Spartacus

Stanley, what have you done? This movie licks white dog crap. The set pieces, the mild delight of seeing Laurence Olivier do anything, and the vain prospect of any sign of Kubrick showing up are all that's keeping me going.

I'm an hour and a half in. Kirk Douglas is sickening as the most dimple-chinned classical male hero of all time, perfectly shaven and buzzed and slicked back despite being a rural slave. His personality is no less grossly polished and whitewashed than his looks, being a life-size masculinity mannequin made of stale cheese. His love interest is hardly better, bearing that ridiculous fog they always put on the camera to accentuate a true beauty in old movies, bearing a gratingly one-dimensional and repetitive orchestral theme, and bearing an impossible (and probably misogynistic on the writers' part) infatuation for her Dirk Diggler Kirk Douglas.

One searches for any evidence Kubrick made this. There's no hint of philosophy, of artistic adventure, of the frightening side of humanity; it's the most basic old epic. It's even worse than the Heston epics I suffered recently. I don't get it.