I just didn't find it particularly scary or suspenseful. Yeah, it's a good depiction of Jack going mad, and I'll give you the ax through the door scene as genuinely scary, but otherwise the only thing that made the movie at all scary or suspenseful was the score. The cinematography sure didn't, and neither did the editing. The blood flood out of the elevator seemed inserted for shock value, and not in a particularly plot-relevant way.
It was said that King opposed the casting of Nicholson because he thought Nicholson seemed "menacing already" and thus his "descent" you be less a surprise to the audience. I've always heard that one of Nicholson's greatest assets as an actor was he had an ability to seem angry and dangerous with little or no effort.
I can't stand any of Kubrick's movies. Never cared for 2001, Clockwork Orange, none of 'em. I especially don't care for The Shining, since it's like a Roger Moore Bond flick in the sense that he kept the title and the character names, and threw out nearly everything else. Unlike even A View to a Kill however, I wasn't entertained by any of it. Everyone raves about Jack Nicholson, but what does he really do except what he always does? Jack is a terrible Jack Torrence, with Nicholson, he's not someone slowly going/being driven mad, he plays crazy from the jump. The mini-series, while pretty tame from a scares standpoint (what exactly do you expect from the House of Mouse?), is far more faithful to the book.
Someone once said that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a movie best watched when you're high on various drugs available in the late 1960s. Wonder if that would work with various Star Trek movies.? Medicinal marijuana is legal here now...
Yeah, 2001 was well known as a "head" film back them. Buy your ticket, have a seat and drop some acid.
Well... I watched DR. STRANGELOVE and FULL METAL JACKET back to back a few weeks ago and they are both fantastic. His meticulous style really works better when it's grounded in a realistic scenario, meaning, not so extremely overstylized the plot gets buried under all the heavy symbolism. DSL even has a sequence that's probably movie history and foreshadowed what's become superhip 40 years later: a shaky cam POV fight sequence. IMHO unheard of before.
I liked Full Metal Jacket but I never could understand Pyle's descent from bullied wuss into murderous suicidal crazy. It seemed to just suddenly appear after the donut eating incident. Combined with The Shining (and for that matter Hal in 2001) it might be that Kubrick has some kind of problem depicting mental decline onscreen.
oh come on, that was easy. the marines did what every military does: break the recruits and build them up again. hartman broke pyle a little too well. he even let it become personal. due to the collective punishment pyle also lost his support among his peers/joker. boom.
It's pretty explicitly stated that turning the recruits into murderous psychopaths is the whole purpose of boot camp. Leonard is the one who resists the training, even if only through sloth and incompetence. The only way he's able to graduate and become a Marine is to turn himself into a psycho but he can't go on living as that person.
I wish the would do a remake of Running Man that more closely matches King's book. That book was far more like the reality shows we have today, without the violence/death of course, then the movie was.
I think that's part of the point. You can approach it from multiple angles, but none of them quite make sense. (Notice that the physical layout of the hotel doesn't make sense either.) It's all part of depicting "madness". Nor is it intended to be "scary" in the usual sense. Cheap thrills are not the point. What could be more horrifying and unnatural than a man trying to murder his wife and child?
Trivia which you probably know already: The end of 2001 (the book) featured the Star Child detonating everyone's orbital nuclear weapons, to basically take everyone's dangerous toys away. Kubrik decided to eliminate that ending for the film, because it would be too similar to the ending of Dr. Strangelove.
Yet the narrator (Mathew Modine) doesn't turn into a murderous psychopath, nor do any of his closer cohorts. And in the movie Modine states (paraphrasing) "the purpose of the training isn't to turn people into unthinking killing machine, it's to develop people to think and act on their own to carry on the mission." google it for the exact words. So while Kubrick may indeed be anti-war you can still enjoy the movie on it's own merit, especially if you have ever served. Trust me, every military member I've ever met loves the shit out of that movie - enlisted, officers, it doesn't matter. We can separate the political wheat from the chaff and enjoy the movie.
Um, no. Neither the Marines nor any other modern military want or need mindless killing machines. The more specialized it gets, the smarter the soldiers need to be. No use for someone who's dumb as a door knob in the Delta Force As I said. Breaking and rebuilding is what they do. Pyle was stuck at broken and a competent killer. Bad combination.
Not "mindless" killers. They want intelligent killers, men who kill deliberately and efficiently without a shred of doubt or remorse. Also, everything I say is in the context not of any real-world military, but of the movie, which again takes a certain amout of dramatic license.
