One of the funniest lines I've heard in some time was uttered in a strangely touching comedy called Color Me Kubrick (2005). The line is delivered by one Alan Conway, a fellow who is impersonating director Stanley Kubrick. The fellow is bemoaning the insipidness of which he imagines Hollywood to be rife and says "The studio didn't think John Malkovich could carry the film." The reason this line evokes such a gut-warbling guffaw is that the actor saying the line is Mr. Malkovich himself.
Part of the irony spins on the fact that chances are pretty good you've not heard of this excellent film, just as chances are excellent that you do not know the story behind it, a condition that says very little about you personally but which speaks with terrible clarity about the condition of the popular media itself. Even the metal-heads and roustabouts in this movie know who Stanley Kubrick is--or was, now. Indeed, they know a great deal more about him than does Mr. Conway, the man who in real life went about during the filming of Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, impersonating the director in order to get the believers to pay for his lifestyle, one that includes substantial amounts of vodka, a contributing factor to Conway's ultimate demise.
Written by Anthony Frewin and directed by Brian W. Cook, Color Me Kubrick utilizes many of Kubrick's own devices to give us the giggles, although the laughter is probably reserved for those in the crowd familiar with the man's work. So, for instance, in the opening scene, we have a couple punk boys in the employ of a bar rounding a corner to the strains of music we recall from A Clockwork Orange, a music which has conditioned us to expect trouble. Sure enough, the boys are headed off to potentially commit some horrible ultra violence against an upper class couple. "I wonder who that could be?" the society man inquires of his wife at the ring of the doorbell. In other words, this devilish little comedy is simply chock full of self-referential bits that, again, will squeeze laughing fits from fans of the late auteur and should even woo the novices into checking out some of the director's great film. You know, like The Shining, Lolita, Spartacus, Judgment at Nuremberg. Pardon me? What's that? You say Kubrick did not direct Judgment at Nuremberg? You say that was Stanley Kramer who did it? Well, one can't be expected to know everything, now can one, especially since Conway didn't know it either and blew a gig when he was hitting on a gay young man who actually did know it.
Is Conway crazy? I don't think so. He did manage to get himself locked up in lieu of going to jail for his fraudulent activities. Indeed, he left the mental institution to go dry out at a nice resort-like facility frequented by the likes of actors and rock stars. He tells his boyfriend it's all an act to stay out of the slams. But we aren't certain. We remain unconvinced in part because Malkovich does carry the film so well that the ambiguity trembles on the vine. By the time we near the end, we're not even certain the man is gay, much less that he didn't have the whole thing planned from the start. Still, we don't want any harm coming to this phony because we keep getting hints that the real Conway does not much like himself and has adopted his felonious lifestyle for just that reason. If his masquerade comes undone, the reality of his life may be a bit more than he can bear and his tentative hold on reality may tumble and crash.
We would not like that.
Funny enough, about eight years ago I found myself in a similar situation. I had gone through a tremendous amount of money in an attempt to avoid coming to grips with the death of my loved ones and one day found myself with two nostrils filled with dried cocaine residue, a liver throbbing from alcohol abuse, and skin that more than anything else needed a touch of a suntan. I drove a car I had reported stolen to get the insurance money from Arizona to Ohio where I ingratiated myself among a group of people who believed me to be a psychiatrist. Fooling them was easy because they were actual psychiatrists themselves and they found my narcissistic personality to be quite appropriate to the occupation. I maintained this little masquerade for six weeks and was only revealed for a liar due to my unfortunate habit of talking in my sleep, no doubt the remnants of a guilty conscience. I share this bit of personal experience because (a) I think it's time to come clean about it, lo these many years, and (b) because even though I admit I took matters to more than an extreme, I certainly conned no one out of any money but rather simply occupied myself with the intellectual discussions that I probably would have never encountered had I actually been what I pretended to be.
I think Alan Conway may have been after something similar. Granted, he knew very little about the real Kubrick and looked almost nothing like the man. However, I suspect he was simply lonely and figured that people would like him if he were famous, which they did.
I told you it was a touching comedy.
As if to make up for the disappointing documentary about certain screenwriters, Tales from the Script, we certainly found some needed luck today when we came upon the unimaginably titled yet aptly named film Great Directors (2009). Director, actor and writer Angela Ismailos, a former political science graduate student and exciting filmmaker, pulls together interviews she conducted with some genuinely fascinating movie directors who indeed deserve the adjective "great." She talks with Bertolucci, Lynch, Cavani, Breillat, Sayles, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Todd Haybes and Richard Linklater. These men and women are not the people who direct the latest throw in some idiot franchise and they most likely have the supreme decency to have absolutely no idea who either Adam Sandler or Seth Rogan are. These men and women understand that everything people do has a political aspect, even if that aspect is to avoid being political. Bertolucci, who directed Last Tango in Paris, was an avowed communist. Catherine Breillat, who acted in Tango, is a fiery novelist and director who kicked down the sexual barriers to women in French films with her own brilliant A Real Young Girl (1976), a movie so disturbing it took twenty-three years for the film to be released. Ken Loach has been making great socialist realism films since the 1960s and yet chances are good you can't quite place either his name or some of his best pictures, including Which Side Are You On?, one hell of a fine documentary about police abuses and the spirit of youth, among other things. Ultimately, the two big Hollywood names here, John Sayles and David Lynch, get their due as rebels with cause; yet it's the so-called lesser-known talents who really pull us in and make us want to experience their films.
Ismailos earned any drink you'd care to buy her just for getting these people on camera.
Once again, you are cordially invited to join PhilroPost on May 30 for our first ever Summer Reading Spectacular.
Those of you inclined toward fast humor may choose to scroll low to discover our Twenty-three jokes scattered down amidst at those pesky adverts.
In the meantime, here comes the heat.
Hot Pages
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