"And thus, on this tooth and claw planet, you need a very strong military - so I’m going to stick with the idea that ['Full Metal Jacket'] footage was used primarily because of its powerful, realistic portrayal of boot camp..."

"... juxtaposed with the entirely demoralizing and inappropriate injection of WOKE ideology into the USA military. Which I agree with myself and which I’m certain my father would have agreed with. Truthfully, I believe my father (who supported Reagan), would very much approve of saving America, indeed the world, from the highly destructive Globalist forces threatening to take over this planet...."

TO THOSE WHO THINK MY FATHER WOULDN’T HAVE WANTED #TRUMP TO USE FMJ FOOTAGE

Here are my thoughts: I agree in principle that an anti-war movie is incongruous with promoting the idea of a tough non-woke US military and thus war itself - however - these are very dangerous and… https://t.co/0bSXz8nL3V

— Vivian Kubrick (@ViKu1111) October 13, 2024

"Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again."

That's the last line of a post I wrote on May 23, 2023 — "DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, 'normalcy': 'We must return normalcy to our communities.'"

That was back when DeSantis was endeavoring to replace Trump by being essentially Trump minus the weirdness. Yes, there was talk of weird-versus-normal just like there is today. I said:

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

"Duvall dancing at Studio 54. She lived the life of a celebrity in the 1970s and 1980s, dating Paul Simon and Ringo Starr...."

"The film critic Pauline Kael called her the 'female Buster Keaton.' On casting Duvall in 'The Shining,' Stanley Kubrick told her, 'I like the way you cry.'... Sitting between Paul Simon and James Taylor, Duvall greets Arnold Schwarzenegger at a screening in 1977."

From the captions at "Shelley Duvall: A Life in Pictures/With her gossamer frame and toothy smile, she was one of the biggest film stars of the 1970s" (NYT)(free-access link).

"I, thank God, had no idea what that meant, so I said to him, 'What are you talking about? I’m coming back on Wednesday.' Literally, it was an honest answer. I had no idea what he’s talking about."

Said E. Jean Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, reflecting on Trump's saying "See you next Tuesday."

Quoted in "E Jean Carroll lawyer says Trump used coded version of C-word against her/Roberta Kaplan says ex-president directed ‘See you next Tuesday’ remark at her after deposition in unrelated case at Mar-a-Lago" (The Guardian).

According to Wikipedia:

See you next Tuesday (C U next Tuesday) is a common euphemistic backronym for the word "cunt".....

I've always associated it with Stanley Kubrick. It's surprisingly hard to find references to that on the web, but there's this from Roger Ebert: "John Landis... includes the dialog 'See you next Tuesday' in every one of his films, after first hearing it in Kubrick's '2001.'"

Is Trump really going that far out of his way to get women to talk dirty to him? How much speaking in code is going on out there? You risk seeming nutty if you make assertions that you've been spoken to in code. When is it worth speaking in code? When you're luring someone into seeming nutty by accusing you of speaking in code? When you know the code will be understood and you want to get your message out? But here's Kaplan asserting that she "had no idea what that meant" — flaunting her innocence of Trump's scurrilous rhetoric. Did Trump deliberately elicit that performance? So complex. So inane. What would Elvis do?

"Founded at the pinnacle of the British Empire, the [Manchester Museum] is now undergoing a rethink..."

"... led by its director Esme Ward. In her post since 2018, Ward wants to make the free-of-charge institution more inclusive, imaginative and caring. She has repatriated 43 ceremonial and sacred objects to Aboriginal communities in Australia, and appointed a curator to re-examine the collections from an Indigenous perspective.... 'All of us in museums have a responsibility to really think about who they are for, not just what they are for,' Ward said in a recent interview in her office, which has a velvet sofa and a framed poster reading 'No Sexists, No Racists, No Fascists.' Calling museums 'empathy machines,' she said their mission extended beyond caring for objects and collections to 'caring for beliefs and ideas and relationships,' and being 'a space that brings people together.'"

From "A Museum Pivots to Become 'an Empathy Machine'/The Manchester Museum in England was founded at the pinnacle of the British Empire. Now it is embracing the city’s South Asian population and reassessing the colonial past" (NYT).

