A shiny, vacuous design of soulless scientism...

A shiny, vacuous design of soulless scientism, Kubrick fails at disproving faith with film's ultimate display in 'delusion of grandeur.' Yes, thanks to technological globalism, we are now self-appointed Übermenschen having prescribed to this hallucinogenic illusion of solipsistic MTV compost in prostitution of generic classical music.

Thesauruses should be illegal for film critics to access

The most simplistic piece of trite that has been misconstrued as false 'genius.' A work that can be summarized as "humanity killed itself and things were reborn anew." Everything else incumbent to showcasing special effects. It's a theme park ride of his envisioned future with the intellectual weight of such. No Griffith work could comparably be summarized in the same fashion. Neither a Flaherty. Both actually serve to challenge the viewer beyond coddling with displays of appropriated classical tunes Kubrick hoped would elevate his work beyond the middlebrow tripe it actually was.

2001:A Space Odyssey is quite simply the worst thing to happen to cinema ever. Its forced profundity has caused millions of people all over the world to force themselves to like what is quite simply nothing more than an exercise in style.

Kubrick has no idea what he is doing here. His film jumps around with little to no sense of unity. The great film makers of the world create a series of events that contain clarity of information, something Kubrick couldn't bet his life on.

What is the purpose of what is going on here? Is there any coherent message? I have heard suggestions that it is Kubrick's message about the future of humanity, but what future is that? Does Kubrick even know?

This is Transformers for the art house crowd. Pure style over substance. Nobody actually likes this film, they just like to be seen liking it.

This is the penultimate example of a film that is "perfect" or "real," and in becoming perfect and real it has rid itself of everything worth experiencing in art. "Realists," or those who believe that quality is gauged by how accurately a film depicts real life, flock to this film because they claim that it was successful in predicting the future. Even if this is true, the purpose of art is not to be a fortune teller. Pseudo-intellectuals flock to this film because its ability to inspire conversation post-experience. Even if this too is true, the purpose of art is not to inspire thought after the fact, but rather to lift the audience from their own confused minds for a time in order to show them something better. Subjectivists flock to this film because it's lack of clear storytelling allows them to condescend to those who are sane enough to listen to their body when it tells them that something is not worth watching. Because there is no clear meaning, subjectivists are able to make the claim that you simply didn't understand, and that they are therefor smarter than you. Ironically, what they themselves are failing to realize is that this very fact implies a failure on the part of the filmmaker to adequately communicate. For these poor delusional people I fear there is little hope of being anything more than mediocre.

The perfect human being is devoid of anything that makes them special or unique, while the most flawed human being is perhaps a sideshow freak. The mind is drawn to the sideshow freak because he is more interesting, while paradoxically repulsed by the perfect person because of his or her extreme lack of interest. In the same way, the clear mind should be repulsed by 2001 because it is simply too prefect, and therefore perfectly boring.

the copypastas are multiplying!

Thank you Griffith poster, you understand.

The death of the western came with a bang. The gunshot fired by Italian hack Sergio Leone. One shot wasn't enough for Leone though, he emptied five shots into the body of the once great genre, and of those shots, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was the most fatal.

Whereas revisionist westerns around this time were brave, bold, and fresh coming from true auteurs like Sam Peckinpah and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Leone was stuck in the past, and a past he frankly couldn't understand. To him, Westerns were not about a new frontier. They were not about heroes looking for a fresh start, succeeding or failing for various reasons. They even lack the ability to subtly subvert roles and archetypes like John Ford would, and fail to even satisfy basic genre requirements of proper thrills and entertainment like a Howard Hawks film would.

Instead, what films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly represent is the value, or lack thereof, of cheap genre filmmaking. Leone's westerns lack a world view. The stories are merely means to the end set pieces. Watch in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as Leone incorporates the American Civil War merely as an excuse to have a set piece in which they blow up a bridge. Why? Because David Lean did it, and the cheapness of Italian cinema at the time was dedicated to making copycat of everything popular cinema at the time.

Leone's trilogy is called "Dollars" trilogy, and in doing so he reveals his motivations as a businessman, not an artist. Corners are cut where they have to spend more than they want. The only reason this film has scope comes through Leone's use of Techniscope, and yet anyone bothering to pay attention notices how Leone betrays the composition of his own set up by cutting into close ups, simply because he's such an unimaginative hack. One can't completely blame him though, the Italian countryside is as empty as the souls of its filmmakers.

Truly robbing the film of any scope it seeks to admit is a tired story about a chase for gold. Whereas people like Huston showed caution at romanticizing the adventure for gold, Leone revels in it, because it's all his cheap Italian bag of tricks has. The adventure itself isn't particularly adventurous anyways. This is a three hour film that spends most of its time lobbying around in rooms as characters try con the audience out of a desire for any actual forward momentum. Whenever this doesn't work, Leone throws in Ennio Morricone's nauseating score.

