STANLEY KUBRICK COLLECTION
Warner Home Video Directors Series
New Remastered Editions of 5 Works from the Director whose movies crossed New Frontiers
There is a tear in the middle of the shrink wrap on the right side of the box set.
EYES WIDE SHUT Stanley Kubrick's daring last film is many things. It is a compelling psychosexual journey. A haunting dreamscape. A riveting tale of suspense. A major milestone in the careers of stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. And "a worthy final chapter to a great director's career" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).
Cruise plays Dr William Harford,who plunges into an erotic foray that threatens his marriage -- and may even ensnare him in a lurid murder mystery -- after his wife's (Kidman) admission of sexual longings. As the story sweeps from doubt and fear to self-discovery and reconciliation, Kubrick orchestrates it with masterful flourishes.
FULL METAL JACKET Director Stanley Kubrick rips the skin from the face of war to expose the dehumanizing effect of the military on the people fed to its emotional meat grinder. Through the eyes of an 18-year-old recruit -- from his first days in the seeming hell of Marine Corps boot camp as his superiors try to strip of him his individuality and recreate him as a Marine, to the hell of the 1968 Tet offensive, Kubrick reveals the damage done to the collective human soul by the inhumanity of war. Based on the novel The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford.
THE SHINING ""All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" -- or rather, a homicidal boy in Stanley Kubrick's eerie 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's horror novel. With wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) in tow, frustrated writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as the winter caretaker at the opulent ominous, mountain-locked Overlook Hotel so that he can write in peace.
Before the Overlook is vacated for the Torrances, the manager informs Jack that a previous caretaker went crazy and slaughtered his family. Jack thinks it's no problem, but Danny's "shining" hints otherwise. Jack sets up shop in a cavernous lounge with strict orders not to be disturbed.
Danny's alter ego, "Tony," however, starts warning of "redrum" as Danny is plagued by more blood-soaked visions of the past, and a blocked Jack starts visiting the hotel bar for a few visions of his own. Frighted by her husband's behavior and Danny's visit to the forbidding Room 237, Wendy soon discovers what Jack has really been doing in his study all day, and what the hotel has done to Jack.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Stanley Kubrick's striking visual interpretation of Anthony Burgess's famous novel is a masterpiece. Malcolm McDowell delivers a clever, ton-in-cheek performance as Alex, the leader of a quartet of droogs, a vicious group of young hoodlums who spend their nights stealing cars, fighting rival gangs, breaking into people's homes, and raping women.
We watch Alex transform from a free-roaming miscreant into a convict used in a government experiment that attempts to reform criminals through an unorthodox new medical treatment. The catch, of course, is that this therapy may be nothing better than a quick cure-all for a society plagued by rampart crime.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE works on many levels -- visual, social, political, and sexual -- and is one of the few films that hold up under repeated viewings. Kubrick not only presents colorfully arresting images, he also stylizes the film by utilizing classical music to underscore the violent scenes, which even today are disturbing in their display of sheer nihilism.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity. At the "Dawn of Man," a group of hominids encounters a mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings. To the strains of Straus's 1896 "Also Sprach Zarathustic," a hominid invents the first weapon, using a bone to kill prey. As the hominid tosses the bone in the air, Kubrick cuts to a 21st century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of years in technological development.
U S scientist Dr Heywood Floyd travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a strange object on the moon's surface: a black monolith. Cutting ahead 18 months, impassive astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole head toward Jupiter on the spaceship Discovery, their only company there hibernating astronauts and the vocal, man-made HAL 9000 computer running the entire ship.
When the all-too-human HAL malfunctions, however, he tries to murder the astronauts to cover his error, forcing Bowman to defend himself the only way he can.
Bonus Disc - STANLEY KUBRICK: A LIFE IN PICTURES The moviemaker's career comes into sharp focus in this compelling documentary narrated by Tom Cruise. Fascinating footage glimpses Kubrick in his early years, at work on film sets and at home, augmented by candid commentary from collaborators, colleagues and family.