Silly Putty, Villabona and Kubrick

It’s like Silly Putty, that silicone invention formulated to pick up icky substances like dirt and vomit.  It’s also used to alter the characteristics of certain materials.  Photoshop is today’s Silly Putty.  Heartless retouching obliterates (a person’s) original form or properties.

I’ve been seeing several friends and people I’ve worked with closely in fashion magazines, and I can’t immediately recognize any because of all the putty-ing.  So it’s refreshing to see subjects in their natural form, such as these taken by my photographer-friend Ricky Villabona for the magazine Spark.

Ricky’s is also Stanley Kubrick’s number fan.  Kubrick, who started out as a photographer before venturing into film, had a narrative style overflowing in every moving frame.  The stills of Ricky the Kubrick disciple evoke a parang-nandiyan-ka-lang-at-mayroon-nangyari subtext (like you’re there, and something interesting just happened), as someone puts it.

Kubrick should be the greatest filmmaker that ever lived, if ‘body of work’ were the criterion. He never did the same genre twice.  Every film he did was a major event, in terms of substance and style.  Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and even the misunderstood Eyes Wide Shut.

A personal fave is Barry Lyndon (1975) starring a very young and hunky Ryan O’Neal.  There Kubrick pushed the boundaries of naturalism, eschewing artificial lighting to recreate 17^th century Ireland.  He used natural light sources like the sun through the windows and candles for the night scenes.  The effect was appropriately soft for a Romantic era.  Simply stunning.