The cold brilliance of Stanley Kubrick's filmmaking is on ample display in a new box set
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff | October 21, 2007
No one understands a great director as well as another great director. Which may explain why Robert Altman was so ticked off six years ago.
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On Tuesday, Warner Home Video releases what must qualify as the ultimate geometry lesson. "Warner Directors Series - Stanley Kubrick." The box set includes two-disc editions of "2001," "A Clockwork Orange," "The Shining," "Eyes Wide Shut," a one-disc "Full Metal Jacket," and a documentary about Kubrick, "A Life in Pictures." In addition, Warner is reissuing separately "Lolita" (Kubrick and Nabokov: a marriage made in mandarin heaven) and "Barry Lyndon." Only "Dr. Strangelove" is missing from Kubrick's post-"Spartacus" filmography.
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True, there's "Spartacus." But that was really a Kirk Douglas project (he produced as well as starred). "Lolita" verges on chamber work, almost as indebted to Strindberg as Nabokov. And no small part of the astonishment that is "Dr. Strangelove" lies in Kubrick's ability to ignite Armageddon using just three main sets: General Ripper's office, the errant B-52's cabin, and the Pentagon war room. The movie's so brilliantly made viewers don't notice that what they're watching is, basically, cross-cutting among a trio of linked one-act plays.
