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The question is does God believe in me?

The Times finally takes a look at the massive exhibit celebrating Stanley Kubrick at Frankfurt's Deutches Filmmuseum and finds it as chilly and impersonal as the films he made:

Though the exhibition faithfully chronicles Kubrick's career from his low-budget crime dramas of the 1950's to the much-hyped erotic thriller "Eyes Wide Shut," released after his death, the most interesting section concerns a film he never made, "Napoleon."

In the course of a three-decade quest to film a biography, Kubrick pored through more than 18,000 documents and books about Napoleon's life. He amassed a card file that recorded every significant event in the life of Napoleon, day by day.

Back in March, the Guardian ran a piece about Kubrick's pack-rat palace by Jon Ronson, a BBC documentarian who has actually looked inside the billions of boxes in which Kubrick stored his film research.

"Look closer at the books," says Tony.

I do. "Bloody hell," I say. "Every book in this room is about Napoleon!"

"Look in the drawers," says Tony.

I do.

"It's all about Napoleon, too!" I say. "Everything in here is about Napoleon!"

I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband's novel and finding it is comprised entirely of the line "All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy" typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick, "Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick's passion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining."

This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear out that comparison. "Somewhere else in this house," Tony says, "is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon's inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it'll tell you."

"Who made up the cards?" I ask.

"Stanley," says Tony. "With some assistants."

"How long did it take?" I ask.

"Years," says Tony. "The late 1960s."

The exhibit is up until July 1, and there are still no plans to bring it to the States.

Child's play

On the eve of the latest Harry Potter movie's release, the Guardian considers the fate of child stars--without once mentioning the Rickster, Drew Barrymore or Shirley Temple, which must be some sort of a record. Instead, they talk to people like Adrian Hall, who played Jeremy Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Actually, Hall's got a pretty good sense of humor about his plight:

"It'll be on my gravestone but there comes a point when you have to accept that. If you don't, then you drive yourself insane and hang yourself in a motel room."

The cinetrix had occasion to watch a 20-year-old Temple play the improbably named Philadelphia Thursday in Fort Apache the other night, and her former child star "twinkle," for lack of a better word, managed to distract from the performances of John Wayne and Henry Fonda, no mean feat. Now that's a star.

AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!

That is the sound of ultimate suffering. The cinetrix makes it tonight. Here's why:

DreamWorks will turn Marlene Dietrich's story into a star vehicle for Gwyneth Paltrow. The studio has optioned Maria Riva's memoir "Marlene Dietrich," and has secured cooperation from Dietrich's estate. Jess Money will write the script and produce with Paltrow and David Nicksay. [via Variety]

How much Dietrich girl-on-girl action will be jettisoned in favor of Paltrow swanning around in a white tuxedo, a smug ogee playing about her lips?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to create a Hot Voodoo doll to scuttle this travesty.

Fuck and Run

Kim Cattrall won't be putting out for the now-shelved Sex in the City movie. She's too busy rearranging her lube drawer or something. Oh, boo-hoo. Like she's the only ancient slut in Manhattan. Whatever.

Plans to bring sitcom Sex and the City to the big screen have been shelved after star Kim Cattrall, true to the free-spirited Samantha she played in the show, said she could not commit to the project.

Back when the cinetrix was a lass, we had a word for that sort of bait-and-switch roundheels: cocktease. Blah blah sisterhood is powerful and how dare I la la la. Ladies, the show was written by a bunch of bitter queens--and have you seen what Pat Fields looks like?--it is not about you and your girlfriends out there in Moline, no matter how many pairs of Manolos you buy on Bluefly. Get over it already and breathe a sigh of relief that we've dodged another tiresome television to silver screen retread.

Monkey man

Back on this date in 1925, teaching Darwinism got John T. Scopes convicted in the famous monkey trial. Now, you could take the high road in observing this anniversary and watch the magisterial Spenser Tracy strut and pace as a barely fictionalized Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind.

Or, well, you could celebrate the close cinematic relationship we humans have with our primate cousins and watch a bunch of monkey movies.* [The cinetrix will not suggest where that course puts you on the evolutionary scale.] Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started.

King Kong (1933, natch)
Project X
Ed
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Every Which Way but Loose
Any Which Way You Can
Planet of the Apes
George of the Jungle
Dunston Checks In
Monkey Business
Bedtime for Bonzo
Mighty Joe Young
Congo
Tarzan the Ape Man
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Meditations on monkey movies may be found here and here. Damn, dirty apes!

