Contributors

Showing posts with label Stanley Kubrick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanley Kubrick. Show all posts

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Warped Kubrick

I don't know what to think about this story that I recently discovered in my "To Post, Misc" file. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is one long metaphor for the slaughter of Native Americans? Or it's a confession that Kubrick helped fake the moon landing? Completely silly and completely fascinating at the same time! Here is the first 12 minutes...

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Missing Kubrick

I miss Stanley Kubrick. He was, hands down, my favorite filmmaker and I wish he had lived longer or, at the very least, made more films during his time with us. But he made what he made and his body of work is still several levels above everyone else's filmography, in my humble opinion.

Of course, this recent piece over at the Atlantic is more than a little salt in the wound of missing Kubrick.

However, it's Kubrick's interest in jazz-loving Nazis that represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis, published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism. The officer in that Strangelovian snapshot was Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a fanatic for "hot swing" and other variations of jazz outlawed as "jungle music" by his superiors. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter, euphemistically referred to as "travel letters," which flaunted his unique ability to jaunt across Western Europe and report back on the jazz scenes in cities conquered by the Fatherland. Kubrick's title for the project was derived from the pen name Schulz-Koehn published under: Dr. Jazz.

Kubrick and World War II? That would have been mega! Considering what he did with Vietnam and World War I (in Full Metal Jacket and Paths of Glory, respectively), the mind can only wonder in awe. Throw jazz into the mix and I'm really lamenting today at a Kubrick-less world..