In The Shadow of The Brutalist
Yes, The Brutalist is long. It’s pretentious. It’s ambitious and unapologetically grand. But this is what makes it interesting. It’s a film that forces you to bear witness to an unchecked ego and sit with that discomfort. Far from being a stock tale of genius, the film is a complex (and flawed) meditation on the forces that can elevate and destroy a man.
The Greatest Movie Never Made: Kubrick’s Napoleon vs. Bondarchuk’s Waterloo
In late 1969, Stanley Kubrick was busy. His career-defining 2001: A Space Odyssey had been an enormous directorial and technical success, he was in the middle of editing the dystopian A Clockwork Orange, and beginning to circle what he thought would be his next grand project, a definitive biographic story of Napoleon. Like all Kubrick projects, especially those following 2001: A Space Odyssey, the process for developing the script, and the sheer effort which went into the production was total. For years, Kubrick had planned to create a biographical film of Napoleon’s life, and had engaged hundreds of production staff in gathering as much information as possible about the era. From costumes, interiors, historical records, surviving written evidence, academic historiography, everything was completely exhaustive, and all of it would go into the creation of what Kubrick believed would be one of the greatest historical films ever made.