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OTB#19: Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon. Stanley Kubrick. 1975. ⚁

Oh, I saw this as a (young) teenager. I remember renting it on VHS. What I remember from it is… er… that there were a lot of green hills?

Correct!

I also remember that I really liked the movie. And that it’s somehow a Kubrick movie that all Kubrick fans hate?

[45 minutes pass]

I do like this… but Kubrick leans very hard into making everything so ironic all the time that everything becomes kinda juvenile. And poor Ryan O’Neal (34), trying to play a teenager… But I assume that he grows older, since the movie is three hours long.

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/dance-1.mp4

[another 45 minutes pass]

MY GOD! (I. e., Emacs.) I was a very, very patient teenager, man. This is an intermittently pretty movie, but it’s so dull. It’s not that stuff doesn’t happen — there’s a lot of plot here — but it’s all affectless and not very interesting. I mean, why should we be interested in the Barry guy in the first place? Or, rather, that’s part of the overall irony which suffuses all the scenes: “Here’s this stupid asshole who somehow fails upwards through all these mishaps. Isn’t that ironic? Don’t you think?”

[35 more minutes pass]

I usually think the same about everything since I was like six, so I’m really surprised at how crushingly tedious I find this movie. I’m totally open to that I’m wrong, and that I was right at thirteen — that sounds more likely, really. But right now, I find this to be the most boring movie, like, ever.

[the end]

I didn’t change my mind.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

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