Empathy machines.

Empathy machines.

Empathy machines.

What if there were a machine that could manufacture empathy? It would be a torture device! What did your literal mind — if you have one — picture? I thought first of the machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony," then of the device strapped to Malcolm McDowell's head in "A Clockwork Orange."

But, you may say, a museum that's an empathy machine cannot be a torture device because nobody is forced to go to the museum or to stay there, but that's not true. Kids are forced. 

Why would someone who loves art — does Ms. Ward love art?! — think of the museum as a machine? To help you think about her thinking, here's art about a machine, Paul Klee's "Twittering Machine":

Extra background:

"Seriously, you are the first person who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from intromission to last spasm," wrote Stanley Kubrick...

... to LeGrace Benson, a Cornell art history professor, who had written him a letter in 1964 detailing her observations about "Dr. Strangelove."

Now, Benson, who is 92, is interviewed in "My Coffee With Stanley Kubrick" (NY Magazine).

Have we reached the last Queen's-funeral news story?

I think at this point the scraping of the bottom of the barrel is too obvious: "Twins who starred in ‘The Shining’ wait in line to view Queen’s coffin."

That's the NY Post, where, I guess, they're defining stardom downward.

Movies that you have to watch twice to understand.

That's a title for a list I wanted and, googling, I found 5 things. Let's see if any fit my needs. I have come to believe that the best movie-watching experience is the second (or subsequent) watch, so that first watches feel like a test to see whether this is a movie worth watching at all. These days, if I watch a movie once and think it's good, I watch it again, within a day or two. That way, I have the greatest opportunity to see the most in this thing I've discovered is worth watching. Sometimes on second watch, I feel humbled by how much I missed the first time around. I'm practically laughing at myself for thinking I had seen the movie.

So let's look at what my search turned up.

"The idea that some hapless, well-meaning person would put up a poster like this, thinking that they had a cat..."

"... it just seemed so funny to her. So it was obvious that it was a joke. She really didn't expect the calls."

 

I highly recommend "The Possum Experiment," the new episode of "This American Life," which is centered on the question whether people are basically good and can be trusted. 

All the segments were high quality, not just the part about the possum experiment. There's also a part about a black male comedian who went blind:

Here's something that I philosophized this little trip. It's a trip for me. This fucks with my head a little bit. My blindness is diffusing the scariness of my Blackness. That was one of my secret weapons to be a big brother, and people get nervous. Oh, fuck. There's a big Black guy. Watch out. That shit is powerful. It was a thrill. Once people find out that I can't see, my Blackness is out the window. They treat me like I'm a Make-a-Wish baby. Uh oh, watch out. There's a big Black guy. Oh, he just walked into the broom closet. OK, no worries.

And the last part is about the alternative endings to "Clockwork Orange."

According to [the novelist Anthony] Burgess, when the book was published here in the States, the publisher told him they wouldn't put it out unless they could cut chapter 21. This was way before the movie was optioned. It was still just a novel. They said the optimistic ending was Pollyanna-ish, naive, and bland. They were like, we Americans are tougher than you Brits. We can handle a nihilistic ending. Some people are just beyond hope. That's more realistic.

But the story wasn't so simple, and Burgess seems to have been bullshitting.

It's like "Clockwork Orange" but without actual clamps holding your eyelids open.

he knew https://t.co/AKLTm4C3zo pic.twitter.com/yJvEUzBMpY

— sarah 𐂂 (@tinygreenbug) February 10, 2022

In case you've forgotten "Clockwork Orange," you can easily get up to speed on that and other eyeball horrors in the movies at "A Clockwork Orange And 8 Other Movies With Terrifying Eye Scenes" (CinemaBlend).

Have you seen all of Stanley Kubrick's films?

I haven't. Here's somebody's ranking of all of them. There are 13.

Up until last night, I'd seen "Dr. Strangelove," "Lolita," "The Shining," "Clockwork Orange," "Barry Lyndon," "Paths of Glory," "2001," "Full Metal Jacket," and "Eyes Wide Shut." (Named in the order that I like them.)

