A few words about...™ Barry Lyndon -- in Blu-ray - Page 6

Marsnkc,

I've never been to Hyde Park Corner, but the next time I cross the pond, I'll try to drive past the place.
Would I find you there, standing on a soapbox as tall as your post above?

Are you comparing Stephen King to Shakespeare?
I wouldn't go there, if I were you.
Pruning the text has been going on in the theater and in films for a long, long time.

It is not arrogant for a grown-up to disregard a child's opinion when that opinion is naive and the grown-up knows better.

Cruise stinks in Eyes Wide Shut.
Everybody on the production knew that he stunk and knew that he was sinking the ship, but professional etiquette and the hierarchy of authority forbade them from saying so.
Everybody who acts or directs knows that he stinks in the film, including Cruise himself.
He should have had the professionalism to stand down and withdraw, but you know how ego gets in the way.

By the way, I respect and admire Barry Lyndon.
I read the novel and I studied up on Thackeray before going to see the film in 1975.
But I did not see in the novel the film that Stanley Kubrick saw.
What he saw, and how he accomplished it on film, took my breath away the first, second, and third time in 1975.
It still does.
It is a very special film.

Buy the Blu-ray.
Edited by Richard--W - 9/29/11 at 9:00pm

Try is the operative word. Stanley did it in a Porsche. At 30mph. Wearing a Full. Metal. Helmet.

Sorry to intrude but just a couple comments.

On Jack's performance in The Shining, it was what Kubrick wanted. Kubrick did ask his actors at times to push things over the top, Patrick Magee would have told you that. Sometimes subtle was not what Kubrick wanted in a performance.

On Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, I don't think he ruined the movie but he certainly was the wrong man for the job. The scene that I would point to is when Bill and Alice return home from the party and are smoking pot in their bedroom and Alice decides it is time to reveal some things about her secret inner life. This is really the moment that sets Bill off on his little sexual odyssey and Cruise plays the scene like he has a bad case of indigestion. It's kind of funny though that Kubrick also once considered Steve Martin for the part. I mean he also seems a poor choice.

On Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon, I thought his performance as the adult Barry was great but felt Kubrick should have cast another (younger) actor to play Barry in the early portion of the film as the drama with his cousin and Captain Quin played out.

That scene, in particular the fact that pot is used as the catalyst for this revelation from Alice, is one of the few issues I have with the film. I've always hated the way films many times will use alcohol or nowadays pot as some form of truth serum. It's the one crutch that - more often than not - is contradictory to how we behave in reality. Drugs and alcohol (although I enjoy both from time to time) don't make you suddenly prophetic; usually it's the exact opposite.

I didn't really think it was the pot that was the catalyst for Alice's confession. I thought it was that she felt her husband was not being honest with her, he was hiding behind a mask of smug hypocrisy and that caused her to let loose on him. She confronted his BS with brutal honesty. I felt like the pot was used in the scene to do a couple of things, show a sort of intimacy with this married couple that we are voyeuristically watching in their bedroom in this private moment and to give Bill something to (incorrectly) blame his wife's behavior on. I did not really feel watching it that the dope was a truth serum in the scene.

I can see that, and I think you hit the nail on the head about Alice reacting to Bill's BS. However, to me the way the scene is edited, it feels as though they would not have begun that conversation without the pot. Bill even mentions that the pot is making her aggressive. Although she denies that, the scene previous to this, they both seem so bored, that aggressive actions would seem to be the last thing on their minds, let alone thinking about the previous night at the party. This leads me back to the pot being used as a type of jumping off point for their conversation. Then again, I'm probably over thinking it anyway. LOL

Wow, this thread got waaaaay off target. Sorry about that.

I'm pretty fascinated by this debate. I don't know anything about projection, but I have a question, for anybody who would like to answer.

On DVDs (and presumably Blurays), when a movie's AR is 1.66:1, there are black areas left and right, presumably to protect the height of the film, since the monitor is 16:9. It isn't exactly a "letterbox," but it does amount to a kind of matte, again, left and right.

If Mr. Kubrick had wished, could there have been similar black areas on the actual projected versions in 1975? It seems to me, if he wanted to protect the height of his desired 1.66:1 film, which he knew would be projected in 1.85:1, he'd have to add black areas on the side, making the projected image ever so slightly smaller, but retaining the height.

By the way, I watched this movie tonight and was, once again, truly amazed by it. The impact of those images is still tremendous.

It could have been done, and has been done in recent years when showing films in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio in cinemas, since most megaplexes are set up for two ratios only: 1.85:1 and 2.35/2.40:1, and even their accuracy then has been spotty. Examples would include Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and The Good German. The problem with this method is that you wind up with an image dead centre in the frame that has been compromised in terms of resolution. While the compromise would have been considerably less in the case of Barry Lyndon, it would have been a shame that they would have to do this just to appease theatre owners who couldn't be bothered to spend the money on a 1.66:1 aperture plate.

The technical term for this matting on the sides is "pillarboxing," as the mattes look like pillars on the sides of the image.

 

The process Stephen_J_H described, which results in matting on all 4 sides of the film frame, is called windowboxing, although typically the image ends up looking pillarboxed on a WS theater screen.