Would you please open the pod-bay doors for our Blu-ray critic Stephen Garrett? Sorry, Stephen, but I’m afraid we can’t do that. Stephen, Stephen, give us your answer do…
Honestly, how stupid was the idea of making a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? Cocreator Arthur C. Clarke was perfectly entitled to publish 2010: Odyssey Two in 1982, more than 14 years after collaborating on the script of Kubrick’s landmark film, and MGM exercised its legal right to make it a flick. But was there no decency on hand? Director Peter Hyams tried to spin a franchise out of a profound philosophical rumination, one that Kubrick’s hippie marketers rightly dubbed “the ultimate trip.” It ain’t the penultimate trip, folks. It’s the ultimate. And 2001 is also, arguably, the ultimate Blu-ray. Read more »
The movie, from a children’s book, sounds more hysterical than historical. But with Al Pacino inked to play Napoleon (per The Hollywood Reporter), a mythic, never-made epic comes tantalizingly into view. Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is the project that most obsessed the late director. He researched Bonaparte for years in the 1970s, built a huge card catalog detailing every day in the emperor’s life and even speaks of Al Pacino in this 1980 interview with Michel Ciment:
It would also be nice to do it as a twenty hour TV series, but there is, as yet, not enough money available in TV to properly budget such a venture. Of course, there is the tremendous problem of the actor to play Napoleon. Al Pacino comes quickly to mind. And there is always the possibility of shooting the twenty episodes in such a way that he would be fifty by the time he got to St. Helena….
Al, I’m joking! I’m joking!
Kubrick’s obsession with Napoleon is a key window into the director’s perfectionistic process. A superexpensive Taschen book exclusively devotes itself to the unmade film; meanwhile, here’s a PDF of Kubrick’s original screenplay, dated September 29, 1969.
Fidelio. See? We still remember the password for the sex orgy in Eyes Wide Shut. A lot of good it did us. But what was the password for the house? Only Keith Uhlich remembers that. Read on for Keith’s argument as to the antiheroic nature of Tom Cruise’s Bill Harford. Read more »
