Review: 'The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film'

Horror movies are horror movies because they're scary, but there are many more reasons to watch them than the thrill of a good jolt. For the most veteran, and therefore calloused, of horror viewers, the possibility of being scared is a hell of a lot less likely than simply enjoying some rich Gothic atmosphere, cool monster makeup, the fine acting and directing one finds in a good movie of any genre, or, for the baser of us, vats of gore. You know who you are.

Review: 'Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust'

David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust is as notable for the look of the glammed-out alien as it is for the spectacular music Bowie made during the Ziggy years. That would be irritating if Bowie hadn't brought such high artistry to the bizarre makeup, outfits, and hair dyes he donned while in character. Bowie believed that no photographer was nearly as qualified to capture his Zigginess as Mick Rock was. Bowie paid Rock the highest compliment an artist of such visual audacity could pay a photographer when he said of Rock "[he] sees [me] the way [I] see [myself]... [he sees me] through [my] own eyes."

Bowie freaks with cash to burn could see Rock seeing Bowie through his own eyes to their hearts' content when the duo published Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust in 2002. A luxurious volume with text by Bowie and images by Rock, Moonage Daydream was a remarkable insiders' view of the alien, although its limited edition release made it extremely hard to come by. It sold out in just months.

For Moonage's twentieth anniversary, and Ziggy's fiftieth, Genesis Publications is reprinting the book in a larger format and in larger quantities. It's a beautiful package full of great pictures from studio shoots, candid ones, live shots, and even music videos stills. Bowie appears with Lou Reed and Jagger and Lulu and Marianne Faithfull (in her nun's habit, of course), and Rock includes some stray shots of compatriots such as Iggy Pop and Roxy Music to illustrate the narrative. Bowie discusses how Daniella Parmar, Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, Kabuki, Lindsay Kemp, and Bewitched (yes, Bewitched) influenced the look the book celebrates. There is also a comically high number of shots showing Bowie fellating Mick Ronson's guitar. But my favorite bit is a short anecdote about a potentially disastrous, underpopulated gig in St. Louis that turned out to be what sounds like a magically intimate affair shared between artist and audience. In some ways, that's what Moonage Daydream is too.

Review: 'The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers'

The auteur theory tends to get overstated when examining the very collaborative art of filmmaking. Nevertheless, the most distinctive directors do tend to have the final say when it comes to the look and philosophy of the films they manage. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of cinema could identify a film that, say, Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, or Steven Spielberg directed from just a single carefully selected still frame. Other very famous directors, such as Robert Wise and Billy Wilder, are less identifiable by visual style than they are by point of view (Wise: optimistic; Wilder: pessimistic). Plus, directors have flashy jobs that require a certain gregariousness, or at least a big mouth. Hunching over a typewriter like Robert Towne or adjusting a lens like Gregg Toland is not as attention-getting as DeMille shouting through a megaphone in his jodhpurs.

Sloan De Forest's new book The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers celebrates these most celebrated people to work behind the cameras. Like other volumes published in Turner Classic Movies' series of film studies, The Essential Directors consists of short entries each with a bit of background history, a bit of critical assessment, a few recommendations for representative works, and lots and lots of fabulous photos. More so than the series' volumes on horror films and summer movies I've reviewed here on Psychobabble, The Essential Directors refuses to rock the boat too much with its selections, mostly only straying from the household-name canon to acknowledge that white men didn't always helm movies with entries on Oscar Micheaux, Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, and Elaine May. Consequently, those are among the book's most interesting and informative entries. De Forest could have diversified his selection a lot more if he did not limit himself to directors who worked in Hollywood before 1975, but I guess that would have been outside the scope of TCM's programming.

Review: 'Adapting Stephen King Volume 1: Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining from Novel to Screenplay'

Joseph Maddrey begins Adapting Stephen King Volume 1 with the statement that Stephen King is in the Guinness Book of World's Records as the guy whose work has inspired more movies than any other writer. That means Maddrey really has his work cut out for him since Volume 1 only covers adaptations of King's first three novels published under his own name, and it covers the scripting processes of Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining in great detail. He follows King's debut from its early stages as an apparently disappointing adaptation from revered screenwriter Stirling Silliphant through Lawrence D. Cohen's unquestionably successful adaptation. Along the way he explains where the drafts veer from King's source material, analyzes how those alterations affect the story, and explains how the directors and actors' interpretations of the scripts alter the work further. Maddrey also gets into the reinterpretations as each of King's first three novels have been brought to screens large and small more than once.

