|
|
|
comparing the Lolitas
Wednesday, December 7 2011
The warmth continued today but was joined with rain as colder weather systems advanced on the area. Meanwhile I'd downloaded the 1962 version of Lolita (by Stanley Kubrick) to compare with the 1997 version I'd just watched down in Virginia. Watching it today, I found it a much better movie than the 1997 version despite all the restrictions placed on sexual content (particularly man-child sexual content) back in the early 60s. The Charlotte Haze character made a much more convincing show of being overly chatty and sexually desperate. I also preferred the playful (though somewhat stumbling) evil of Kubrick's Clare Quilty character. That said, the 1997 version of the Lolita character was perhaps a bit better than Kubrick's, though this might have been a function of how much older the character looked in Kubrick's rendering. This wasn't entirely due to the actress's age (she was only 14), it was partly due to her trendy early-60s hairdo, which to modern eyes looks like the hairdo of an older woman (the same woman Lolita would have grown up to be). Let this be a lesson to anyone making a film today: to age well, styles must be as generic and timeless as possible. (There's a reason Mark Hammill's Luke Skywalker will always look like he hails from the late 1970s.) One further observation: I noticed a lot more dirty double entendre in the 1962 version than in the 1997 version. The first such instance was when Charlotte Haze told Clare Quilty at the high school dance that Lolita had to go see his uncle to have a cavity filled. "Yes," Quilty chuckles lecherously. Kubrick's 1962 version of Lolita even featured a scene that would have been censored in a modern movie: the one at the end where a pregnant Lolita is seen nonchalantly drinking a beer. This goes to show that we're not just loosing taboos as time marches on, we're also picking up new ones. Still, being a product of the early 60s, Kubrick's version feels much less modern than films he made only six or seven years later. That's partly because of the Big-Band-heavy soundtrack, but it's also because of the archaic (pre-Method) acting styles.
[REDACTED]
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111207 feedback
previous | next |