Yeah, I'd never seen "Spartacus," and I still haven't. Unsurprisingly, I'd never seen "Killer's Kiss" or "Fear and Desire."

The one I finally got around to watching — it's featured in the Criterion Channel's Sterling Hayden collection — is "The Killing." Highly amusing. The women were hilarious. It had Vince Edwards. It had a poodle and a parrot. Plus the great Sterling Hayden (last seen by me in "The Asphalt Jungle"). And at one point a character explains everything (quoted at my son's 101 Years of Movies blog):

If you ever find yourself wondering, Am I the only one who..., the answer is no you are not. There is always someone else.

That's what Meade asserts — and I presume he's not the only one who asserts that. If he could say it, someone else has also said it. You're never the only one.

The specific occasion for the assertion of this immense generality was a discussion of yard signs on view in our neighborhood as we were driving home from the sunrise run this morning. We noted that the Black Lives Matter signs are nearly all gone, for whatever reason. The only persistent signs are anti-gerrymandering, perhaps because there's serious hope of affecting legislation, with help from Tony Evers. (Evers, the governor, is a Democrat, but both houses of the Wisconsin legislature are run by the GOP.)

I mention Evers, and I have to add, "Say it, say it!" which I do to escape the very mild fake annoyance I would experience if Meade said what he always says — or used to always say — which is: "Tony is the little man who lives inside my mouth and tells me what to do." I added, "Do you think you're the only one who whenever he hears the name Tony Evers says 'Tony is the little man who lives in my mouth and tells me what to do'?"

"Kubrick the nudnik is here again."

I'm reading "Kubrick’s Human Comedy/Though Stanley Kubrick was often characterized as icy, his life and filmography reveal that his heart was as large as his mind" (NYRB): 

When [his high school friend] asked Stanley why he didn’t do his own assignments, he got this placid reply: “I’m not interested.” 

What did interest him was the Graflex single-lens high-speed camera his father had given him for his thirteenth birthday, with which he learned to capture crisp images of subjects in motion. Soon he was spending hours in the darkroom in the apartment of another friend, whose mother was heard to complain, “Kubrick the nudnik is here again.” 

The nudnik first sold a photo, of a downcast news vendor surrounded by tabloid headlines announcing the death of FDR, at age seventeen to Look magazine. Over the next five years Look used his images in 135 articles 

You can see many of the Look photographs — including the downcast news vendor — here (at The New Criterion)("A 1949 shoot at Columbia University includes a photo of three physicists standing atop a massive particle accelerator, as well as that of a laboratory scientist handling a glowing rod reflected in his dark, circular glasses; neither image is extricable from thoughts of Dr. Strangelove").

***

I've abolished the comments section — I couldn't handle the constant vigilance it required of me — but you can do the equivalent of commenting by emailing me here. I will presume you want your words published in an update to this post, and unless you tell me how you want to be named, I'll use your first name only.

"Some 800 girls were said to have sought the part. When Ms. Lyon was cast, Mr. Nabokov, employing the word he used in the novel, called her 'the perfect nymphet'..."

"Ms. Lyon accumulated more than two dozen film and television credits from 1959 to 1980, but she was known primarily for one: Mr. Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel ['Lolita'], which was adapted for the screen by Mr. Nabokov himself.... The novel was scandalous when it was first published in English in 1955; the film, made when the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code still governed Hollywood, was less so — in part, some critics thought, because Ms. Lyon, whose character was aged slightly for the movie, seemed too mature. 'She looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly haughty teenage air,' Bosley Crowther said in his review in The Times. 'The distinction is fine, we will grant you, but she is definitely not a "nymphet."'"

From "Sue Lyon, Star of ‘Lolita,’ Is Dead at 73/She was 14 when she was cast in the title role of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel. It remained her best-known credit" (NYT).

"McDonald's has made the decision to stop selling milkshakes when there's a Brexit rally nearby... Burger King U.K. came under fire after tweeting, 'Dear people of Scotland. We're selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun.'"

From "Throwing milkshakes as a political statement makes a splash in Britain" (CBS News).

