Tag: Stanley Kubrick

Max’s Drive-In Movie – A Clockwork Orange

This movie changed me when I was a teenager. It made me realize the power that a movie can have. Just a few movies have moved me like that, and this was one of them. Platoon and Full Metal Jacket were two others. I had seen violence before on the screen but this was realistic and brutal…especially when you are a very young guy (too young to watch this) viewing it for the first time. I had to rethink many things after seeing it.

I love the soundtrack, especially the music performed on a Moog synthesizer, which set the tone for the film. I’m not giving a synopsis of the movie…there are plenty of books and internet sites doing that… but a movie that will change you does its job and more. This film was directed by the great Stanley Kubrick and you know it’s his movie within 30 seconds of the intro. 

There is a story about a frog and a scorpion, which I relate to this movie. It goes like this. A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, they would both drown. Considering this, the frog agrees, but midway across the river, the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When the frog asks the scorpion why, the scorpion replies that it is in its nature to do so.

This movie runs the gamut…cruelty, horror, the absurd, violence, pity, and justice. In my opinion, this movie shows that evil exists in all of us and what happens if we let it take over. Also, I think the movie shows you that no one can change someone’s nature no matter what drugs or treatment you may give them outside of a lobotomy. Treatment and drugs may slow them down and help but their nature is not going to change. They will at least have to keep fighting it every day. 

In the end, A Clockwork Orange challenges viewers to consider human freedom and the ethics of “curing” people against their will. This movie has been analyzed to death and rightly so. It could have only been made in the period it was made. I can’t imagine this movie coming out now…although I wish more modern filmmakers would take chances.

The scene that stick with me are the record shop scene, the Billy Boy gang fight, Singing in the Rain, and of course the eye scene… The record shop scene was filmed in the Chelsea Drugstore… I would love to have a room like that place. Very 60’s-70s futuristic…immortalized in the Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”…The building is now sadly a McDonalds…modern progress?

Malcolm McDowell as Alex was excellent in this movie along with his droogs Pete (Michael Tarn), Georgie (James Marcus), and Dim (Warren Clarke). 

Plot from IMDB

Alex DeLarge is an “ultraviolent” youth in futuristic Britain. As with all luck, his eventually runs out and he’s arrested and convicted of murder. While in prison, Alex learns of an experimental program in which convicts are programmed to detest violence. If he goes through the program, his sentence will be reduced and he will be back on the streets sooner than expected. But Alex’s ordeals are far from over once he hits the streets of Britain.

The cool car is an Adams Probe 16 AB/4 that was referred to as a Durango 95 in the film has been restored…

The Record Shop (Chelsea Drugstore)

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Adams Probe 16 AB/4

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Max’s Drive-In Movie – The Shining

The Shining

Jack Nicholson on Stanley Kubrick: Everyone pretty much acknowledges that he’s the man and I still feel that underates him. 

This movie keeps you coming back. If you ask 15 people on what the movie meant…you would get 15 different answers. The movie is so much more than the quoted lines like REDRUM and Here’s Johnny! Every time I watch it I get something different out of it. This won’t be the last Kubrick movie I feature on here. 

In 2016 or so…we saw this movie on the big screen on Halloween and it changed the movie completely for me. It made me appreciate it more than I did and that is saying a lot. The film drips with ambiguity. The Shining has to be one of the most dissected movies ever filmed. The cast was absolutely perfect. I also connect to the movie in different ways. It was released in 1980 and they filmed it in 1978 and 1979 and the hotel reminds me of that time so well.

Stanley Kubrick directed this movie and we see Jack Torrance slowly go insane and the drama builds throughout. There are no wasted scenes in The Shining…each scene has a purpose and it’s not wasted. The scenes are hard to explain. There is an open space of silence in many of them so you focus on what’s going on. The bathroom scene with Jack and Grady is careful and deliberate. Nothing else matters in the story except right now in each scene. 

