Ray Pride

(A True...Ish Story) Perversely inconsequential, the unlikely, knowing anecdote "Colour Me Kubrick" is a delight, with an unlikely John Malkovich impersonating Alan Conway, a dissolute bounder of a low order who gamboled shamelessly about London in the 1990s, pretending to be the elusive Stanley Kubrick even though he looked not a whit like the director, knew almost nothing of Kubrick's work, and was in it pretty exclusively for the liquor and the rough trade. Director Brian Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both close associates of Kubrick's; it's simply a lovely, swishy wisp of a movie. Malkovich revels in being a different incarnation of clotheshorse, less fashion plate than unfashionable cracked saucer, sometimes decked top to boot in drab middle-aged fawn and other times an outcast from "Barry Lyndon" in brocade jackets and exaggerated peignoirs, and especially emerging from his boudoir in mid-calf fishnets and heels beneath a tatty, crotch-shy smoking jacket of uncertain chinoiserie chatting up a young guest. (When a bold ascot parts to reveal a t-shirt with Brando's face from "The Wild One," the joke turns Warholesque as well.) Cook is restlessly jokey about Kubrick's fondness for needle drops of classical music and big band-era pop, and the musical score is comprised largely of cues he'd used, including the prelude to "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Rather than the steady yaw of a space station above earth, the music accompanies the twirl of a garbage bag filled with his laundry taken to the shop on the next corner (just past the "Bleu Danube" sex shop). Cook's take on deserted London side streets is akin to the memory-Greenwich Village of "Eyes Wide Shut," and "There you are, Stanley, another treble brandy," is surely a sentence never before spoken on earth, alongside "Little Tommy Cruise would like a part and I said to him, `Perhaps,' over breakfast this morning at the Savoy; "I seem to have left my laser platinum no-limit American Express VIP card at home"; although a few pair of punks may have exulted before with the words, "Stanley fookin' Kubrick!" Luc Besson's Europacorp was a primary producer. 86m.

"Colour Me Kubrick" opens Friday at the Landmark Century.

(2007-03-20)

Also by Ray Pride

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