Should I Watch Stanley Kubrick's Lolita?

Yes, its great.

It's an odd movie - Sellers really steals the show.

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All I focused on in Strangelove.

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You missed a lot of great performances then George Scott was pretty amazing as was Pickins.

I've never seen the original. I saw the 1997 remake with Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain.

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That said, I'm not sure what I make of it. I guess it's supposed to be a satire, but I don't think that I understand all of the significance.

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***SPOILERS LIKE A MUG - YOU'VE BEEN ADVISED ***


The entire Lolita story (Nabokov was a master, BTW) is heavily, heavily layered - very much like Fitzgerald (which is high praise from me) and only a handful of filmmakers could have pulled it off - Kubrick for his part indicated that if he had known about the serious censorship requirements, he never would have made the film.

It's about not being satisfied with what you have - Humbert could have flourished (maybe) in a relationship with Charlotte. However, his wholly unnatural (recall that Lolita is 12 in the novel and only raised to 14 in the film because of the MPAA) obsession (Mason was ~50, Sue Lyon was 14, but cast partially because she appeared older) with the daughter drives a wedge between himself and an appropriate relationship, which indirectly leads to his wife/Lolita's mother's death. The novel makes it clear this is a pattern of Humbert, all but calling him a pedophile. He's also a murderer and generally a cad.

Then it is about power, and robbing a child of childhood innocence and a normal life. Lolita (the child) realizes this fairly quickly and acts "adult" in the situation and ditches Humbert after a brief dalliance. When he finds her later, she is an expectant mother, attempting to live a normal (not a fantasy with an old man) life, as her mother would have wanted - as we all deserve.

He directs his anger at this loss at Quilty, ultimately murdering him.

Humbert, in addition to being almost certainly a pedophile, also possesses a certain amount of self-righteousness, believing his feelings trump societal norms, laws, decency, etc.

Kubrick would return to similar themes (minus pedophilia) in Eyes Wide Shut - his final film.

I prefer the remake

Yes. It’s quite good

As a massive Kubrick fanatic, I never could bring myself to watch Lolita... Maybe I'm just not into pedo stuff...

BTW, was it never disturbing to anyone else just how much of that kind of stuff was the fricking subject of mainstream films... Have you ever seen Woody Allen's Manhattan?? He's like 45 and dating a 15 yr old... THATS The Premise!... And no one batted an eye.

Allen used this trope numerous times and then if course the Sun Yi stuff in real life... The guy has been an open pedophile for decades and no one cared

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As a massive Kubrick fanatic, I never could bring myself to watch Lolita... Maybe I'm just not into pedo stuff...

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Watching a movie (or reading a book, since I consider the Nabokov book a modern masterpiece) doesn't require you to be "into pedo stuff" any more than watching a movie about the Holocaust requires you to be down with gassing people to death. Or, given your username, watching a movie about the Kennedy assassination requires you to be into "murder stuff." That sort of statement just reeks of the sort of defensive self-congratulatory moral high-handedness that makes one assume you secretly shoot child porn on weekends and want to take the absolute clumsiest approach to making sure nobody suspects you of doing so.

Now if you'll excuse me, we're about to watch "Let the Right One In" as part of our October horror movie marathon at my house. It's about a prepubescent vampire accompanied by a much older pedophile servant. Not that we're into that sort of thing, of course. Well, my wife might be -- I have my suspicions -- but I'm not.