THE SHINING

Warners fights back the mediocrity that plagued its previous Kubrick Collections with the psychological horror-show, THE SHINING. This might be the most consistently solid DVD in the set with a surprising commentary from Kubrick protégé and steadycam inventor, Garrett Brown. Unlike McDowell and Dullea, actors who provide contributions on previous tracks, Brown had rare access to Kubrick’s inner technical circle, having been at the center of one of cinema’s most notorious film shoots.

Six months over-schedule, a set engulfed in flames two-weeks before wrapping and a patient Spielberg twiddling his thumbs waiting months at Burnhamwood to shoot RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, Brown elaborates on many rumors, of which almost none were exaggerated, and provides the final word on the most infamous day of shooting in film history: Kubrick’s 130-takes of Scatman Caruthers in the kitchen of the Overlook Hotel. Legend has it that Scatman was driven to hysterics, weeping and wildly flailing his arms, in an effort to stop the madness. But Brown suspects these were calculated crocodile tears. It turns out Caruthers may have pulled one over on old Stanley orchestrating a stalemate with his rarely sympathetic director.

Brown provides further insight on his collaboration with Kubrick and the first studio film to shoot entirely with steadycam, the camera operator’s own invention. He paints a picture of Kubrick as a demanding auteur enamored with the professionalism and dedication of young Danny Lloyd, and disappointed in the martyrdom of his victim-star, Shelley Duvall.

Kubrick’s 17 year-old daughter, Vivian, filmed a now legendary documentary, “The Making of the Shining,” which is included on the DVD and proves Duvall to be a generous, certainly naive artist shocked on the day by the cruel tactics of her co-star, Jack Nicholson, and director Kubrick. In hindsight, though, you sense she understood what it would take to reach the emotional pitch required of the character, Wendy Torrance – a battered wife who discovers her husband has gone completely insane and is attempting to murder their son suffering from multiple-personality disorder. Duvall looks back on her experience, including the relentless pushing of her collaborators, with gratitude in the documentary’s interview, filmed one year after the infamous shoot. One can’t help but imagine how devastating the role was for the lovely Duvall, however, when you consider she never attempted a serious dramatic role again.

Nicholson was, of course, Kubrick’s muse in many ways, his latter-day Peter Sellers, having originally penned for the actor his dream project never to be, NAPOLEAN. Still, you get a sense Kubrick seized in the psychotic Jack Torrance an opportunity to exercise his own professional and personal demons taking cinematic revenge on the Fates in what critic Jack Kroll aptly calls ‘the first epic horror film ever made.’

CONTENTS: 1080p transfer and Commentary Track (Garrett Brown w/ film historian John Baxter); the Making of the Shining w/optional Commentary from Vivian Kubrick; 3 Production Featurettes; Theatrical Trailer.

EYES WIDE SHUT

“Isn’t that the wonderful thing about marriage? It requires both parties to enter into a kind of deception.”

The opening challenge from the mysterious Hungarian suitor to Nicole Kidman’s character is also the thesis of arguably Kubrick’s most personal film, EYES WIDE SHUT. Upon my generation’s Kubrick, the embattled picture released just two weeks after his untimely death, it became fashionable to prick the picture with pejoratives, like ‘clumsy’, ‘lugubrious’, and, this is the one that always baffled me, ‘out-of-touch’, as if having lived several decades away and thousands of miles from the storefronts of Manhattan proved the man knew nothing more of infidelity’s temptation. Determined to hold some kind of agency over the first film in the cannon that wasn’t an outright masterpiece, haters used the director’s hermitic reputation and the fact that he hadn’t made a film in over a decade as fodder for an agenda to humanize him – if he can fail, we can fail. Those closest to Stanley, of course, suggest in a worthy companion featurette perhaps this was the point of the work itself.

The tagline of EYES is telling here: CRUISE, KIDMAN, KUBRICK; a real-life celebrity super-marriage put to the test by 18-months behind the experimenting lens of Kubrick. The process, for the first time, became more interesting to him than the final product, recasting and retooling, it seemed, until his dying breath. Garret Brown suggests in his commentary on THE SHINING that we never saw Kubrick’s final vision, but rather a hasty edit turned in by a few hacks behind-the-curtain at Warners.

The long-awaited Director’s Cut quickly dispels that myth. Kubrick fans hoped, perhaps, he had a secret cut stowed away in the basement solving many of the film’s short-comings. Alas, all we get here are more delectable tits-and-ass in the final, limp orgy sequence, though the disc isn’t a complete let-down.

Two capable documentaries accompany EYES WIDE SHUT; one is a kind of riff on A LIFE IN PICTURES (the sentimental documentary distributed in the last SK Collection) called “The Last Film of Kubrick,” and the other is a look into the many lamentably orphaned projects called “The Lost Projects of Kubrick.” As mentioned, the most personally devastating of these lost films to Kubrick was NAPOLEAN, a film he shepherded through many years of pre-production, preliminary casting, budget finalizing, even a start date, only to see MGM pull the project weeks before shooting was to begin. The reason given was the competing Napoleon feature that simply got there first, the Rod Steiger vehicle from Paramount which, adding insult to injury, was a box-office bomb. As a consolation, Kubrick was to make the misunderstood chef-d'œuvre, BARRY LYNDON, some four years later, sans Nicholson.

The “Lost Projects” documentary goes on to interview Brian Aldis, the author of A.I.’s source material short, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” – a masterful film eventually grandfathered to Spielberg – as well as a brief description of WARTIME LIES, Kubrick’s holocaust picture. Here is another example of Kubrick simply late to the game; months before shooting, the cultural phenomenon of SCHINDLER’S LIST would compel the Jew from the Bronx to pull yet another personal film from production.

Hearing the background of these projects and their abandonment, one wonders what might have been had Warner’s had a little more faith in our greatest filmmaker to greenlight some these projects. In fact, one need only study the fortitude of FULL METAL JACKET at the box-office, a film released only months after the $150 million dollar Oscar cluster-fuck, PLATOON – a competing film in genre, no doubt, but stylistically two films never were more opposite. JACKET, in fact, went on to find its audience, a profit of $60 million (after worldwide and rentals), and is now considered by many veterans to be the most realistic war movie of all time.

Yet another superlative of many that could describe this giant’s definitive, towering, non-grad oeuvre.

CONTENTS: 1080p Rated and Unrated transfer; The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut documentary; Lost Kubrick: the Unfinished Films of Kubrick documentary; Interview Gallery featuring Cruise, Kidman and Spielberg; Kubrick’s 1998 D.W. Griffith Award Acceptance Speech; Theatrical Trailer and TV Spots.