Maddrey's approach is as resourceful as his information is thorough and insightful. Adapting Stephen King Volume 1 is mainly a novel-to-script-to-screen study, but it also includes oral history interludes and interviews with the screenwriters responsible for the most significant adaptations (the only screenwriter he does not personally interview is King himself; oddly, he selects an interview from the run-up to Kubrick's Shining in 1979 to illustrate the section on the Shining miniseries King spearheaded in 1997). Clearly, a lot of work went into this book which means it will likely be years before he gets around to my favorite King novel, It. Get cracking, Maddrey.

Review: 'Underexposed! The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made'

Films that stall out before production have always held an allure for cineastes. What might have been if Hammer Films really had made that adaptation of Vampirella starring Barbara Leigh in the seventies? What if The Beatles really did star in an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings for Stanley Kubrick? What if the Stones played the droogs in a Kubrick-less Clockwork Orange or if Robert Rodriguez had remade Barbarella with Rose McGowan or David Lynch and Mark Frost had made a zany Steve Martin/Martin Short comedy called One Saliva Bubble? 

Joshua Hull runs through 50 of these "what ifs" in Underexposed! The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made. The crypto-movies he discusses are always most interesting when there is sufficient details about what they would have entailed. An entry on Neill Blomkamp's Alien 5 is essentially pointless since Hull provides no information about the treatment or script aside from a description of a few pieces of concept art. When details are sparse, the author provides synopses of the attached filmmakers' movies that were actually produced, which doesn't really scratch the itch this book promises to scratch, and his pun-heavy text is an acquired taste. But when Hull relays sufficient details about a Tim Burton-era Batman sequel featuring Nicolas Cage as Scarecrow and Courtney Love as Harley Quinn, a William Dozier-era one in which Adam West's Batman and Yvonne Craig's Batgirl would have faced off against Godzilla, and Steven Soderbergh's proposed 3-D musical about Cleopatra with songs by Guided by Voices, Underexposed! earns its keep. 

The book's what-if poster art is generally very cool too, but it would have been even cooler if all of the artists had made an effort to recapture the poster art style of the given film's era as Dave O'Flanagan (the unproduced John Hughes romp Oil & Vinegar), Nick Taylor (David Cronenberg's pre-Schwarzenegger Total Recall), Rachael Sinclair (Vampirella), and Mary Levy (Batman vs. Godzilla) did.

Review: 'Stanley Kubrick Produces'

Stanley Kubrick is one of the most recognizable and revered film directors and arguably the one who most effectively and indelibly smuggled big ideas and experimental storytelling into mainstream cinemas. However, a close look at his career reveals that Kubrick put a lot more of himself into producing than directing. Over the final three decades of his career, he directed only five films, but he was constantly busy with distribution, marketing, home video releases, dubbing for foreign markets, etc. And he lavished all the attention on this unglamorous stuff that he expended on his directing. Ultimately, his obsession with every facet of production so consumed his time that he could direct only one picture in the final twelve years of his life.

I'm a major Kubrick fan, and I've read several books about him, but I didn't quite grasp why his career was as odd as it was until reading James Fenwick's Stanley Kubrick Produces. Bolstered with a tremendous amount of research in the Stanley Kubrick Archives at the University of the Arts London, Fenwick highlights how dedicated Kubrick was to maintaining control of his work from the very beginning of his career. It began with media spin in the days when he wanted to project the idea that he had more control than he really did and he tended to bungle his productions. He made the ultimate blunder when he and partner James B. Harris signed a contract with Kirk Douglas's production company that gave the actor far more say than it gave Kubrick. 

The interesting takeaway from Stanley Kubrick Produces that Fenwick doesn't overemphasize is that Kubrick's obsession with control was often about creating and presenting his work as well as he possibly could. It may seem crazy for a producer to get involved in how his movies are dubbed for foreign markets, which is a task usually farmed out to companies that specialize in that kind of work. However, anyone who has ever seen a film dubbed with flat, unengaged voices knows how integral voice acting is to the effectiveness of a film. Kubrick was rightly offended by attempts to market Paths of Glory as a blood and guts war movie or 2001: A Space Odyssey as pulp sci-fi and one can understand why an artist of his caliber would want to get involved in that side of the business for the sake of how the world approached his art. While the many mistakes documented in Stanley Kubrick Produces expose Kubrick as not as infallible as some fans consider him to be, and his attempts to subvert labor union rules were downright immoral, the infamous obsessiveness it also documents only highlights how complete his artistry was.