Stephen King wrote the book but did not like Kubrick’s interpretation of it. Usually 9/10 times I’m a book guy…on this movie/book, I’m not. I liked Stanley’s vision for the movie over the book. Kubrick didn’t explain everything to you and it’s stronger because of that. You also get isolation, madness, and the supernatural, leaving viewers with many questions about the true nature of the Overlook Hotel.

I have read complaints about Nicholson’s performance being too far over the top.  I totally enjoyed his performance and I think Shelley Duvall is seriously underrated in this movie. I can’t imagine what she went through…she had to stay on edge and hysterical through half the movie. Danny Lloyd (5 years and turned 6 through filming) was great as Danny in the film. Kubrick kept Lloyd very reserved in the right spots and he doesn’t overact like some child actors do. The additional character actors fit their roles perfectly. Who would have thought Scatman Crothers would be cast in a movie like this? He was great at his role as was Philip Stone as Delbert Grady and Joe Turkel as Lloyd the Bartender. 

Now the music…it makes it. Very few films I’ve seen where the music flows with the dialog. In one scene featuring Jack and Danny sitting on a bed…the orchestration goes up with a question and falls with an answer. The atmospheric synthesizer they used in this movie and A Clockwork Orange adds to the movie greatly. When you are watching the film you feel isolated like Jack, Wendy, and Danny and the music again adds to that. 

The two scenes that still scare me when I see it in the movie? A simple scene really but when Wendy finds Jack’s novel she finds out what he’s been typing on a typewriter for a very long time. It sends chills up me when I see that. What a perfect way to show someone has gone insane without saying any dialogue. 

The other one is when Danny is riding his Big Wheel or Trike down the hallways and you hear the wheels changing from carpet to hardwood floors…what will be around the next corner? Then the twins appear…that gives me the creeps…forever and ever and ever. 

I’ve read a lot of Shining theories and all are all different. There are so many theories like… There were no ghosts at all, it was all in Jack’s head and what happened is what he wrote, it was all in Wendy’s head, the Hotel is really hell, it’s a reminder of the Holocaust, and even down to viewing the film forward and then backward. I think most (there are plenty more) of these are too far out there but that shows you what Kubrick built into this film…you WANT to watch it again and again. I watched it twice before writing this. 

Plot IMDB

A psychological horror film centered around the Torrance family: Jack (Jack Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd). The story follows them as they move into the isolated Overlook Hotel for the winter, where Jack takes a job as the hotel’s caretaker. The hotel’s eerie history, which includes murder and supernatural occurrences, begins to affect Jack, who is struggling with writer’s block and a history of alcoholism. Meanwhile, Danny, who has psychic abilities called “the shining,” starts experiencing terrifying visions of the hotel’s past, including the ghostly Grady twins and a river of blood flowing from an elevator.

As time passes, Jack descends into madness, influenced by the hotel’s malevolent forces. He becomes increasingly violent and erratic, eventually attempting to murder his family. The film culminates in a tense chase through the hotel’s hedge maze

Quotes:

  • Wendy Torrance: Well, I’m very confused, and I just need time to think things over!
  • Jack Torrance: You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over, what good’s a few minutes more gonna do you now?

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  • Lloyd: Women: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
  • Jack Torrance: Words of wisdom, Lloyd my man. Words of wisdom.

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  • Jack Torrance: Hi, Lloyd. Been away. Now, I’m back.
  • Lloyd: Good evening, Mr. Torrence. It’s good to see you.
  • Jack Torrance: It’s good to be back, Lloyd.
  • Lloyd: What’ll it be, sir?
  • Jack Torrance: Hair of the dog that bit me.
  • Lloyd: Bourbon on the rocks.
  • Jack Torrance: That’ll do ‘er!

I remember this trailer back in 1980…it’s one of the best trailers I’ve seen of any movie. Modern trailer makers should study this one.  

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