiss,'' ''The Killing'' and ''Spartacus.'' It also reorders some of my transposed chronology, informing me that both ''Paths of Glory'' and ''Lolita'' preceded ''Dr. Strangelove.''

(FMJ) Stanley Kubricks Vietnam | Sept 17, 2008 | New York Times | Francis Clines

STANLEY KUBRICK'S VIETNAM - New York Times Wednesday, September 17, 2008 By FRANCIS X. CLINES Published: June 21, 1987 LEAD: THE REASSURING THING about Stanley Kubrick is that after being deep as Yahweh in the creation of one movie for the last five years, he emerges gentle and curious on the seventh day, asking about beer commercials and envying silent film makers and recalling the pleasures of the Thalia. THE REASSURING THING about Stanley Kubrick is that after being deep as Yahweh in the creation of one movie for the last five years, he emerges gentle and curious on the seventh day, asking about beer commercials and envying silent film makers and recalling the pleasures of the Thalia. ''Have you seen those Michelob commercials?'' he asks as if they were samizdat, speaking of the 30-second spots that came uninvited with the Giant football game videos that his sister sent the eminent director all last winter from New Jersey. Then, he had no time to spare for watching anything beyond his own work in progress and a weekly fix of football. ''They're just boy-girl, night-fun, leading up to pouring the beer, all in 30 seconds, beautifully edited and photographed. Economy of statement is not something that films are noted for.'' Sunday morning at Pinewood Studios in the London suburbs seems sepulchral in the empty executive offices, as quiet as Hal's deep-space murder scene in ''2001,'' an awful setting to encounter one of a kind. But Mr. Kubrick arrives rumpled and lone as the night watchman, offers a simple hello, accepts the fact that he cannot direct the phone to work properly, and settles down to discuss movies and imagination and his own new work, much as a carpenter would feel the grain of a cabinet. It is his newest making, perchance his best or at least another in his line. ''It starts with being excited by a story and finally it's telling the story on the screen,'' he says, speaking of the process of directing. ''It goes from the most wonderful literary atmosphere to desperation. It can be as crude as standing up and writing on the back of an envelope when someone's just said something and it's 4 o'clock with the winter sun fading. You've got to shoot it and you're trying to exploit something that's just come up. It's like a quarterback calling an automatic play when he sees the defense he's up against.'' His new movie, ''Full Metal Jacket,'' a story hinged on the trauma of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War, is completed and opens in New York on Friday at neighborhood theaters. Beckton, an old 1930's-gasworks town abandoned on the Thames, has been destroyed by Mr. Kubrick's technical artists, all fiery and pocked as Hue, the Vietnamese city of the movie's climax. The 200 palm trees flown in from Spain to make Vietnam of this sceptered isle have been returned to peacetime. Out on the downs, the Parris Island cadence counting has ceased along with all the lurid, ignoble, cynical and sadly mortal motion of characters directed onto film from the mind of Stanley Kubrick. The movie is literally only hours old in Mr. Kubrick's finished, perfectionist version, and far from talking 1980's box office or 1960's jabberwocky about his personal agony through the nation's Vietnam experience, Mr. Kubrick is describing being true to the initial emotion that struck him when he first found this story. That was five years ago amid what is the hardest part of directing, he says, searching for a good tale that sustains the imagination. ''The sense of the story the first time you read it is the absolutely critical yardstick. I remember what I felt about the book, I remember what I felt in writing the script, and then I try to keep that alive in the very inappropriate circumstances that exist on a film set where you've got a hundred people standing around and nothing but particular problems, still trying to sustain a subjective sense of what it is emotionally - as well as what it is that pleases you.'' Bearded and staring carefully as a question is asked, Mr. Kubrick speaks with his right hand rubbing his brow, often glancing down, like a man reciting the confiteor or handicapping the next race. ''That first impression is the most precious thing you've got, you can never have it again - the yardstick for any judgment that you have as you get deeper and deeper into the work because making a movie is a process of going into smaller and smaller detail and finally winding up in the minutiae of how does a footstep sound on the sound track when you're remixing the film.'' No, he had no craving to make a signature movie about that war, he says. He was reading the Virginia Kirkus Review, as he usually does, looking for stirring fiction about something, anything that might promise a stunning translation to film and he came upon a novel, ''The Short-Timers.'' He read a copy. ''I reread