Cathryn (formerly catslash) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
remindmeofthe) wrote2010-05-26 05:18 pm
remindmeofthe) wrote2010-05-26 05:18 pm
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As mentioned yesterday, I'm taking a summer course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, which is structured to give us enough time to watch an entire movie in one class period. Which is pretty awesome. Especially since I realized upon looking at the list of movies we'll be seeing that I hadn't seen any of his films before. That's a lot of pop culture I've missed out on! So I've been enjoying this class a lot so far.
(Also, the room is airconditioned. I miss it already.)
So far we've watched and discussed 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, and today we screened Barry Lyndon. Juuust barely. That is a long-ass movie and we needed like every second of classtime to get the whole thing in - it ended exactly when class ended.
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karaokegal asked that I post my thoughts on Barry Lyndon after watching, so!
We didn't have time to discuss the movie, obviously, and I deliberately skipped doing any of the reading for it so far, because I didn't want to be spoiled or influenced by anything other than what we've talked about for the previous films. I am a great big sucker for period drama and was really looking forward to this one. (And am sad Kubrick never got to make the film on Napoleon he had planned. No doubt it would have been epic.)
I am guessing, though, from comments made by both my professor and K-gal, that one of the reasons Barry Lyndon is more obscure is Ryan O'Neal's performance. He's very bland, and makes Barry pretty much impossible to connect to. However, I personally found this to be in the film's favor once I thought about it afterward.
Kubrick does the same thing with the actors playing human characters in 2001. They are all superbland and interchangeable - that plus my wretched memory for faces meant that I couldn't even tell the two astronauts during the middle sequence apart! This effectively deflects attention from these characters, redirecting it toward the visuals that are so important to the movie, and of course toward HAL. For 2001, this technique didn't work so well for me. There are only forty minutes of dialogue, and I am the kind of viewer who always tunes out stuff like battle scenes and scenery porn. Avatar, for example, bored me to TEARSwhen it wasn't pissing me off with its shitty story because of all the scenery porn. 2001, while obviously a better movie, was still hard for me to pay attention through much of it because of its lack of dialogue.
Barry Lyndon, however, most emphatically does not have that problem. There is tons and tons and tons going on, lots of loquacious and brightly-popping characters, scenery so stunning it even caught my eye at times, AND even a narrator. I was enthralled for the entire movie. So when O'Neal's blank performance consistently deflects viewer attachment, there is plenty of other stuff to focus on.
Barry himself is a difficult protagonist. In theory he should be sympathetic for much of the first portion of the film, before his uglier qualities take over, but he's really kinda not, because those ugly qualities do not surface out of nowhere. What later manifests as cruelty and a tenacious lack of empathy start out, in the young Redmond Barry, as a petulant self-centeredness. Narrative convention demands that we sympathize with a young man thrown over for a rich older man by the woman he loves, but Kubrick doesn't quite allow this - Nora's family is in debt and relying on that marriage, and Barry's outbursts are childish and kind of embarrassing to witness. Really, when we find out later on that his "winning" the duel against Nora's fiancé was a set-up to get rid of Barry for the sake of her family, it's hard to feel bad for him.
So Kubrick sets us up against Barry from the beginning, not unlike with Alex in A Clockwork Orange. But, as mentioned, instead of a charismatic performance that demands attention, we get Ryan O'Neal and his blank face. I'm not picking on O'Neal at all. With 2001 in mind, it's clear that his performance is deliberate, and goes hand-in-hand with Barry's unlikeableness. Kubrick surrounds Barry with other colorful characters, directing our interest toward everyone except Barry and making it smooth and unsurprising when he asks that our allegiance ultimately be placed with a character we don't even meet until halfway through.
Lord Bullington, Barry's stepson, also gets a traditionally sympathetic introduction - his stepfather is cruel to him from childhood, the mother to whom he is devoted is trapped in a loveless marriage while her husband openly has affairs and wastes her money (which is destined to be Bullington's money when she dies), and his pride is battered and bruised but never broken. Unlike Barry, though, he himself is a sympathetic character. While he lacks the steady courage that one must admit Barry possesses in spades, the situation he is lashing out at is genuinely unjust and, even as a child, he conducts himself with more dignity than does Barry.
Kubrick doesn't even bother not trying to telegraph the plot when it comes to Bullington. Thanks to the prevalence of duels and fights so far in the film, the second we learn of his love for the mother Barry intends to wed for her title and fortune, we know the movie's climax is gonna be a duel. Shit, even I knew, and I'm not really good at seeing plot developments coming no matter how obvious. When that duel comes, he still manages to make it exciting and suspenseful, as Bullington, despite his fear, refuses to end the duel until blood is shed (this is one scene where he is not at all dignified, and it still works in his favor), and Barry totally misreads him. There is a great flicker of a reaction from O'Neal here when Barry's deliberate discharge of his pistol into the air doesn't pay off the way he presumably expects it to - I wasn't sure what was going through Barry's head when he did that until that look crossed his face, and then I knew. Nice work there.
There is a fuckton of other stuff I could talk about in this movie, and no doubt a full fuckton of other stuff I didn't even catch, but basically it is awesome and everyone should see it. The end.
