[.ca] Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze (ISBN 0253213908)

Only if you are a true Kubrick fan:
I was so so offended by the slackness and cheekiness of this book that I absolutely had to write a review... The writing style is so bad it will make your head spin like a top. The sentences run on forever, and Professor Nelson can't seem to keep to a point at all. He spends most of his time impressing himself instead of trying to communicate with readers. Don't bother with this one unless you are a true Kubrick diehard.

Interesting insights:
I was a student in Dr. Nelson's film class at San Diego State several years ago. At that time, Nelson impressed me and others with his obvious love of the film medium. I recently purchased the 1982 edition of the book, and was again impressed. Yes, Nelson is a professional and at times his style can often seem pedantic and overly academic, but I will probably buy the updated version of the book with the analyses of "Full Metal Jacket" and "Eyes Wide Shut."

Good scholarship, occasionally overwhelming:
Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze by Thomas Allen Nelson ...is one of the best Kubrick books available. Nelson discusses all of the films, and devotes a chapter to each one beginning with Lolita. There are photographs, too, but the printing is so lousy for these that they are easily ignored. The text is the most important material here. Nelson is an astute critic, and his text is informed by a comprehensive knowledge of film history and the realist and formalist schools. Although he uses the term mise en scène more times that I would care to tell you, his prose is immediate, conversational, and engaging. Here's one example from his 30-page essay on The Shining: Early in the film, for instance, they learn how to negotiate the corridors of the hotel ("to leave a trail of breadcrumbs," to quote Wendy), and in once scene Danny moves in a circle around the Colorado Lounge on his Big Wheel tricycle, while Jack tends to remain stationary within its center. Wendy and Danny explore the hedge maze and complete a circular journey that travels into and out of its diabolical design. Jack, on the other hand, imitates what Borges characterizes as the death-in-life of the "North" (that is, northern European intellectualism)-that yearning for a totally rationalized world without those crevices of unreason that arouse despair in some and imagination in others-rather than the "South's" desire to traverse the maze and engage its multiplicity, to confront fate and choice, and to outface oblivion in an act of creation. Whew.

For Kubrick Fanatics Only:
Did you ever wonder why the carpeting in Room 237 in "The Shining" was green and purple? Or why the camera moves on the dolly from left to right in "The Killing"? Or who that artist Ryan O'Neal was referring to during the art-room scene in "Barry Lyndon"? I never did, and I imagine most people don't either. Which is what makes this book so problematic. Stanley Kubrick was a legendary perfectionist, and his work seems to have inspired a similar level of meticulousness in authors who write about him. This book analyzes Kubrick's 10 feature films down to the minutest detail (his first two brief features and "Spartacus," in which he was a director for hire, have been wisely glossed over), and the effect can be a bit stultifying. To be sure, the author comes up with some interesting tid bits about the great filmmaker's work, but just how accurate is all this? Kubrick has been known to pooh-pooh this sort of treatment of his work, and it's easy to see why: In writing about "Full Metal Jacket," Nelson refers to a scene where the character named Cowboy is dying and there's a burning building in the background that looks like the monolith in "2001." The author says that is Kubrick's way of signalling an evolutionary moment. In fact, Kubrick said in a 1987 Rolling Stone interview that the structure's resemblance to the "2001" monolith is just a coincidence. Even more bizarre is the book's near-total absense of any criticism. It is almost entirely descriptive. He mentions in the postscript that "Eyes Wide Shut" is one of Kubrick's "finest achievements" and he criticizes parts of "The Shining" but otherwise fails to note what works and what doesn't in these films. There are some fun parts in this book, but it is weighed down by its leaden prose and heavy-handed academic style.

A wonderful view:
There can be no greater praise for a book about Kubrick than to say that it is worthy of its subject. This one is. The opening chapter gives the bare biographical facts, and attempts to dispel a few of the myths about Kubrick's personality - not least the idea that, for example, a man's real or journalistically endowed flying phobia should have the least relevance for a viewer or a critic of his films. The next chapter analyses the early films up to the first masterpiece, Paths of Glory; and each subsequent film (except for the compromised Spartacus) has a chapter to itself. Nelson's critiques are detailed, comprehensive, thoroughly readable and constructive - which is to say, favourable. He appreciates the films and wishes others to appreciate them too. This revised and expanded edition contains, in the first chapter, a charming tribute to the director and, in two new chapters, analyses of Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut which show that, in the intervening years between The Shining and the present, Nelson's abilities have diminished as little as Kubrick's. All the essays in the book can be read and enjoyed for their own sake - I was especially fond of the one on A Clockwork Orange, long before I was able to see the film itself - but they will also make you long to be back there in the dark, sharing the artist's vision with the eyes Nelson has widened for you.