it almost immediately and I thought, 'This is very exciting, I better think about it for a few days.' But it was immediately apparent that it was a unique, absolutely wonderful book,'' he says about the novel, written by Gustav Hasford, an ex-Marine combat correspondent whose offering resembles a memoir of the pellucid and the ravaged as much as the naked and the dead. The screenplay is by Mr. Kubrick, Mr. Hasford and Michael Herr, author of ''Dispatches,'' a memoir of the Vietnam War. ''Full Metal Jacket'' is a reference in military bureaucratese to the rifle cartridge that is the field ammunition of the basic Marine Corps fighter-killer. The movie is blue with death and madness but also characteristically balletic at times with Mr. Kubrick's forensic eye, particularly in the initial boot camp scenes where men are shaved raw for war. The chorus-type character, Private Joker, played by Matthew Modine, traverses the war diagonally, encompassing the propaganda mill of the combat correspondents and the sudden, all-hands combat duty of the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese. This is an event that shreds the jingoistic romance of the war and makes an unlikely killer of Joker. Whether critics judge the film singularly good or bad - never an easy, predictable task for them by the director's track record - at a minimum the movie has been spare and ugly and beautiful by the time its dark sweep is completed from the Marine Hymn to the singing of M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E as Mr. Kubrick's Marines stagger beyond the Tet offensive into nowhere and houselights up. Mr. Kubrick is such a loner in the film business, not only following the beat of a different drummer but more likely constructing his own drum, that it can only be purest coincidence that his movie has emerged now in the industry's sudden burst of special Vietnam films. It comes close after ''Platoon,'' the well acclaimed standout that he recently saw and liked very much, he says plainly as a fan who loved the Thalia's darkness, apparently devoid of professional envy. Mr. Kubrick shies from talking of what he hopes his movie says; he judges he was typically dubious and critical of the Vietnam War in its day, but he hardly seems the zealot-esthete now having his say about it. His worry about war in conversation is understandably technological from the man who made ''Dr. Strangelove,'' a doubt that nuclear weapons can ever be eliminated and a concern that there is too little negotiation to limit the chances of accidental missile war. Mr. Kubrick works hermitlike for years on a single picture, searching out a story, writing a script, producing and directing all the way down to, lately, the search for good foreign writers, actors and directors who might not spoil the work for him in the four main movie dubbing markets. His choice of subject matter for a new film is enough to fascinate buffs who have bounded with him across 30 eclectic years from ''Paths of Glory'' to ''Spartacus,'' from ''Lolita'' to ''Dr. Strangelove,'' from ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' to ''A Clockwork Orange,'' from ''Barry Lyndon'' to ''The Shining.'' ''I'm happy with the picture,'' he says in this period of pause when he will catch up on 18 months of missed movies, good and bad, and read as ever with the hope of finding another story. ''My films have all had varying critical opinion and it's always been subsequent critical reaction that settles the scores.'' He talks of that more in puzzlement than vindication. ''The only thing I can think of is that everybody's always expecting the last movie again, and they're sometimes angry - I mean some critics - often put off because they're expecting something else.'' He talks of trusting the ''more democratric intelligence'' of the public, a lesson he particularly learned after ''2001'': ''People who didn't have the responsibility of having to explain it or formulate clear statements about it two hours after they saw the film weren't troubled.'' At age 58, Mr. Kubrick has been involved in making movies for 35 years, a physician's son who became a relative adventurer from the Bronx, dropping from formal education to become a photographer for Look magazine, then moving to motion pictures where he has mastered the basic phases from writing to financing and reigns as a bookish autodidact of unpredictable curiosities. He dislikes Los Angeles, feels New York is technically limited for film making and so finds London the place to work and raise his family in satisfying privacy. ''Just keep at it,'' he says of his work habit of plunging into the making of each film, analyzing each approaching day's move well into the night before, much like the masters of Mr. Kubrick's beloved avocation, chess. ''Chess is an analogy - it is a series of steps that you take one at a time and it's balancing resources against the problem, which in chess is time and in movies is time and money,'' he says. Chess is less creative for him but teaches him not to get carried away with impulsive first ideas. ''I've found over the long period