Colour Me Kubrick
dir Brian W. Cook
2007

"Funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on film."
-Alex, A Clockwork Orange

"Everybody wants to make themselves out to be something more than they are, especially in the homosexual underworld."
- Willie O'Keefe, JFK

"Do you suppose Stanley Kubrick ever gets depressed?"
- Joe Gideon, All That Jazz

Alan Conway would have done well to invest in a Blockbuster card.

In the early 1990s, while Stanley Kubrick was working on Eyes Wide Shut, Conway hustled drinks and small loans by pretending to be the famous film director.

Writ large, this could be a magnificent scam, but Conway's cinematic pretense was paper thin at best. Unfamiliar with Kubrick's work, his accent, his look or his lifestyle, Conway might just as well have claimed to be the queen herself.

The choice of Kubrick makes an odd sort of sense. Conway craves attention and what better way to get it than to claim to be someone famous who no one really knows anything about. JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, beware.

It's an unremarkable story, but Color Me Kubrick is a remarkable film.

Shot in loving tribute to Kubrick by longtime assistant director Brian Cook, this little story about a sad little man so consumed with self-loathing that he'd rather be anyone, even someone totally alien, than face himself in the mirror is almost the perfect biopic for Stanley Kubrick, in that he is wholly absent from the story.

The film is filled with Kubrickian expressionism: from the "Bleu Danube" adult book and video store over which Conway resides to the long tracking shot of Conway bringing his dirty clothes to the laundry to the stiff, semi-formal dialogue delivered by supporting characters dressed in garish, 70s futuristic fashions.

Kubrick's great theme was human alienation. Alienation of humans from each other, from their past, from technology and, ultimately, from themselves.

The Discovery, with its bulging crew quarters and elongated flagellum-like tail delivers the human genetic code, in the form of Dave Bowman, to inseminate the ovarian Jupiter.

Driven to rage by the ghosts of the American past, Jack Torrance stalks the halls of the Overlook Hotel with murderous intent toward his wife and child.

Betrayed and abandoned by his "so-called droogs," Alex is left to the tender mercies of the state, which cannot decide whether torturing him themselves or leaving it to the other prisoners makes for better public policy.

Kubrick's characters often find themselves caught up in something larger than they are, in over their heads, helpless, as the gears and wheels of historical, technological and biological inevitabilty click and turn around them.

And this was Alan Conway, struggling against annihilation in the war room of the self.

Like a monolith in orbit, a ghost in a hotel bathroom, a secret drug administered to guide our understanding, Kubrick looms large in this film. He is never pictured, never heard from, plays no part in the story. But, as in his films, his presence is felt everywhere.

Like a good Kubrick protagonist, Conway doesn't stand a chance. Jupiter wins again.

Four stars, the Jason 9000 says he's sorry, but he just can't do that