Posted on 08/15/2019 1:45:47 PM PDT by C19fan
The Stanley Kubrick exhibition at London’s Design Museum examines the making of every one of the extraordinary director’s films. But its opening section is devoted to a film he didn’t make: a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. As odd as that might seem, Kubrick fans are almost as fixated on Napoleon – to use its working title – as they are on anything else in his awe-inspiring canon. Critics regularly hail it as the greatest and most tantalising unfinished film of all. Besides, the story of how Napoleon was nearly-but-not-quite made exemplifies Kubrick’s sky-high ambition, his ravenous intellectual curiosity and his obsessive planning. “We put the display upfront because it’s a beautiful illustration of his process,” says Adrienne Groen, the co-curator of the Design Museum’s exhibition. “You can see his methods, and the amount of material he gathered before he even started.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
What about QTarantino’s remake of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! starring Britney Spears?
The Britny needs a hand up
The other thing that bothers me about the movie is the location filming in England. I can’t get passed it because it looks nothing like America, and the American backdrop is crucial to the novel.
A very under rated movie at the time. Probably still is.
Not every Kubrick movie was great. I loved 2001 at the time and was amazed by the special effects, terrific for the time. I showed it to my adult kids a few years ago and they wondered what I liked about it. Way, way too slow. Relied on the special effects to cover for a plot that plodded. Did not age well.
It was filmed in England? I didn’t know that.
One thing Kubrick did was he put the end part of the book as the very first scene of his adaptation. That didn’t work at all for those who had read the novel. Kubrick was known for taking liberties like that and in my opinion, it would have been much better to try and keep the film rich with the source material, as the end part of that novel is the absolute best part and he put it out of chronological order to try to be edgy and different. Doesn’t work for me.
While we’re talking about it, Shelly Winters was very good as the wife in that film.
Didn’t Osborne pass away recently or am I thinking of someone else. ?
I too saw it with a full orchestra, but didn’t know that they found more footage. I wonder if it is available on Blu-ray disc. I would really like to see it again.
Yes he did pass recently. But he made the comments about Lolita while he was alive.
Shelly Winters used her annoying mannerisms to perfection. It may be her best performance.
There were a number of areas in which my mostly excellent education was deficient.
The importance of Napoleon was one of them.
The British version does not have Coppola's score. It has a score by Carl Davis. Davis is a veteran composer of music for silent films, and he has done splendid scores for Keaton and Lloyd comedies and dramas like The Big Parade. His score is primarily arrangements of music by classical composers like Beethoven and Mozart. Davis's score was used when the film was restored and shown back in the early 80's. I actually prefer Coppola's score. It was kind of cartoonish, but the movie is a bit cartoonish at times. I know there are plans for a USA Blu-ray release. I don't know if it will include Coppola's score. It would require some re-recording to fit scenes that are now longer than they originally were, and would need music to cover the new scenes that have been added.
An added feature of the Blu-ray is that the three screen tryptich can be watched alone on three TVs and three Blu-ray players. One of the discs has the left side of the tryptich, one the middle and one the right. Presumably, it would recreate on one's home theater the sensation of seeing it on the big screen without having to letterbox the tryptich. I have no idea how one is supposed to synch three players as this is something I will never do. Still, it's a cool feature for some.
You can see some screenshots that show how they have cleaned up the film HERE.
Thanx
I saw it years ago as well. It toured for a while. It was well made but the subject matter wasn’t my cup of tea. It was a bit like the Battleship Potemkin. Well done but glorifying communist revolution again wasn’t for me.
Since more of the film has been discovered since the early
80s, that makes things a bit problematic.
There have been three scores written for it: Davis’, Coppola's and Arthur Honegger’s (for the first screenings in the 20s.)
The difficulty would be new scenes. I still have not watched all of the Blu-ray (even though I have had it for a couple of years), so I am not sure how much is new material. There are several scenes involving the daughter of Tristan Fleury (the guy who is a cook during the Brienne scenes and who chews up some documents to save Bonaparte during the Reign of terror). She basically worships Bonaparte and has a little shrine to him. Her scenes are not all that great, IMO, but I imagine they would require a new theme as the "love theme" that Coppola composed would be reserved for Josephine. They will either have to come up with a new theme from another composer, or use an existing classical piece (Coppola used a few classical pieces in his original score just as Davis does).
Maybe I can make my way through the whole film this weekend. I keep putting it off. Watching silent movies can be tiring, because you cannot take your eyes of the picture and follow it as you can with a sound film.
ping
I also compared the look of the earlier release with the new one. It is truly night and day. The Blu-ray looks exactly like the screenshots in the link I posted earlier. The old version was rather crude-looking, with many shots so faded they had almost no gray in the frames. Many scenes in the original release are cobbled together from several sources, so the quality varies from shot to shot in some scenes. In this new version, there is no jumping from source to source. I don't know how they did it. I know there was a lot of digital work done, but they must have found more 35 mm source material than was available back around 1980. The movie looks like 35 mm throughout.
The Copppola version was also sped up a bit back in 1980. It had to do with keeping the running time under 4 hours so that New Yorkers could still catch mass transit in order to get home from Radio City Music Hall. This version uses the correct frame speed, so some of the increase in running time has to do with that. Tonight I am going to try to find time for the Seige of Toulon sequence.
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