of time which it takes to make a movie that your own sense of whether you think it's good or bad or how happy you are at a particular time is very unimportant, that the ideas just come and sometimes they seem to come out of some place that's got nothing to do with how you feel.'' Mr. Kubrick talks of movies not as Ahab stalks the whale but as a physicist might toss and catch Newton's apple. ''I have a feeling that no one has yet really found the way to tell a story to utilize the greatest potential that films have,'' he says. ''I think the silent movies come closest to it because they weren't trapped in having to present a scene which was essentially a stage type of scene; movies consist of little play scenes.'' He sounds gentle toned, as if he were not discussing the heart of his existence. ''There's a a gap between the guys who can actually write a story and someone who can visualize it, and that's a big gap because even the directors who write, like Woody Allen and Bergman, are very much bound up in the conventions of the stage.'' As he talks, Mr. Kubrick suddenly puts his envy of the silents on a track parallel with his curiosity about the 30-second Michelob spots. ''The best TV commercials create a tremendously vivid sense of a mood, of a complex presentation of something.'' ''Some combination of the two might work,'' Mr. Kubrick says, braiding a fantasy that seems to twirl somewhere within. ''I have a feeling that no one has begun to do what a movie could really do.'' His voice has a casual, New York mood, but his eyes reflect a terrible determination. The director pictures a grainy old fade-in from the silents and he invents a title card: ''Joe's cousin, Bill.'' ''And you just see a shot of Bill doing something,'' he says as a listener lingers wishing that Stanley Kubrick would flesh out Bill. But Bill ceases to exist, with no time for mourning in the run of ideas, as Mr. Kubrick lovingly talks of ''economy of structural statement, the nearest to silent film.'' This is a quality he savored in the Vietnam book in his first reaction, he recalls, and one that in the film he has sought to transfer ''quite literally because the dialogue is so almost poetic in its carved-out, stark quality.'' But this movie is done, and Mr. Kubrick seems not so much depleted or doubting as waiting for the process to turn in his mind all over again, waiting for a story. ''It's the most difficult thing,'' he says, ''A good story is a miraculous discovery.'' Even then he sounds more grateful than plaintive. ''The structure making a movie imposes on your life when you're doing it again feels like it felt each time before,'' Mr. Kubrick says, smiling. ''So there is a kind of wonderful suggestive timelessness about the structure. I'm doing exactly the same as I was doing when I was 18 and making my first movie. It frees you from any other sense of time.''

(FMJ) Inside the Jacket | July 5, 1987 | New York Times | Janet Maslin

FILM VIEW; INSIDE THE 'JACKET': ALL KUBRICK By JANET MASLIN Published: July 5, 1987 STANLEY KUBRICK'S ''FULL METAL JACKET'' establishes its grip on the viewer's attention instantaneously, with an opening scene in which young recruits are shorn by an off-screen Marine Corps barber, while a corny, lulling song is heard in the background (''Kiss me goodbye and write me when I'm gone/Goodbye sweetheart, hello Vietnam''). The scene would be ordinary, even a cliche, were it not for the look on the young men's faces. In their eyes we see absolutely nothing: no apprehension, no bravado, not even blind obedience, only the emptiness of clay ready to be molded. The sense of sheer animal helplessness, conveyed with the seeping white light, uncluttered frames and daunting angles of which Mr. Kubrick is a master, is a shock. It's also a challenge to the audience to remain mindful of these men's humanity, despite the brutal and dehumanizing ordeal to which they will be subjected. This opening scene is something else as well: It's an announcement of the cool, merciless perspective of Stanley Kubrick, whose directorial distance from the inner workings of his characters has always been extraordinary. In ''Full Metal Jacket,'' that distance allows Mr. Kubrick to take a frighteningly clinical view of the process by which fighting men are molded. He presents the gradual and deliberate assault on individuality and privacy that is basic training; the connections between sex and aggression; the combat soldier's ultimate and even stirring realization that he has left his better nature far behind him. Mr. Kubrick's vision of this process is infinitely more troubling and singular than the one set forth in Oliver Stone's ''Platoon.'' Comparisons between these two films are as specious as they are inevitable, for their directors appear to have aimed for very different effects. But ''Platoon,'' as the film that has most definitively brought the Vietnam experience home for moviegoing America, stands as a kind of box-office landmark, and ''Full Metal Jacket'' appears at least superficially to cover similar terrain. Harrowing as both of these films are, their effects