Director Kubrick made 11 commercial feature films during his lifetime. After I watched "Path of Glory", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "A Clockwork Orange", "Full Metal Jacket" and "Dr. Strangelove", I worshipped them and was shocked. It's like thinking that in all the TV series from the past to the future in the world, "The Wire" is in the sky, and all the rest are in the world. At that time, I felt that all the directors in the long history of human civilization, Kubrick was in the sky, and the rest were in the world.
I think he's a genius, and I can't find any reason other than that, the same human form and body can create pioneering works that are completely different in content and form. His black and white films, the colors he uses, the music he chooses, the sets he sets, the makeup he puts on. His sci-fi, his thrillers, his wars, his history. Originally, after watching a lot of movies, we know what is a genre film, what is a style, what is an anti-genre film, and what is a niche style, we know that there will be a conflict level about 75 minutes before the end of the movie. Small orgasms of % intensity. Before a Kubrick movie, we could never have any guesses about the next frame.
We use genius to explain many inexplicable excellence in the world, which makes an otherwise difficult and mediocre life feel a little easier. But just open your eyes a little bit, and you will find that the truth is more painful than admitting that a genius was born to be a genius. It was like the first time I saw Picasso's exquisite and beautiful oil paintings in de young in 2011, and it was like the first time I saw Van Gogh's delicate and strict perspective scale still life woodcut prints in Tate Britain this summer. While complaining about the absurdity and randomness of modern art, we are vaguely forced to admit the inevitability of the perpetual circulation of classics.
"Barry Lyndon" was the final blow to my assessment of Kubrick's genius for escaping harsh reality. I used to have a saying that all movies can be edited to under two hours. There is no story that a normal human can understand that cannot be told in the language of two hours of footage. If a movie is longer than two hours, it must be because the director did not cut the nonsense scene. I used to have a saying that all movies that use narration are because they are not well-made, and there is no movie story, and there is a moral and plot that cannot be expressed through the dialogue and expressions of the leading actors.
"Barry Lyndon" was three hours and five minutes, and I didn't fast forward a second, and felt that any shot was redundant. There are a lot of narrations throughout the whole article, which made me have to revise my previous theory, saying that this is not because the film's dialogue is weak, but because this is not a film, it is an epic of oil painting sets.
A masterpiece has the effect of silently engraving its frame-by-frame images in the viewer's mind. The scene of the second duel in the church is one of the best of this kind (the only scene with a similar effect before this is the scene in which Sarah plays the piano in 1982 Blade Runner).
Inside the abandoned church, the hollowed-out cross penetrates the Tyndall phenomenon of sunlight, and the flying white dove.
One side of the duel was constantly moving, trembling, vomiting, crying, young and hunched, ugly faces twisted with hatred, legs twisted with fear. The other party never moves, with a dignified top hat against a dark background, undisturbed silver hair, deep blue eyes, a solemn expression, and a natural oil painting.
There's no need to discuss every turn of a duel's preparation for every shot, the plot of everything is less important before those eyes of Patton Lyndon. Personal destiny rises and falls under the turbulent history, rises from the dust to the peak, and then loses everything. And after everything is over, good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor - they are all equal now.
Ryan O'Neal, the actor who played Patton Lyndon, was brought to the peak of his acting career by this film, and he has no comparable work since then, and he has no work since. Ryan's beauty is also a kind of genius. He previously starred in love stories and was recognized as the most beautiful of the most beautiful group of people in America at the time. He dated the most famous actresses in Hollywood and Europe. Farrah Fawcett (the blonde poster in Tony's bedroom on Saturday Night Fever, the most beautiful actress in the world at the time) has been involved with him for life. Looks, youth, wealth, fame, love, talent for acting, Ryan O'Neal has it all. And Ryan ONeal used his narcissis aptitude to choose the one that destroyed himself and his family among countless paths. According to a report by Vanity Fair in 2009 , because he forced his underage children to also use drugs, he and all four children of his three partners could not escape the curse of drugs, and his adult life was forever arrested in possession of drugs, and he failed to detoxify. , illegal use of weapons, traffic violations arrested in circulation. None of them claimed to feel the warmth of the family, alienated or even hated their father all their lives. Ryan and Farrah themselves suffered a sharp decline in health after middle age and suffered from various cancers in their later years. As Shakespeare said: These violent delights have violent ends.
Coincidence or not, it's one of the evidences of Kubrick's genius: the roles he chose for his films were ONeal, Marisa Berenson (who played Mrs. Lyndon), Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (open Vision's protagonists and husband and wife actors), life more or less fits the fate of the characters in the movie.
Ryan O'Neal is a genius, and his choices show that being born a genius isn't enough. This makes people cherish Kubrick's genius even more. He did not stop his creation because of his indulgence and narcissism. On the contrary, he continued to push the limits of human artistic imagination in the form of film with extreme efforts.
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