Kubrick was not as complicated a cookie as some have made him out to be. At least, that is what his personal assistant thinks. Leon Vitali was hired by Stanley Kubrick to play Lord Bullingdon in "Barry Lyndon" and continued to work for him until Kubrick's death in 1999. An interviewer in 2007 asked Vitali to describe the real Stanley Kubrick.
You know, it's not as complicated as you might think. The best way I can put it is this: If you make it in more of a personal context and you think about yourself as being someone who can sometimes be angry, sometimes be generous, sometimes be jealous, sometimes be resentful, sometimes be extremely kind -- all those basic human qualities. Everybody's got them. And the thing is, for many people, there's one part of them that drives them more than another. Some people are continually feeling guilty about life. He could feel guilty about some of the things he had to do. Or they could be extremely ambitious. Something drives them more than all the others. They have all those other qualities inside them. But somebody like Stanley, who had all those like you or I, but to about the power of a gazillion, all right? Because from minute to minute it could change. One of those, the ambitious, would suddenly give way to something quite mean. And then equally give way to something almost over-generous. Everything he did was almost overpowering.
It seems that how a person may come across depends upon what emotion is in the driver's seat at the time. Things may not always be what they seem, which makes finding the truth a hit or miss pursuit at best. How does the old Marvin Gaye song go, only believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear?
Picture of the day. Pakistan asked Google over the weekend to cut off access to You Tube from within the country. That explains why You Tube was inaccessible everywhere last Sunday. But information wants to be free, so the news story spread the that the request was prompted by the posting on You Tube of footage of several Danish editorial cartoons. These were cartoons from 2005 satirizing Mohammed and led to deadly riots world wide. The cartoons were recirculated by the Danes once a secret plot to kill the cartoonist was discovered. For the benefit of you InterWebs gear heads out there, here is why You Tube had to pull the plug everywhere to shut out Pakistan.