Is the entire cup thrown at the person or just the contents? I'm not sure, but this "milkshaking" seems to be the same activity as pie-throwing (where, usually, it's shaving cream in a pie tin, smashed into a person's face). I guess for milkshaking you don't need to get as close, and it's easy to buy your loaded weapon in a fast-food joint. In the UK, there's debate about whether this should actually be called "violence," but obviously it is.

Wikipedia has an entry for "milkshaking":

Milkshaking is a term that refers to the use of milkshakes and other drinks as a means of political protest in a manner similar to egging.

Well, with egging, the hard shell is always part of the projectile, and you've got to hit hard enough to break the egg.

The target of a milkshaking is usually covered in a milkshake that is thrown from a cup or bottle.

Usually... so perhaps sometimes the cup is also thrown.

The trend gained popularity in the United Kingdom in May 2019 during the European Parliament election and was used primarily against right-wing and far-right politicians and activists, such as Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Carl Benjamin, and members of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party.

Robinson was the first one to be milkshaked, and when he got milkshaked the next day, he punched the person who did it.

In American slang, "milkshake," used as a noun, refers to a woman's body "and the way she carries it." Urban Dictionary has various entries for "milkshake," the verb, going back to 2005, including the idea of throwing a milkshake at someone, from 2013. That doesn't have the political-theater angle, just a mindless prank, done from a moving car, aimed at a random pedestrian. The British activity is also there, entered 2 days ago.

And here's the rather extensive Wikipedia article on pie throwing. Excerpt:

The probable originator of pieing as a political act was Thomas King Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine. In 1970, Forcade pied Otto N. Larsen, the Chairman of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography; his action was called the first Yippie pieing[.] Aron Kay, also a Yippie, went on to take up Forcade's pieing tactics. Kay pied, among many others, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and Andy Warhol....

Though pieing may not have been a political protest before 1970, pieing appeared — almost appeared — in the great 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove," and the context was distinctly political:

But for a last-minute change of Kubrick’s heart, the moment of reckoning was to be preceded with a riotous battle with pastries from the War Room buffet table. The fight, which was shot but cut out before the final print, begins with Soviet Ambassador de Sadeski (Peter Bull) responding to the threat of a strip search by hurling a custard pie at US general Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), which misses and hits the American president.

“Gentlemen,” rallies Turgidson, holding his wounded leader (Peter Sellers) in his arms, “our beloved president has been infamously struck down by a pie in the prime of his life! Are we going to let that happen? Massive retaliation!” Chaos ensues in fast-motion, in a manner recalling the silent slapstick of Mack Sennett and the Keystone Cops....

"Eventually, Strangelove fires off a gun and shouts ‘Ve must stop zis childish game! Zere is Verk to do!’ The other characters sit around on the floor and play with custard cream like children building sandcastles. ‘I think their minds must have snepped from the strain,’ Strangelove announces."

Pie throwing goes way back — to stage shows and silent movies. The first is the 1909 film "Mr. Flip." There are many many pie-in-face bits in the movies but (judging from the Wikipedia article) the ultimate was this 2-minute sequence from "The Battle of the Century" (1927) with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy:



Stop! Stop! This has gone far enough! Love thy neighbor!

Andrew Yang (the Democratic presidential candidate) talks about "normal" so much....

... it reminds my son John of that fake police officer played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita":

I said to myself when I saw you — I said, "That's a guy with the most normal-looking face I ever saw in my life!" . . . It's great to see a normal face, because I'm a normal guy. It'd be great for two normal guys like us to get together and talk about world events — you know, in a normal sort of way....

At the link: the "Lolita" clip and Yang's "normal" quotes.

"When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it," said Stanley Kubrick about the ending of "2001."

But he tries to just say it:

The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.

They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but weren’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what to do in zoos with animals, we try to give them what we think is their natural environment.

Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made some sort of superman. And we have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.

"THE MOVIE 2001 IS NOW 50 YEARS OLD. If it were a reality, we’d have had space stations and moon bases for decades."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, suggesting that the movie pointed the way to an exciting, rewarding future of human life in space. That's not how I remember the movie! I've seen it twice, and I remember a very negative view of space life. So I'd say the movie was a reality. It was a real movie and real people in the real world saw the movie, and our emotional and intellectual response — the reality of what makes us human — was not enthusiasm about shooting more rocket ships at the sky, but complicated anxiety about the unknown, the brutality of separation from earth, and the remorselessness of robots.