are very different. ''Platoon'' conveys the day-to-day physical experience of men at war with exceptional realism, while ''Full Metal Jacket'' has a more abstract and typically (for Mr. Kubrick) elliptical style. While ''Platoon'' develops a relatively conventional narrative, ''Full Metal Jacket'' has a separate prologue (as ''2001'' did) and a less linear structure in which storytelling is less central than the distinct, indelible images Mr. Kubrick has created. If ''Platoon'' accompanies its brutal realism with the ennobling sounds of Samuel Barber's ''Adagio for Strings,'' ''Full Metal Jacket'' takes the opposite tack. It scores the sharply poetic imagery to be found here with the most soulless and banal American popular songs imaginable, from ''These Boots Are Made for Walking'' to ''Surfin' Bird'' (Mr. Kubrick, with his use of a children's song in the film's last scene, even manages the kind of heavy irony that would sink anyone else, and that in his hands becomes bone-chilling.) Perhaps most important, ''Platoon'' is a film that anticipates and manipulates every response that its audience has. ''Full Metal Jacket,'' while no less wrenching, allows no easy catharsis, no comfortable understanding. In that, it has more in common with Mr. Kubrick's own work than it does with any other film about the Vietnam War. It's a mistake to look to Mr. Kubrick's films for easily encapsulated attitudes; even his earlier war film ''Paths of Glory'' (1957) was strikingly anomalous for its time. ''The Shining'' is no ordinary horror film, any more than ''2001'' is a simple, reductive vision of life in space. Mr. Kubrick, in adapting material as varied as Anthony Burgess's ''Clockwork Orange,'' Stephen King's ''Shining,'' Thackeray's ''Barry Lyndon,'' Nabokov's ''Lolita,'' Terry Southern's ''Dr. Strangelove'' and now Gustav Hasford's ''Short-Timers,'' the novel on which his new film is based, has always extracted and shaped elements from these books into films that are never slavishly faithful to their sources. What finally matters, in his films, is less their identifiable ideas than their vast and genuine staying power. The pure mystery of his monolith (in ''2001''), the stark, empty corridors of his haunted hotel (in ''The Shining,''), the exquisite and ironic perfection of his 18th-century landscapes (in ''Barry Lyndon'') are as elusive as they are unforgettable. The basic training episode in ''Full Metal Jacket'' will have that same long-lasting impact, as will the extended combat sequence, near the film's end, that culminates in a transcendent image of war and its horror. In between, briefly, the film (co-written by Michael Herr, Mr. Hasford and Mr. Kubrick) takes a journalistic tone that only underscores how much more haunting Mr. Kubrick's work is when he avoids the verbal and the literal. When American soldiers try to explain their feelings about the Vietnamese people, the war itself, even the landscape (it's a land without horses, the Texan nicknamed Cowboy complains), they are only echoing what we already know. But when Mr. Kubrick films a group of soldiers gathered around a writhing prisoner, in the ruins of a structure that's as much like a temple as a military headquarters, with the full import of their role made clear to all of them, he creates a visual epiphany that no viewer could forget, and no combat journalist could easily equal. Even more involving, in its way, is the basic training episode that serves as a prelude to the events in Vietnam. Basic training, with its grueling workouts and its colorfully obscene invective, is as basic a convention as the war film has; we've all seen this before. But we haven't seen it done as it's done here. Mr. Kubrick devotes about 45 relentless minutes to a process that is as overwhelming for the audience as it must be for the recruits. And in doing that, he also takes care to maintain the viewer's critical distance. So the audience can experience what is being done to these men and think about it, too: about the way the drill sergeant (played by Lee Ermey, himself a former Marine sergeant and a man with extraordinary lungs) deliberately violates every racial, sexual and personal taboo as he hectors his men, infantilizing them (he makes them sleep holding their rifles, march holding their genitals) so as to reconstruct them along different lines. The title refers to a shell casing, a kind of model for the tough, hollow fighter who will emerge from this ordeal; it's also a reference to the misfit in the group (a figure of astonishingly real anguish, as played by Vincent D'Onofrio) for whom this training most conspicuously backfires. No one who sees ''Full Metal Jacket'' will easily put the film's last glimpse of Mr. D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Mr. Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind. A caller has pointed out that Eliot Ness was not, as I inadvertently suggested two weeks ago, actually approached for help by the woman struggling with her baby carriage in that film's train station scene. As he so neatly put it, ''A true hero doesn't have to be asked.''