Before there was Maude Lebowski and her vaginal art, there was A Clockwork Orange and penis-art-as-murder-weapon (think of the symbolism, bro). And now, thanks to Japanese toy firm Medicom, you can own an almost three-feet-by-one foot piece of movie history/male anatomy, for the low low price of somewhere between $1600 and $2000. Jesus, is that thing made of gold? If I wanted to see a three foot dong, I bet I could pay Michael Fassbender half that to just show it to me.

The prop which appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s movie “A Clockwork Orange” is solidified. It is full reappearance about the object used by the engraver Herman Makkink design at the time of motion picture photography. The product made from FRP of original and allotropy material used as a prop. By an internal special feature, peculiar action shown within a play is reproducible. Size: W800xH340mm. [Amazon]

Two grand seems wildly overpriced, but if I was rich I would buy that in a heartbeat. Small price to pay to be the envy of every hipster costume and Halloween party from now until eternity. Also, if any toy/memorabilia companies are reading this, I’ve been trying to buy the giant lizard tail from Fear and Loathing for more than a f*cking decade now.

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It’s been a while since we last checked in with Armond White, everyone’s favorite vociferant contemptularian, and three-time exalted cyclops of the Bull Moose Moving Picture Society of the 1934 World’s Fair. On the A-Dubz docket today, IFC Films’ Room 237, a documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining told through interviews with the most outspoken Kubrick lovers. As is so often the case, Armond actually has a valid point to make, about how the middlebrow has come to worship ambiguity for its own sake, because middlebrow critics aren’t smart enough for critical thinking. And as always, A-Dubz’ valid points are almost completely upstaged by his own verbidinous thesaurification and intense desire to keep his lawn clear of pre-pubescent whippersnappers.

Which is to say, he uses the word “nerd” seven times. Seven. And that’s not counting uses of the term “geek.” And let’s keep in mind, he’s an Ivy League-educated film critic.

Room 237 lets the nerds loose

Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining. Ascher’s film—a true mockumentary if ever there was one—is named after the Overlook Hotel suite where little Danny sees Kubrick’s most disturbing visions due to his gift for “shining.” Every nerd wants to shine.

Three times. He used “nerd” three times. And we’re still in the first paragraph, people.

Fans seem unable to recognize the film’s failings and so try to make virtues of its mistakes.  “Kubrick often in many of his movies would end them with a puzzle so he’d force you to go out of his movies saying ‘What was that about?’” So claims one zealot who responds to cinema the way a child reacts to a video game, trusting that the manufacturer cares about his response.

“who responds to cinema the way a child reacts to a video game.” So… joyfully? By calling the other viewers “fag” on a headset? I love the phrase, I’m just not sure what it means. “…trusting that the manufacturer cares about his response.” Again, this is coming from a guy who writes about movies for a living.

Another nerd says “[Kubrick] is like a megabrain for the planet who is boiling down, with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of our world and giving them back to us in this dream of a movie.”

NERDS! NERDS! NERDS! God, what I wouldn’t give to see Armond White giving some Christopher Nolan fanboy a swirly. I’d like to think Armond could do it without even mussing his cravat.

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It’s all but gospel now that Stanley Kubrick once conceived a perfect movie called AI, but died before he could make it, at which point Steven Spielberg took over and added an ending that was just him raining a warm piss stream on Kubrick’s dead face. Hey, that’s what people say. Well now, Spielberg tells French TV that he’s taken over another Kubrick project, working with Kubrick’s family on Kubrick’s famously ambitious but never executed screenplay about Napoleon, of which Kubrick once said “I expect to make the best movie ever made.” Interestingly, Spielberg plans to do it as a miniseries. Say what you will about AI, if this is half as good as Band of Brothers, I will watch until my eyes bleed.

Kubrick wrote the script in 1961 but ultimately abandoned the Napoleon biopic in the ’70s because of budget and production challenges. The late filmmaker is famed for his obsessive perfectionism, so his estate should find comfort working in the able hands of Spielberg. [THR]

Kubrick’s Napoleon project was so well-known that it even inspired an 1100-page coffee table book called “The Greatest Movie Never Made.” Impressive, considering a script is only about a hundred pages. ThePlaylist offers their cliff’s notes:

Originally proposed as his next project after “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick pitched the movie as a $5 million production (roughly $100 million in today’s dollars) with extraordinarily ambitious plans that included upwards of 30,000 men as extras for the battle scenes (remember, this was before CGI) as well as utilizing front projection techniques that he had recently used on ‘2001.’