Review: 'Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks'

No new filmmaker of the late twentieth-century reached for that brass ring like Paul Thomas Anderson. While most seemed content to ape Tarantino, Anderson made clear his aspirations to join the looming likes of Kubrick, Altman, and Malick: filmmakers of preternatural vision and ambition. Although Anderson never made any bones about his film-geek touchstones (the most reductive of critics labeled Boogie Nights his “Scorsese,” Magnolia his “Altman,” There Will Be Blood his “Kubrick,” and so on), Anderson’s films were still preciously personal and wholly original in their own rights. Each new release was an event, especially as his schedule slowed to a crawl in the twenty-first century.

Psychobabble’s Favorite Year at the Movies: 1968!

A somewhat recent trend in cinema studies finds writers naming their choice for the best year in movies and penning full-length arguments to back up their picks. There have been a couple of books arguing in favor of the year of The Wizard of Oz  (yay!) and Gone with the Wind (gag!). I have not read Charles F. Adams’s 1939: The Making of Six Great Films from Hollywood’s Greatest Year or Thomas S. Hischak’s 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year, though I have read and reviewed Brian Rafferty’s Best. Movie. Year.Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen and Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan’s Cinema ’62. I enjoyed both of those books very much even though I do not share the respective writers’ opinions that 1999 or 1962 are cinema’s best years. They did get me thinking about my personal choice, though, and let’s be honest, all of these books are nothing if not expressions of their writers’ personal tastes. I’ve settled on 1968.

Review: 'Stephen King at the Movies: A Complete History of the Film and Television Adaptations from the Master of Horror'

Early in Stephen King at the Movies: A Complete History of the Film and Television Adaptations from the Master of Horror, Ian Nathan drops some stunning statistics. Apparently, the Master has written or inspired some 65 movies, 30 TV programs, and 7 episodes of TV anthology series. That must be some sort of record, and it certainly justifies the existence of a book like Nathan’s. Fortunately, the author knew just what to do with this overdue project.

Stephen King at the Movies is part photo book, sneering with nasty full-color images culled from the many King screen works, as well as some neat behind-the-scenes looks at these films and shows’ creations. Nathan does not allow the photos to do all the heavy lifting though. He supplies satisfying making-of accounts and critiques of each of the numerous pictures he discusses in an entertaining tone appropriate to his subject matter and with the critical distance to acknowledge that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is great despite what King says and that the King-approved mini-series version is thoroughly mediocre.

For the most part, Nathan allows a couple of pages to pore over each film, but for the cream of this creepy crop—Carrie, The Shining, Misery, Stand by Me, etc.—he devotes as many as eight pages. Along the way, there’s some interesting trivia, such as a nuggets about how Warner Bros. offered Stanley Kubrick The Exorcist and Warren Beatty almost played the James Caan role in Misery. Visual and textual fun, Stephen King at the Movies should keep fans occupied as they suffer the always brief wait for another King project to splatter across the screen.

Review: 'Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film'

From his decision to adapt the scandalous Lolita to the world-annihilating cynicism of Dr. Strangelove to the unflinching anti-storytelling of 2001 to the horrific physical and psychological violence of A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick made a career of shocking viewers. He seemed to save up his most unrelenting succession of shocks for what turned out to be his final film. Kubrick’s decision to film a lengthy orgy extreme enough for U.S. censors to demand its actions be obscured with digital censors was shocking. That the film required an excruciating 18 months to shoot was shocking. The way the long, long, long awaited film from the man many rated as cinema’s greatest living artist baffled, repelled, and bored many viewers was shocking. Kubrick’s sudden death shortly after completing the first cut of Eyes Wide Shut was the biggest shock of all.