(Also, the room is airconditioned. I miss it already.)
So far we've watched and discussed 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, and today we screened Barry Lyndon. Juuust barely. That is a long-ass movie and we needed like every second of classtime to get the whole thing in - it ended exactly when class ended.
karaokegal asked that I post my thoughts on Barry Lyndon after watching, so!We didn't have time to discuss the movie, obviously, and I deliberately skipped doing any of the reading for it so far, because I didn't want to be spoiled or influenced by anything other than what we've talked about for the previous films. I am a great big sucker for period drama and was really looking forward to this one. (And am sad Kubrick never got to make the film on Napoleon he had planned. No doubt it would have been epic.)
I am guessing, though, from comments made by both my professor and K-gal, that one of the reasons Barry Lyndon is more obscure is Ryan O'Neal's performance. He's very bland, and makes Barry pretty much impossible to connect to. However, I personally found this to be in the film's favor once I thought about it afterward.
Kubrick does the same thing with the actors playing human characters in 2001. They are all superbland and interchangeable - that plus my wretched memory for faces meant that I couldn't even tell the two astronauts during the middle sequence apart! This effectively deflects attention from these characters, redirecting it toward the visuals that are so important to the movie, and of course toward HAL. For 2001, this technique didn't work so well for me. There are only forty minutes of dialogue, and I am the kind of viewer who always tunes out stuff like battle scenes and scenery porn. Avatar, for example, bored me to TEARS
Barry Lyndon, however, most emphatically does not have that problem. There is tons and tons and tons going on, lots of loquacious and brightly-popping characters, scenery so stunning it even caught my eye at times, AND even a narrator. I was enthralled for the entire movie. So when O'Neal's blank performance consistently deflects viewer attachment, there is plenty of other stuff to focus on.
Barry himself is a difficult protagonist. In theory he should be sympathetic for much of the first portion of the film, before his uglier qualities take over, but he's really kinda not, because those ugly qualities do not surface out of nowhere. What later manifests as cruelty and a tenacious lack of empathy start out, in the young Redmond Barry, as a petulant self-centeredness. Narrative convention demands that we sympathize with a young man thrown over for a rich older man by the woman he loves, but Kubrick doesn't quite allow this - Nora's family is in debt and relying on that marriage, and Barry's outbursts are childish and kind of embarrassing to witness. Really, when we find out later on that his "winning" the duel against Nora's fiancé was a set-up to get rid of Barry for the sake of her family, it's hard to feel bad for him.
So Kubrick sets us up against Barry from the beginning, not unlike with Alex in A Clockwork Orange. But, as mentioned, instead of a charismatic performance that demands attention, we get Ryan O'Neal and his blank face. I'm not picking on O'Neal at all. With 2001 in mind, it's clear that his performance is deliberate, and goes hand-in-hand with Barry's unlikeableness. Kubrick surrounds Barry with other colorful characters, directing our interest toward everyone except Barry and making it smooth and unsurprising when he asks that our allegiance ultimately be placed with a character we don't even meet until halfway through.
Lord Bullington, Barry's stepson, also gets a traditionally sympathetic introduction - his stepfather is cruel to him from childhood, the mother to whom he is devoted is trapped in a loveless marriage while her husband openly has affairs and wastes her money (which is destined to be Bullington's money when she dies), and his pride is battered and bruised but never broken. Unlike Barry, though, he himself is a sympathetic character. While he lacks the steady courage that one must admit Barry possesses in spades, the situation he is lashing out at is genuinely unjust and, even as a child, he conducts himself with more dignity than does Barry.
Kubrick doesn't even bother not trying to telegraph the plot when it comes to Bullington. Thanks to the prevalence of duels and fights so far in the film, the second we learn of his love for the mother Barry intends to wed for her title and fortune, we know the movie's climax is gonna be a duel. Shit, even I knew, and I'm not really good at seeing plot developments coming no matter how obvious. When that duel comes, he still manages to make it exciting and suspenseful, as Bullington, despite his fear, refuses to end the duel until blood is shed (this is one scene where he is not at all dignified, and it still works in his favor), and Barry totally misreads him. There is a great flicker of a reaction from O'Neal here when Barry's deliberate discharge of his pistol into the air doesn't pay off the way he presumably expects it to - I wasn't sure what was going through Barry's head when he did that until that look crossed his face, and then I knew. Nice work there.
There is a fuckton of other stuff I could talk about in this movie, and no doubt a full fuckton of other stuff I didn't even catch, but basically it is awesome and everyone should see it. The end.
no subject
One thing I found interesting was the difference in duelling styles. I wish I knew whether it was a regional difference or just a development in duelling that occurs between Redmond's duel with Quinn and the climatic duel with Bullington. Because if the latter had been the earlier style obviously things would have been quite different.
What did you think of Marisa Berensen's performance? She took a lot of heat from the critics at the time, but I thought she was absolutely perfect for the role and did a great job. (Not to mention rocking those wigs.)
Here's my review from seeing it on the big screen at the Castro about a month ago.
http://karaokegal.livejournal.com/862104.html