What was once a beautiful genre that turned out some of the best and most influential films cinema has to offer, Leone kills it and puts it back to the artistic value of a penny dreadful. His only reason for success comes at the opportunity of his film coinciding with the death of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Had the New Hollywood era arrived sooner, Leone would have been properly rejected for his cheap hack filmmaking methods. Instead he is improperly regarded as a hero of cinema, when he is nothing more than a hack. Yet the biggest offense is that his films are so boring in spite of their indulgence to cheapness. At least Spaghetti Western filmmakers like Carbucci made their trash fun.

I would like to say before I pass my judgement on this film, that cinema is a story telling medium. Lynch fans and cinematographers seem to forget this all too often. It is the job of a filmmaker to tell a story, not just to present the audience with a pretty picture or clever spectacle. With that being said, I have two major issues with the film "Barry Lyndon," and neither of them are with the cinematography. I have always said the Stanley Kubrick is the best cinematographer in history.

Barry Lyndon is a character of such mediocrity that to watch him is to watch the very essence of potential be wasted on directionless meandering. This lack of intensity results in an inability to sustain the audience's attention for very long at all. Lyndon is a person who goes around manipulating people, and we are supposed to sympathize with him when this results in misery? No, I think not. I found myself wishing him dead near the end of the film, which is not a pleasant experience. I don't like to wish other people harm, and I resent Kubrick for forcing it on me by presenting me with a lad of great promise, then slowing turning him into a monster before my eyes. Had Kubrick chosen a character of the time more worthy of depiction the film might have been worth the three whole hours it took to view it.

The film itself is little more than a series of vignettes tied together by a central character. None of these vignettes are very poignant, and only briefly brush against profundity amongst those who feel nostalgia for nationalism lost. As I find myself in love with the whole earth, not just the part where I spent the first few years of my life, I simply could not relate, and I find anyone who can to be silly and childish.

And the prime reason why John Ford will always be a mediocre pale imitation of Griffith is because he only grasped the superficialities of his content. With Ford, there is always play-like contrivance and centralization, i.e. Stagecoach. With Griffith, paths will most often not cross, but they were linked by editing. That was one of the genius hallmarks of the man, so much so, his works are a separate medium from Ford.

WHO ARE YOU GRIFFITH POSTER REVEAL YOURSELF

Welles is a pretty shit director. Not only did he do nothing new, most of his filmography is complete shit that just gets worse as it goes on. Citizen Kane is alright but nothing special unless it's the first film you've ever seen. Nonlinear story structure was already done in DW Griffith's Intolerance, shadows and low angles in sound already done in John Ford's Arrowsmith, invisible cuts and whippans in DW Griffith's Abraham Lincoln, deep focus in William Wyler's stuff as well as Jean Renoir's, and Citizen Kane's script is literally Power and the Glory which Preston Sturges wrote. Power and the Glory honestly looks a lot like Kane visually and was directed by William K Howard, who is a far better director than Welles could ever hope to be. But really what makes Welles shit is he lacks any subtlety whatsoever. He makes use of long takes and multiple events happening in the frame well, but his mise en scene is turned up to 11. A lot of his shots look like they were done by a film school freshman shouting for attention (which he kind of was since he was schooled on film history before directing Kane). Really, he's just a name easily impressed plebs that don't know their history lap up. If you actually think anything directed by Orson Welles is good after seeing anything prior by superior directors, your taste is highly questionable and ought to be checked for early signs of down syndrome.

>Even if this too is true, the purpose of art is not to inspire thought after the fact, but rather to lift the audience from their own confused minds for a time in order to show them something better.
Mike Stoklasa pls.

A lot of Benning's stuff is, like most people's, poor imitations of Flaherty's. It's the same reason why Eisenstein is largely shit. They think using disparate scenes or content to make 1+1=2 or 2-1=1 is smart. It's not. It's basic fucking math. What makes Griffith and Flaherty vastly superior is that their scenes are independent but contrasted and paralleled through intellectual crosscutting and camera movements. And what idiots think is great "irony" by matchcutting opposites or playing the opposite feeling music or playing opposite narration, etc. is really just that. Doing the opposite. It's not bold, it's not genius. What Griffith and Flaherty did is genius. They don't immediately show you their irony. You have to pay attention and recall to know the irony in their works. Nearly every age in Intolerance ending in bloodshed and death while the boy gets a trial is ironic. The heft given to the boy's trial in comparison to literal ancient civilizations at war is ironic. The idea that Flaherty's subjects in Nanook or Moana never really existed is the greatest irony ever put on screen because it's an irony that takes place OFFSCREEN, you have to know that with your own knowledge.