Even if you are among those viewers who loathe Eyes Wide Shut, the shocking nature of its making may still compel you to read Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film. Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams uncover new shocks that enrich the story of an already labyrinthian film. Although I knew that the film gestated in Kubrick’s mind for a long time, I was surprised that it did so for as many as 40 years. Kolker and Abrams imply that Kubrick’s obsession with bringing Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle to the screen may have infused much of his earlier work, including Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining (Kubrick annotated his copy of Stephen King’s novel with ideas for scenes that seem straight out of Schnitzler’s), and unproduced projects such as Burning Secret and Laughter in the Dark. Though there is a lot of humor in the finished product (particularly in its oft-misunderstood orgy sequence), I was also surprised by the wealth of evidence that Kubrick seriously considered adapting Traumnovelle as a comedy, and that he’d considered casting Woody Allen and Steve Martin in the lead role and communicated with Terry Southern about writing it.

While I noticed at least one exaggeration (Kolker and Abrams called the Eyes Wide Shut shoot history’s longest, but the 12-year shoot of Boyhood and the 5-year shoot of Eraserhead easily beat its 18 months), the book is well researched (materials include Kubrick’s personal faxes and notes he made on scripts and in books) and doesn’t oversell its conclusions. I’m not sure if it will spur Eyes Wide Shut haters to reevaluate the film, but Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film will give them some fresh insight into the seemingly impenetrable mind of Stanley Kubrick.

Review: 'Kubrick’s Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick'

Stanley Kubrick’s work is often more like world’s you visit than movies you watch. The galactic emptiness of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The grimy yet candy-colored near-future dystopia of A Clockwork Orange. The cavernous, ice-encrusted hotel of The Shining. The opulent dream vision of NYC in Eyes Wide Shut. The oil painting landscapes and chiaroscuro interiors of Barry Lyndon. Even the desolate suburbs of Lolita are inhabitable environments that engulf you, shutting out any trace of our real world for two or three hours. Kubrick put an absurd amount of thought into how to best create these fully dimensional worlds visually, but he put a great deal of thought into the sounds swirling between their borders as well. He’d spend hour upon hour researching music, and the fruits of his labors are clear to anyone who cannot separate the visuals of great spacecraft tumbling through the cosmos without hearing “The Blue Danube Waltz” or a tiny car traversing a treacherous path swarmed by foreboding forests without hearing Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s “Dies Irae”.

Much of the music to which Kubrick bestowed additional dimensions can be heard on El Records’ Kubrick’s Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick. This set is both fascinating and frustrating. It is frustrating because so many essentials are not present. The Shining’s sprawling soundtrack is largely reduced to the jazz-age tracks Kubrick used to stir the ghosts of the Overlook’s bloody past. “Dies Irae” only appears within Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”, a stirring piece of bombast far removed from The Shining’s brooding tone. Carlos and Elkind’s chilling synth production is not present. The same is true of the synthesized music from A Clockwork Orange: the pieces only appear in traditionally orchestrated versions. While we get an eerie prelude by Ralph Vaughan Williams that Kubrick considered using in the stargate sequence of 2001, we do not get the more transformative and disturbing Ligeti piece he ultimately used in the film. While pop songs are present in the use of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” (Dr. Strangelove), Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (A Clockwork Orange), and a non-soundtrack song Sue Lyon sang on the B-side of the “Lolita Ya-Ya” single, none of the great pop songs used in Full Metal Jacket appear. In fact, that film, as well as Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, is completely unrepresented.

However, some of these issues also point to one of the more fascinating aspects of Kubrick’s Music since we get to hear much of what inspired Kubrick to use the music he ultimately used, and the inclusion of discarded ideas such as the Ralph Vaughan Williams prelude makes Kubrick’s Music a sort of enlightening look at Kubrick’s musical sketchpad. So while this is hardly a definitive collection of Kubrick soundtracks, it is an educational one, and with such great pieces as John Coltrane’s “Greensleeves”, Nelson Riddle’s “Lolita Ya Ya”,  Rimskey-Korsokav’s “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” (incidentally, a piece shut out of the original Clockwork Orange soundtrack), and several movements from Ludwig Van’s glorious “Ninth”, there is quite a lot of gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh to slooshy, o my brothers.

5 Superior Adaptations of Horror Lit

Adapting literature for the cinema is always tricky, and this can be especially true when dealing with stories intended to raise shivers. What is terrifyingly evocative on the page can flop like a sack of wet leaves when realized with a dude in a zip-up monster suit on screen. Acts unimaginably awful when described cease to play on the imagination when depicted with a rubber knife and karo-syrup blood. Some of horror’s greatest literary works, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, It, and I Am Legend, have never received ideal screen adaptations. Some page-to-screen trips have been more lateral with stories such as Frankenstein and Dracula offering very different yet equally essential elements when turned into movies or ones such as The Haunting of Hill House and Rosemary’s Baby being faithful enough to be genuine cases of “six of one/half dozen of another.” On occasion, a film goes above and beyond, reinventing the story upon which it is based in ways that make the original text virtually irrelevant. Here are five of those superior horrors.

