The cover is the best thing going for this book: an iconic photo from "2001" (Kubrick's greatest film in my humble opinion.) It is a still from the movie - but a masterful composition (a prime example of K's photographic origins and eye): Life, Death, Mystery, Beauty, Civilization - all captured in this one film frame. If Kubrick had been born before motion pictures came along, he would most certainly have been a master painter.
Anyway, apart from Devin Watson's wonderfully designed cover, Julian Rice's book is like many another collection of masturbatory meditations on the meanings of the Master's movies. I like film analysis, but grow distrustful of it when an agenda or grand synthesis or TOE (Theory of Everything) is pushed and crammed and jammed into the reader's mind ad infinitum, ad nauseum. As is the case in this book. The subtitle reveals this agenda quite clearly: "Discovering Optimism from 2001 to Eyes Wide Shut." Okay. Kubrick had Hope. But he had alot of other things going on in the films also. And to distill the films simply for these optimistic elements grows quite tedious, quite quickly. In this book, there are certain interesting insights, yes, but many avenues of thought are completely unexplored. (How could someone discuss "The Shining," for example, and completely ignore any discussion involving Lloyd the Bartender? Or make the mistake in believing that Delbert Grady and Charles Grady are "doubles" rather than script mistakes, as they more probably are. Yes, the Maestro made mistakes in his movies! Jack Torrance tears a page out of his typewriter in getting pissed at Wendy's intrusion, yet in the next cut the page is back in the roller. Going back to "Lolita", in the first scene of Humbert's entrance into Quilty's mansion - allegedly empty but for the blanket-hidden Quilty himself - we see a crewman rushing from the scene. Perhaps it is Kubrick himself. Despite the director's legendary perfectionism, he was not perfect: and the first name mix-up of Grady does not denote two separate individuals as Rice believes, but most likely a mistake in scripting.) Anyway - as to "2001" - Rice would have us believe that the monolith-inspired Moonwatcher and Bowman as an old man in a black bathrobe represent human monoliths themselves! It is a stretch. I believe it was more serendipitous than intentional on Kubrick's part, if you buy into the notion at all.
The book also goes way-too much into the color schemes of the films. Enough is enough! The descriptions of colors are especially irksome in the "Barry Lyndon" chapter. Yawn-inducing, actually. I felt like my head was spinning on a color wheel. Kubrick's colors are, of course, vitally important: but Rice gives undue emphasis to the color schemes at the expense of more fruitful insights.
There are really no startling discoveries in Rice's observations, nothing that a careful viewer of the films wouldn't discover for himself. I found the book to be ultimately boring - and made me want to watch the movies instead. And...I suppose that isn't a bad thing for a book on film to do. It just means that the films way outshine the book.
