The Mighty Kubrick

It’s a gift for the young cineaste to be introduced to certain filmmakers at certain stages of life. The films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, for instance, are a perfect education for the very young. They teach a fundamental fact. Movies are composed of conventions — frames, movements, transitions, plots, character types, stock situations — and it’s the responsibility of a great filmmaker to idiosyncratically adapt, or else explode, those conventions whenever possible. Chaplin does so with an eye for the gag and a sense for exquisite sentimentality. The Marx Brothers achieve it by battling against every convention, wielding comedy as a weapon against all human propriety, hubris, civility, and taste, and their best films unravel in brilliantly stupid ways that greater filmmakers and comedians will never be able to match.