The research was extensive and meticulous, with Kubrick using Felix Markham’s 1966 biography as a launching pad for his in-depth study that eventually grew to include extensive index cards kept on everyone in Napoleon’s life, and cross referenced to an exacting degree.

MGM had initially greenlit the movie, and United Artists were offered the project, but both grew wary after similar epics like “War & Peace” and “Waterloo” struggled financially.

Kubrick once contracted Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange (the novel) to write a novel which would become the basis for his Napoleon movie. Kubrick rejected Burgess’s work, saying “Despite its considerable accomplishments, it does not, in my view, help solve either of the two major problems: that of considerably editing the events (and possibly restructuring the time sequence) so as to make a good story, without trivializing history or character, nor does it provide much realistic dialogue, unburdened with easily noticeable exposition or historical fact.” Burgess published the book anyway, Napoleon’s Symphony.

Meanwhile, I’m told, Spielberg has found a novel way to approach the material, in that he plans to tell the entire story from the perspective of Napoleon’s horse. I’d actually be most interested in the period of Napoleon’s life when he was exiled on Saint Helena way the hell out in the middle of the South Atlantic. But as long as they cover the day he spent at Raging Waters I’ll be happy.

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Criterion has a nice feature on directors and their favorite films, and while it’s hard to do one on Stanley Kubrick, considering he’s both (a) reclusive and (b) dead, Criterion writer Josh Warren claims to have compiled a list based on “interviews with Kubrick’s family, friends and colleagues.” You can check out the Criterion films Kubrick loved over there, which include Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Silence of the Lambs, Rosemary’s Baby, The Bank Dick, Henry V, and others. But this being FilmDrunk, I thought the non-Criterion Collection titles on the list were even more interesting.

Eraserhead

Citizen Kane

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

The Godfather

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Dog Day Afternoon

City Lights

La Notte

Roxie Hart

Hell’s Angels

An American Werewolf in London

Metropolis

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Abigail’s Party

Roger & Me

White Men Can’t Jump

Modern Romance

The Jerk

Yep, White Men Can’t Jump and The Jerk. I’ll admit being surprised by White Men Can’t Jump, but not by the fact that Kubrick liked comedy. He is, after all, the guy who discovered R. Lee Ermey and basically stuck him in Full Metal Jacket and let him say whatever he wanted. Thereby producing one my top ten comedic performances ever, easily. Also, between this and Grantland’s Oral History of White Men Can’t Jump a few months back, could it be that we’re experiencing a renaissance of White Men Can’t Jump? Who could’ve guessed what the future would pull from the junk heap of 1992? Frankly, I had my money on Captain Ron, or 3 Ninjas.

[hat tip: Vanity Fair]

As I discussed recently in a very random tribute, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is one of my absolute favorite movies of all-time (Category: All; Sub-Category: Horror). Seeing it as a child naturally left a lingering affect on me, in that I still have to watch it with at least one light on and my back to the wall. That it still f*cks with my head 33 years later is a true testament to what an awesome film that Kubrick directed and wrote (with Diane Johnson). But what I did not know until this very day – some fan, right? – is that when The Shining was released in 1980, it had a completely different ending.

Apparently Kubrick re-cut the film two weeks after it was released to remove an original ending that tried to pull off the “Bitch, you crazy” angle with Wendy Torrance. In the original ending, Wendy and Danny are in a hospital, where the Overlook’s manager claims that he checked out the entire hotel and couldn’t find anything wrong. No tidal waves of blood, no butchered child bodies, no rotting old lady trying to get her freak on, nada.

It also included a more revealing title shot on black, which we now know thanks to a discovery by Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich, who runs his own Shining tribute site.

Slate shared some contrasting takes on Kubrick’s decision to cut the ending after the film had already been released, but I like Roger Ebert’s take on this change…

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