Essential for students of film history, to say nothing of Kubrick’s most successful movie.
A fascinating, detail-rich account of the long slog to make the science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), writes Benson (Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, 2014, etc.), was a slayer of genres. He reinvented film noir, the costume drama, the horror film, and the war movie. With 2001, over the course of seven years of hard work, he aimed to put his mark on science fiction, with his own unmistakable twist: “Kubrick’s method was to find an existing novel or source concept and adapt it for the screen, always stamping it with his own bleak—but not necessarily despairing—assessment of the human condition.” He found his sources in two places: the work of British science-fiction writer and technologist Arthur C. Clarke and the Homeric Odyssey. In the end, as Benson capably demonstrates, both those sources faded into the background. The Odyssey is perhaps best echoed by the deaths of all the crew members of Discovery, prompting Clarke to write in his journal, “after all, Odysseus was the sole survivor.” A couple of years after the film was released, Clarke recalled that it reflected 90 percent Kubrick’s genius, 5 percent the work of the special effects crew, and 5 percent his own contribution. That assessment was too modest, but Benson runs with the notion that this was Kubrick’s film through and through, and each minute of screen time reflected weeks of work and thought as well as many missteps and rethinkings (voice-over narration throughout, anyone?). The author turns in some memorable phrases—for instance, in his telling, the space between the known and the unknown is “that place science is always probing like a tongue exploring a broken tooth.” More importantly, it is the often fraught episodes of interaction between Kubrick and a phalanx of collaborators and contributors, most of them now forgotten, that drive this endlessly interesting narrative.
Essential for students of film history, to say nothing of Kubrick’s most successful movie.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6393-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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