One word comes to mind when watching Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange; sterile. The film is devoid of morality on so many levels that it astounds the audience upon viewing. I could go on and on about Kubrick's non-existent directing, or the highly contrived nature of the film in general, but I won't waste your time. Let me just say this movie is offensively bad. What I will say is this; A Clockwork Orange is unforgivable in that it associates the very best type of music and artistry with the very worst type of sickening violence. Kubrick uses Beethoven to prop up his crippled storytelling technique in a fashion that screams "I'm Stanley Kubrick, and I wish i could make art as well as Beethoven did." The truth is that nothing Stanley Kubrick ever made was as loving and soulful as Luigi Beethoven, and to compare them is to compare the rarest and tastiest of fruits to a turd that's been stepped on in a dingy New York City sewer.

The Revenant is simply the representation of the artistic bankruptcy plaguing the contemporary film industry.

Like Birdman, Iñárritu's last endeavor in hackery, this latest attempt is to convince the masses that what they're viewing is something deep or meaningful, when all it has done is push forward shallow technicality and exaggeration to make the frame pulsate with vulgar loudness. Characters are mere veneers, the cinematography is pretty but so conspicuous as to be rendered aggravating and the thesis is about as overdone as DiCaprio's acting. The camera feels like it has been waiting all day for a climactic shot and the film's deliberately difficult production history is laid bare in the indulgent cinematography.

Thematic complexity and philosophical subtext take a back seat to what amounts to as basically an action movie with action stars wrapped up in the veil of arthouse. And much like Salome, what lies beneath is ultimately puerile, obscene and holding fascination for adolescents.

Iñárritu is guilty of something far greater than simply making a bad movie. He is guilty for the crime of gestating his pretense and self-importance, forcing many others to labor over it in a misguided attempt to create art and daring to call the afterbirth a film. Perhaps instead of taking his cast and crew to the ends of the Earth in search of a better shot, the Mexican counterfeit filmmaker should have taken his juvenile and crass sensibilities to the seedy San Fernando valley. There at least he could have at least made a profit of filming all the money shots he wanted.

Drive makes the very basic mistake of adding on plot elements to forgo having to do any actual development. The acting is unmentionable in its mediocrity, which goes hand in hand with the direction. The film relies entirely on 1980s nostalgia in order to garner positive reviews from taste obsessed, self proclaimed aficionados who don't like the film, but do like being seen liking the film. There is perhaps a half hour of content here stretched into two hours of boredom via overuse of slow motion for the purposes of "style." At the end of the day its style is just not enough to make this a watchable film.

Blade Runner is perhaps the worst film adaption of a novel ever made. To say that Blade Runner is an adaption of Phillip K Dick's inspiring novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is not only a lie, but it is an insult to both Phillip K. Dick and any movie that has been adapted to film with even a marginal degree of success. It is most generous and honest to say that Blade Runner is inspired by "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?".

Blade Runner presents, at best, a surface-level representation of a select few of the novel's characters; these representations are devoid of the depth that made them captivating. Likewise, there are many great (and well-developed) characters who were excluded from the film.

The subplots, entire segments of the plot, the greater part of its ethos, and major aspects of the novel's theme are also expunged from this film. In short, the elements of the novel that have moral, narrative, effusive, or dramatic merit are conspicuously absent from this film.

Instead of being a narrative that re-affirms greater truths about humanity, Blade Runner exists only as a testament to sloppy adaptation by screenwriters who have such little respect for literature that they would cinematically re-hash a novel's spark notes.

I believe that, were the novel by which Blade Runner is inspired more widely read, society would recognize Blade Runner as the fecal insult to great literature that it is.

Werckmeister Harmonies is indicative of the extraordinarily poor caliber of film-making that has come out of Europe since the infestation of Italian neo-realism more than a half century ago. Europeans have apparently not recovered from the self defeating attitude that great filmmakers produce "profound" films by over-intellectualizing to the point of paralysis. The first scene lacks any semblance of clarity. For some reason I'm supposed to believe that this strange man has inspired a bunch of moldy drunks to dance in organized harmony. I suppose if I asked the filmmaker what the metaphor was supposed to be he would use his big-word-of-the-week to tell me how stupid I was for not seeing his profundity immediately. The use of long shots is there for no other reason than to impress the mouth breathing film schoolers, and would be tolerable if only the direction was a bit more competent and the story was a bit more tangible. As it stands this film's only use to humanity is to allow the most insecure of film snobs to have some abstract film that nobody has ever seen to fall back on when their knowledge and comprehension of aesthetics is called into question. If that is not something you're interested in, this film has no value to you.

It's not up to Kubrick, or anybody else, to disprove a faith. The burden of proof lies with the person claiming their faith to be true.

Film critics are fucking faux intellectual dipshits

This but unironically.

>faith
>burden of proof

I understand that sacred cows make the best burgers, but these critics are so desperate to demonstrate how they're above the movies they're reviewing and their directors that I can't take them seriously