Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999)

A timeless classic, and a must read for any horror authors.

The book manages to hold you in its grips for a long time before you even get a smidgen of information that answers anything! A story that bounces the idea of morality around like a plastic, inflated ball at a beach; effectively making the reader question their own sense of reality and the way in which one can let themselves become unknowing pawns in a reality that is bigger than life.

9/26/25 (cinema): Beautiful. I was rapt throughout. I think of it as a movie that requires effort, active attention, but even the Tron segment held me. The benefits of seeing movies at the theater. Also my interpretation was much more optimistic than last time -- the prehistoric monolith gifts pre-humans with a great leap forward in the form of tools, which are misused for violence and destruction, but they leave a second chance for us to discover once we've achieved space travel, and the show more ending is optimistic -- a new start, a reset.

6/25/23 (streaming): I felt so sad and depressed watching it. It all felt so hopeless and pointless -- the bone rotating in the sky, the whole great leap forward simply being the use of tools to exterminate each other, and for some reason some higher power, or higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe, sees fit to "gift" our species that special knowledge. And then a computer misbehaves because it's been set a mission without full information, and then there's 15 minutes of Tron, and then Dave is old and then a fetus facing the monolith. I accept it as a beautiful tone poem rather than an inscrutable narrative. Also the internet was acting up and causing it to pause every once in a while, only for a few seconds but it gets to be like water torture, drip drip. And I was trying not to order food, and so I instead let myself scroll Facebook, where I saw an article about the BBC doing a deep investigative dive into the market for animal torture. Rich westerners paying people in other countries to live-stream themselves torturing and killing baby monkeys. I don't like this world. I wish we weren't like this. I wish we'd never evolved. Imagine if we hadn't. Imagine if our genes had zigged instead of zagged, and the non-hominid -- or non-sapiens descendants of my pre-zig ancestors were now rustling through a jungle, foraging for leaves, threatened by disease and predators and rival tribes, but not wreaking destruction and brutal, gratuitous suffering in such great quantities that how has the universe itself not cracked and shattered? show less

NOTE: This is a review of the film, rather than of reading of the screenplay itself, and how it differs from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, Dream Story, which I’ve reviewed in detail HERE.

It was Stanley Kubrick’s final film, in 1999, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were still married to each other at the time (though they divorced soon afterwards). See imdb for details here.

The plot closely follows that of Dream Story, but it is a world away in time, place, and atmosphere. show more

The film is set in contemporary NYC, shortly before Christmas (rather than early spring in 1910s Vienna): there is an abundance of colourful lights and lavishly decorated trees in every home, shop, bar, and workplace. On a taxi ride, even ordinary street lights look like chains of festive lights.

Bill is less sympathetic on screen than Fridolin is on the page, and there is friction between him and Alice even before she confesses her fantasy (at his request).

The film is remarkably unerotic, despite plenty of nudity and brief glimpses of group sex.

But the most profound difference is that the film lacks the hypnotic, dreamy, enchanted aura of the book. This is partly because all Bill's adventures are unquestionably real, and hers unquestionably imagined. It lacks the subtle blurring of reality that is so distinctive in the book, though it indirectly acknowledges the possibility in the final scene, when they paraphrase several lines from the book. The realism of Bill’s exploits are partly because you see them on screen (without the visual or musical mist used for Alice’s), and also because there’s a new character, Ziegler, who connects many of the otherwise disjointed people and events.

There is sensual menace, though, at the secret society’s party, which is more of a mystical cult than I pictured from the book. Cold stone interiors, sinister masks, and a total lack of the festive gew-gaws that are ubiquitous in the rest of the film, collude to raise the pulse and seal the fear. show less

Seems more like Ed Wood than Stanley Kubrick! The opening voiceover is definitely a cross between the type of insane nonsense in a Wood film with a few Twilight Zone overtones--although this was a few years BEFORE the Twilight Zone debuted. The acting is pretty bad as well, topped by Mazursky quoting from the Tempest as he goes crazy. Are Harp and Coit playing dual roles meant to be symbolic--or is it just a sign of how cheap this film was? Kubrick can't be blamed for Howard Sackler's show more screenplay in any case, and the two of them went on to a much more enjoyable collaboration on Killer's Kiss. Watch that instead. show less