Anthony Burgess invented slang for "A Clockwork Orange" and began to write a dictionary for it.

He never finished, and, worse, the thing was lost. But now it's found.

What survives are 6x4 slips of paper on which each entry is typed. There are 153, 700 and 33 slips for the letters A, B and Z respectively.

Anna Edwards, the archivist of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, said:

"We found the surviving fragments of the dictionary at the bottom of a large cardboard box, packed underneath some old bedsheets. I suppose the reason for not finding this earlier is that the box seemed to be full of household objects, not literary papers.”...

There are a few entries reproduced at the link (which goes to The Guardian), including:

Abdabs (the screaming) – Fit of nerves, attack of delirium tremens, or other uncontrollable emotional crisis. Perhaps imitative of spasm of the jaw, with short, sharp screams....

Abortion – Anything ugly, ill-shapen, or generally detestable: ‘You look a right bloody abortion, dressed like that’; ‘a nasty little abortion of a film’ (Australian in origin)....

This makes me think of a topic I'd been contemplating writing about: the problem of making a movie out of a book. I'm thinking about it today because I finally got the DVD of "The Mosquito Coast" that I ordered. While waiting for the movie, I read the book. Now, I'm trying to watch the movie without being dogged by thoughts about what's different from the book or not as good as the book, etc. etc. I was just reading a lot of articles about why it's so hard to make satisfying book-based movies (unless the book is rather bad (e.g., "The Godfather")).

With that in the background of my thoughts — and I'd just read about how Stephen King didn't like Stanley Kubrick's version of "The Shining" — writing this post made me wonder what Anthony Burgess thought of Stanley Kubrick's version of "Clockwork Orange." I found this quote:

"In the scene, the movie’s antihero, a thug played by Malcolm McDowell, barges into her home with three of his cronies..."

"... before they assault her husband and trash their house as Mr. McDowell belts 'Singin’ in the Rain.' Mr. McDowell cuts off Ms. Corri’s clothes, then tells her helpless husband to watch before he rapes her. Kubrick insisted that Ms. Corri appear naked for multiple takes. That scene and other violent and sexually explicit material initially earned the film an X rating in the United States. It remained controversial for years after its limited British release, drawing protests and news reports of alleged copycat crimes. Nevertheless, 'A Clockwork Orange' was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture, director and screenplay, in 1972."

From the obituary of Adrienne Corri, who died this month at the age of 84.

I went looking for more information about Corri's experience. I found this:

Adrienne Corri initially declined the role of Mrs. Alexander because Kubrick was getting applicants to de-bra in his office while he trained a video camera on them. She made it clear that wasn’t on. “But Adrienne, suppose we don’t like the tits?” “Tough.”

And:

Little was accomplished during the first two days of shooting [the rape scene with Corri], but on the third day, Kubrick blocked out a portion of the action with McDowell, instructing him to knock [the actor Patrick] Magee to the floor and begin kicking his guts out. The director then suddenly asked McDowell, "Can you sing?" It was suggested that the actor could improvise a song-and-dance number while administering the savage beating. McDowell confessed that "Singin’ in the Rain" was the only tune he knew by heart. This resulted in what Kubrick calls the CRM, or "critical rehearsal moment," during which the director and actors come together to create a defining scene. Kubrick immediately looked into obtaining the rights to the song, and discovered that the fee was $10,000 to use it for 30 seconds. Once the rights were in hand, shooting proceeded immediately. Kubrick later invited Stanley Donen, the director of the musical classic, to view his scene and then asked Donen’s personal permission to use the song for the sequence. "He wanted to make sure I wasn’t offended," Donen reports in the biography Dancing on the Ceiling. "Why would I be? It didn’t affect the movie Singin’ in the Rain." Gene Kelly, who had performed the famous number in the 1952 film, felt otherwise. When Kelly and Kubrick met at an awards ceremony following Clockwork’s release, the danceman refused to talk to the director.