Monsterology: Monster Houses

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Welcome home! You’ve had a tough day digging ditches in some inhospitable mound of dirt or hacking away at a keyboard in an even less homey office cubicle. What you need now is to hang up your boots and settle into your lazy boy. Your home is your castle, your one bit of security and privacy in an increasingly insecure and inprivate world. It is so inprivate that we have to make up new words like “inprivate” to indicate how inprivate it is.

But wouldn’t it be a stone drag if you were settling in to relax in your sanctuary and the walls started bulging unnaturally or bleeding even more unnaturally? Wouldn’t it simply ruin your night if that thing you haven’t even finished paying the mortgage on yet sucked your precious little daughter into the electrical system or made you want to pick up an axe and chop up your precious little son?

Monsters come in all shapes, sizes, and smells, but one thing that unites the mass of them from werewolves to robots is that they somehow resemble organic beings. One of the few exceptions is the monstrous house. The fact that it has no arms or legs or teeth makes the monster house highly unusual and really very wrong (though not completely beyond anthropomorphization, as we shall see). The fact that a house is such a mundane thing, a thing intended to protect and comfort, makes it highly insidious, especially when it turns against the children who dwell in it, as it so often does.

First of all, we must distinguish the monster house from the haunted house. In a haunted house, the monster is some form of ghost. It may make the windows rattle or the chairs fall over, but that ghost is the central threat, not the place it chooses to haunt. That would be like blaming Dracula’s castle for the vampire’s poor behavior, which would be unfair to a perfectly fine castle. The nasty things a ghost does can be accomplished by any breathing, visible asshole. Ghosts or other such entities may be responsible for making a monster house monstrous, but a true monster house takes on a life of its own; it is the threat.

The first truly enduring monster house remains the definitive one. Published in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” largely passed over specifics to dwell on off putting descriptions of the title building. The unnamed narrator approaches the house, and it instantly casts its spell on him, bashing him with waves of depression and unease. He has not even interacted with its weird inhabitants before getting a very strong sense that the House of Usher is a bad place. He even emphasizes its inherent monstrousness by trying to describe it in anthropomorphic terms, noting its “vacant and eye-like windows.”

Is it the house that has seemingly poisoned Roderick and Madeline Usher, both of whom suffer from odd maladies such as Roderick’s intense aversion to sound and his sister’s general malaise and tendency to lapse into catatonic states? Is it responsible for the subtextual moral decay of the siblings, whose relationship may not be entirely platonic? As the narrator drifts through the foreboding house, it reacts violently to the presence of one who might uncover its strange and dirty secrets. It begins cracking in disapproval. When the ultimate abomination comes to light—Roderick’s premature burial of catatonic Madeline—the house has a total nervous breakdown. As the short story’s title spoils, the House of Usher falls—quite literally. The building collapses, claiming the poisoned siblings as its victims while the narrator manages to escape the domestic tomb. In a perversion of home security, the house would rather self-destruct than allow its family’s ugly secrets come to life, even if that means wiping out the family in the process.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 290

The Date: July 16

The Movie: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

What Is It?: The idea that a nation would annihilate another, guaranteeing itself annihilation, is so monumentally moronic that it is hard to believe anyone would conceive of such a thing in the first place. The total absurdity of all this hit Stanley Kubrick with a massive wallop while he was trying to decide how to adapt Peter George’s novel Red Alert for the screen. Not only did Kubrick decide to adapt it as a comedy, but he decided to make it one as over-the-top as a Three Stooges short. However, the themes and agenda are so immensely dark (and the finale so exhilaratingly nihilistic) that Dr. Strangelove is almost as much of a horror movie as it is a comedy.

