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Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick
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DVD detailsActor: Hardy Kr?ger, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Ryan O'Neal, Steven Berkoff Director: Stanley Kubrick Cinematographer: John Alcott Producer: Stanley Kubrick Writer: Stanley Kubrick Editor: Tony Lawson Producer: Bernard Williams Producer: Jan Harlan Writer: William Makepeace Thackeray DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, Letterboxed, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Widescreen Picture Format: 1.66:1 Running Time: 184 minutes DVD Release Date: 2001-06-12 Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Barry LyndonDVD Review: unattractive characters, a bored narrator, and phenomenal story Summary: 5 StarsThis is one of the most original films that I have ever seen. It turns so many notions of normal hollywood filmmaking on their head that I think it is great satire based on realism. Not only do we start off knowing that the principal character that is doomed by his character flaws, but its great beauty/prize - Marisa Berenson in her prime - comes across as dull and plain as a doornail. THere is not a single redeeming character, and even its climax - the duel with his step son - is a comedy of errors. Perhaps the funniest moment in the film is a death by heart attack.
The result is a marvelously lush tour of the underbelly of the late 18C British aristocracy in the context of the wider society, with strict attention to period realism. Virtually all emotion, as witnessed by the viewer, is vapid, self-seeking, deluded, and in the end pathetic. When action abruptly occurs, and there are plenty of vivid bursts of it, it comes too late to do much good.
The theme, I believe, is decadence, a doomed order just prior to the French and Industrial Revolutions. Disillusioned at every turn, Redmond Barry is stripped of his dignity and humanity by a trick and then enlistment in the military, reasserts himself as an interloper into the aristocracy, and imposes his cruelty and cynicism on everyone. His only redeeming features are a few relationships, which invariably are doomed or abandoned, except for his tough mother. It is truly bleak.
Though completely unsympathetic, the actors are wonderful. O'Neal is brilliant as a guileful fool. Berenson, a pampered weakling full of romantic illusion, has nothing whatsoever interesting about her.
As it did 35 years ago, this film utterly rivetted me. As many reviewers have noted, the print is regrettably mediocre. But this is a classic. REcommended.
DVD Review: Favorite Kubrick Movie Summary: 5 StarsI think this is my favorite Stanley Kubrick film,and he has so many great films.Barry Lyndon is a great screenplay surrounded by wonderful scenery draped in the elegant costumes of the eighteenth century,and enveloped in the beautiful timeless music that came from the age.Stanley Kubrick's brings out a superb performance by Ryan O'Neal,and Marisa Berenson in this poignant tale of an Irish youth struggles and travails of making his place in an era where good fortune and ruthlessness go hand and hand in making ones mark in society.I enjoy this film everytime I see it.
DVD Review: Barry Lyndon Cries Out for BluRay Summary: 5 StarsKubrick's most lyrical film, even sentimental in his own sort of way. No other filmmaker can equal Kubrick's suffocating technical precision,and yet with "Barry Lyndon" Kubrick adds a color pallette, textures, and landscape compositions unequalled in cinema before or since; his most humanistic, if not humane, film.
This stunning work of art cries out for a BluRay version that captures the film's original richness. Pleeeease!?
DVD Review: NOT WHAT I REMEMBERED Summary: 2 StarsAfter about 30 years and several years of telling family members that Barry Lyndon was a really good movie, I finally purchased it. Well, the movie isn't what I remembered it to be. Nicely directed, good cinematography, but it is only a 70s movie and probably should stay there.
DVD Review: Intricacies of Drama Summary: 3 StarsI was expecting some kind of British stiff upper lip period piece with quirky characters and lovable uncles and such. Instead, we get a lushly filmed drama of a man with whom we originally sympathize, but later begin to detest. A bit too long for my taste, with a few confusing or ambiguous scenes. I would recommend this film only if you have a few hours to spare and if you appreciate the intricacies of fine drama.
Description of Barry LyndonIn 1975 the world was at Stanley Kubrick's feet. His films Dr.?Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, released in the previous dozen years, had provoked rapture and consternation--not merely in the film community, but in the culture at large. On the basis of that smashing hat trick, Kubrick was almost certainly the most famous film director of his generation, and absolutely the one most likely to rewire the collective mind of the movie audience. And what did this radical, at-least-20-years-ahead-of-his-time filmmaker give the world in 1975? A stately, three-hour costume drama based on an obscure Thackeray novel from 1844. A picaresque story about an Irish lad (Ryan O'Neal, then a major star) who climbs his way into high society, Barry Lyndon bewildered some critics (Pauline Kael called it "an ice-pack of a movie") and did only middling business with patient audiences. The film was clearly a technical advance, with its unique camerawork (incorporating the use of prototype Zeiss lenses capable of filming by actual candlelight) and sumptuous production design. But its hero is a distinctly underwhelming, even unsympathetic fellow, and Kubrick does not try to engage the audience's emotions in anything like the usual way. Why, then, is Barry Lyndon a masterpiece? Because it uncannily captures the shape and rhythm of a human life in a way few other films have; because Kubrick's command of design and landscape is never decorative but always apiece with his hero's journey; and because every last detail counts. Even the film's chilly style is thawed by the warm narration of the great English actor Michael Hordern and the Irish songs of the Chieftains. Poor Barry's life doesn't matter much in the end, yet the care Kubrick brings to the telling of it is perhaps the director's most compassionate gesture toward that most peculiar species of animal called man. And the final, wry title card provides the perfect Kubrickian sendoff--a sentiment that is even more poignant since Kubrick's premature death. --Robert Horton
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