Remembering Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was a master.
In the annals of film he is a legend and he will always be a legend, like Murnau and Hitchcock before him. Why? Because, quite simply, he did things with 35 and 70 mm silver nitrate emulsion film and sprocket coded sound that not only had never been done, but were believed to be impossible to do with the state of the art.
Part technical genius geek, part mad scientist, part cold blooded existential philosopher, part beat poet. Kubrick rewrote the code of modern cinema production, gave a hearty middle finger to the suits, did exactly what he wanted to when he wanted to and got away with it.
This man made the hair stand up on the back of my neck depicting a spaceship approaching a station with The Beautiful Blue Danube rolling its glory on the soundtrack, forever changing my conception of the word beauty. This is the man who made me weep honest tears when they took ‘The Glorious Ninth’ from a total monster like Alex DeLarge and proved to me that morality was a thing that lived in what you were not willing to do. This man showed me that when faced with the ultimate horror of a destroyed world the only human thing to do was laugh.
Kubrick’s medium is nearly gone now. The tools of the trade have changed. His films will never be equalled.
I wept the day he died. I have so few heroes left. He — as distant and quiet to his fans as he was — was one of the biggest.