Why Today?: On this day in 1945, the first atomic bomb test takes place.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 280

The Date: July 6

The Movie: The Killing (1956)

What Is It?: Stanley Kubrick’s first significant film takes the standard heist-gone-wrong scenario and transforms it into something audacious with boggled chronology, bizarre characterizations, and clown masks. Culty character actors populate the cast of miscreants with Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., and Timothy Carey really standing out even though this is definitely Sterling Hayden’s movie. The finale, which involves a bunch of bucks fluttering all over a tarmac, is beautiful and ruthless. In other words: it’s Kubrick.

Why Today?: On this day in 1785, the dollar becomes the official monetary unit of the United States.

Review: 'Stanley Kubrick and Me'

In late 1970, a former formula-one race car driver and current minicab driver received an assignment to deliver a large porcelain phallus to a movie set in Thamesmead. The driver was Emilio D’Alessandro. The sculpture would end up being used by Malcolm McDowell as a murder weapon in A Clockwork Orange. The film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, would end up hiring D’Alessandro as his driver. Despite strict British Union rules, that job also entailed being Kubrick’s personal maid, librarian, TV repairman, deliveryman, shopper, translator (for conversations with Federico Fellini!), veterinarian, dog groomer, tour guide for when his parents were in town, condom smuggler, and defender against everyone who believed the myths that Kubrick was a tyrant or a whack job.

Eighteen years after Kubrick’s death, Emilio D’Alessandro continues to serve in that latter role with his new memoir Stanley Kubrick and Me. Kubrick’s infamously demanding nature is on full display in this book, and D’Alessandro is frank about the strain his 24-hour-a-day work schedule put on his own marriage, but the author never has an unkind word to say about the legendary filmmaker. Consequently, Stanley Kubrick and Me serves a valuable function in the already massive Kubrick bibliography by truly humanizing the legend. Through D’Alessandro’s stories we learn of Kubrick’s tendency to be scatterbrained despite his reputation for being robotically methodical, helpless despite his reputation for being in complete control of his work, and utterly dependent on fellow humans despite his reputation for making chilly films about dehumanization. We get a very intimate look at Kubrick’s love for animals, and the only thing that really makes him lose his shit is when something goes wrong with one of his many pets. We learn of his extreme generosity, such as when he offers to care for D’Alessandro’s children after the driver’s wife loses her father and falls ill. We also learn about the limitations of Kubrick’s thoughtfulness. He calls D’Alessandro at all hours of the day for assistance and is baffled when another employee quits because of the job’s demands. Kubrick assumed that everyone was as devoted to work as he was. He could also be a real pain in the ass to his wife and daughters and possessed a wealth of quirks. D’Alessandro confirms the rumors that Kubrick was paranoid about journalists leaking his ideas and other filmmakers (such as Federico Fellini!) stealing them. Kubrick thought it strange that D’Alessandro wasn’t related to Francis Ford Coppola since they are both Italian. He was an incorrigible pack rat and a massive Danny DeVito fan. Kubrick’s love for and dependence on the author is also on full display and it makes for some truly touching moments.

With the assistance of writer Fillippo Uliovieri, D’Alessandro tells his stories without an ounce of pretension, and the charming, regular-guy simplicity of the storytelling further emphasizes the main thrust of Stanley Kubrick and Me: Kubrick was extraordinary in multitudinous ways, but when it comes down to it, he was still pretty down-to-earth and a real, flesh-and-blood human being.

Review: Criterion's 'Dr. Strangelove' Blu-ray

Stanley Kubrick had been an audacious filmmaker since he’d made his flawed debut Fear and Desire and a great one since he’d made The Killing, but with Lolita, he truly hit upon the qualities that made him a giant by combining the scandalous with the satirical and presenting it with grand scope. Lolita was a great film, but even its most loyal fans had to admit that he mostly skirted the scandalous nature of Nabokov’s novel (by necessity of course… that book would still be pretty impossible to film faithfully today). With his next project, he let its scandalous nature drop on audiences like a bomb, and his decision to film Peter George’s Cold War doomsday thriller Red Alert as the most absurd satire he’d ever make did not blunt its scandalousness one iota. In fact, by making asses of the U.S. military and Soviet leadership and highlighting the U.S. President’s complete inability to juggle them, he made an already controversial story even more daring.

