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Category:    Home > Reviews > Comedy > Filmmaking > Crime > Con Artists > British > Color Me Kubrick (2005/DVD-Video)

Color Me Kubrick (2005/DVD-Video)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: B-     Extras: C+     Film: B

 

 

During his reign as the most important filmmaker alive, Stanley Kubrick stayed out of the public eye in ways that only fueled his legend.  Not many people even knew enough about his films, let alone what he looked like.  As each film was waited on with great anticipation, the slowly increasing appetite for Kubrick just added to and hyped up him and his work.  For ten years, a conman named Alan Conway decided to impersonate Kubrick and got away with it longer than anyone could have imagined.

 

He hardly knew about Kubrick or his films, but took advantage of the buzz (especially among artists) and Brian Cook’s Color Me Kubrick (2005) shows us how with John Malkovich giving one of the best performances he has given in a long time as Conway.  Things start with two Punk teens in the U.K. going to what they think is Kubrick’s home, but when they get there, they find an old man who is clueless as to who they are looking for and what they are talking about.  They wonder if he is a butler, but he is just an old married man.  Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and Ms. Catherine Gale from The Avengers) plays his wife in a clever bit of casting.

 

The film could have settled for those referential moments, but Anthony Frewin’s screenplay is more interesting, charting Conway and those he hoodwinks as they all want to be a piece of something big and exciting as big as the biggest movie screen; a feeling the increasing fanbase and imitators of Kubrick feel now more than ever today.  So good is this that you do not even need to know or like Kubrick, because as the title suggests, the cache and respectability of an unprecedented combination of critical and commercial success that only a fool would pass up is irresistible.  As funny as it is clever, Color Me Kubrick deserves a big audience and the more people see it, the more they will talk about it.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image can have a dullness to it, yet tries often to imitate the look of Kubrick films in amusing ways.  Howard Atherton, B.S.C., deserves credit for trying and outdoing most of the Kubrick imitators.  The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is just fine with good dialogue and decent surrounds, which include the many Classical pieces Kubrick used in his career.  Some actual original Kubrick music was also used.  The combination is decent.

 

There is only one extra (unless you are as amused by the main menu as we were) and that is a long behind-the-scenes documentary Being Alan Conway running about 50 minutes and loaded with great footage and stories of the actual Kubrick.  All in all, this is a great disc of a very interesting film, belonging on the same shelf as Kubrick’s films and the great A Life In Pictures documentary.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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