*The cinetrix is evolved enough to know that there is a difference between monkeys, gorillas, apes, chimps, orangutans, proboscis monkeys et al. Most, but not all of them, are smarter than Matt LeBlanc.

Pop will eat itself

Not content merely to love the 80s, VH1 now is standing outside the 80s' house holding up a boombox. According to Variety, the network has announced it will produce its first-ever scripted miniseries, about the adolescent years of original Brat Packers like Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, Demi Moore, and Rob Lowe. Can you imagine? "In 1985, Judd Nelson was riding high..." Somewhere, Ponyboy is speed-dialing his agent.

The cinetrix can already hear Mandy Moore's tearful acceptance speech at next year's Emmys as she accepts her Best Actress award for courageously donning a prosthesis to play Jennifer Grey with her original nose.

We rob banks

On this day in 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Bienville Parish, La.

[T]here is a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression--as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty. -- Pauline Kael

WATCH Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn
LISTEN Bonnie and Clyde, Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot; Luna and Laetitia Sadier
NAMECHECK Irma Vep

Space is the place

Hey, kids! It's Sun Ra's ninetieth birthday today. If you can't travel back to Saturn to pay your respects in person, the cinetrix recommends marking the occasion by watching the excellent 1980 documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise. And perhaps Disney's Dumbo [Sun Ra did an insane cover of "Pink Elephants on Parade" for Stay Awake]. For those who haven't seen Dumbo in a while, be warned. It is more intense and disturbing and more politically incorrect than you remember.

Oh, and Lord Lawrence Olivier would have been 97 today. Walk around affecting a bad German accent or marry a crazy woman to honor the occasion.

You could also do it up right and watch this.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here

Nerds rejoice

Hot on the heels of the rumor that George Lucas has digitally replaced the actor Sebastian Shaw [who played Darth Vader] with a young Anakin in one of the final shots of the Return of the Jedi DVD [via The Movie Blog], comes news of more Lucas-related travesty. Variety reports that this September Lucas will theatrically rerelease a--wait for it--digitally "revised" version of his debut feature, 1971's THX 1138. It is scheduled to premiere at the Guggenheim [no word on which location, but my vote's on the Venetian].

For you non-nerds out there puzzling over why that title sounds familiar, the cinetrix will explicate a little. You know that cacophonous ringing in your ears caused by the overloud soundtrack of every effects-driven summer blockbuster? The big whooshing noise that sounds as though all the air is being sucked out of the theater by a passing supersonic jet, followed by a clanging gonk, that you hear before the opening credits roll? That's Lucas' patented THX sound system. [Fun fact: Return of the Jedi was the first film exhibited on the THX sound system.] Because ILM wasn't doing enough harm to the cinema on its own.

But here's where I pick up the stalkers. In the original Star Wars movie, THX 1138 is the cell block from which Luke and Han, disguised as Stormtroopers, say they are moving Chewbacca. It comes right before they land in that enormous trash compressor.

Sigh. OK, I also own a copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special. There, I said it. Happy now?

Lunchtime poll

Is it a poll, a quiz, or a personality test? Whatever you want to call it [ummm, perhaps a time-suck?], according to the strangely themed "Summer Cinema Caucus" party affiliation quiz at movies.com, the cinetrix is an art-house addict. Quelle surprise, non?

The Art-House Addict simply loves subtitles and low budgets and avoids the mall multiplex like the plague. Going against the grain is the name of the game for the Art-House Addict, an independent thinker whose taste runs more to The Seventh Seal than The Sixth Sense.

So independent a thinker that there's a huge list of movies that appeal just to me! Whatever.

Take the quiz for yourself to sort out which of the trillion summer releases you're most likely to Fandango. Or use it to build consensus across affiliations by choosing flicks that appear on both your own and your friends' lists.

Here's a sample question:

Foreign films are for:
Smart people, like me
Watching after the Oscar noms come out
Impressing dates by pretending to like them
Uh, foreigners?

Actually, this question got me to thinking about Freedom fries, so the cinetrix took the quiz again and answered the questions as she imagined W. might. My populist, lowest-common-denominator embrace of crap was so confounding the quiz asked me one additional question:

Which of the following is most up your alley?
Armageddon
Psycho
The Lion King

Duh. After clicking Armageddon, the cinetrix-as-W. [shudder] landed squarely in the Blockbuster Buff category:

Astronomical budgets, big-name stars, and lots of computer-generated special effects — this is the trifecta for Blockbuster Buffs. Favoring explosions and eye candy over dialogue and plot, these escapists live for summer movie season and care not what those snobby critics think.

Sounds about right.