Decades beyond the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, remains a towering piece of cinema because of its heroic ability to laugh in the face of disaster—and not just the threat of disaster, but a disaster that actually comes to pass in the film (errr, spoiler alert)—and its power to still make us laugh. Nuclear annihilation is probably the most serious, horrifying event imaginable, but Kubrick treats the topic with helium-huffing silliness. There are a few relatively serious characters to ground the story in reality—President Merkin Muffley and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (pay no attention to their names. They’re serious.), both played by master clown Peter Sellers, ironically enough—but the rest of the cast is totally gonzo with Slim Pickens as a shit-kickin’ air force captain, Keenan Wynn as a dense Colonel who frets about the consequences of shooting a Coke machine, Sterling Hayden as the monstrous embodiment of McCarthy paranoia, and Sellers, again, as a Nazi mad-scientist with some pretty grotesque ideas about saving the remaining human race.

While most of Stanley Kubrick’s films have been readily available in hi-def in the United States since the dawn of blu-ray, Dr. Strangelove has been an odd duck, going in and out of print as a stand-alone release. After all this high jinks, the Criterion Collection that is now releasing a gorgeously high-contrast, beautifully detailed, naturally grained blu-ray of one Kubrick’s and cinema’s finest, and there will now be no question that this is the definitive home-video version of Dr. Strangelove.

Three and a half hours of bonus materials cover nearly every aspect of the film that begs for further exploration. The film’s essential history (a 46-minute documentary called “Inside Dr. Strangelove”); portraits of Kubrick (“The Art of Stanley Kubrick”), Sellers (“Best Sellers”), and Peter George; a documentary that puts the film in the context of its troubled times (“No Fighting in the War Room”); period interviews with Kubrick, Sellers, and George C. Scott; and assorted retrospectives by film historians lead the pack.  Much of this stuff has slipped out on previous editions of the film, but it gets the job done well enough to warrant rerelease here.

The big surprise among the bonus material is a 14-minute featurette starring Richard Daniels, the senior man at the Stanley Kubrick Archives. This is a Kubrick geek’s dream as Daniels leads us through oodles of memorabilia, props, script drafts, press packs, projectionist directives, and letters. He shows off the original memo from the U.S. Air Force demanding a disclaimer be plopped on the beginning of the film and reveals Kubrick’s casting wish list from the days before Red Alert went silly (Burt Lanchaster as the president, Orson Welles as the Russian ambassador…).

The final cherry on this cherry bomb is the coolest packaging I’ve ever seen on a Criterion release. An essay by David Bromwich is typed up as a reproduction of the Top Secret Attack Plan R from the film. Another by Strangelove-screenwriter Terry Southern is printed in a phony girly magazine complete with hilarious ads and centerfold of Ms. Foreign Affairs. The technical specs are printed in a miniature Bible/Rooshan phrase book, and all of these goodies are packaged in a recreation of the envelope that houses the attack plan in the film. The only things that are missing are chewing gum, lipsticks, and prophylactics. Shoot, a fella’ could still have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with this blu-ray.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 183

The Date: March 31

The Movie: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

What Is It?: Stanley Kubrick films the unfilmable, but in a much different way than he did with Lolita or 2001. Kubrick makes a profound statement about the morality of extreme versions of punishment by introducing the world to one of cinema’s most grotesquely immoral characters. Malcolm McDowell plays him with so much charm that you’ll feel really icky for enjoying his company.

Why Today?: On this day in 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code is established. 41 years later, it slapped an X on A Clockwork Orange. Deserved or undeserved? Feel free to debate below.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 107

The Date: January 15

The Movie: Full Metal Jacket (1987)

What Is It?: Stanley Kubrick constructs a horrifying before-and-after portrait of the military as young recruits are turned into mindless machines of war by a cruel drill sergeant before being set loose in Vietnam to put their programming to work. The first half is impossible to top, but the second half ends with satisfying dread and awesome use of "Paint It Black".

Why Today?: On this day in 1973, Nixon announces the end of America’s offensive action in Vietnam.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 99

The Date: January 7

The Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

What Is It?: The greatest science-fiction movie ever made is more of a trip backwards and forwards in time than a science-fiction movie. Shut the lights. Get close to the big screen. You’ll munch on twigs and tapirs with ape people. You’ll walk upside down in space capsules. You’ll float in the terrifying emptiness of space. You’ll rocket through a psychedelic star gate and descend to Jupiter’s weird terrain. You’ll sink deeply into the limitless brilliance of Stanley Kubrick’s brain.

Why Today?: On this day In 1610, Galileo announces he has discovered the first three satellites of Jupiter.