Color Me Kubrick (2005)

Review by All Movie Guide
Filled with deeply ironic visual, verbal, and musical references to the revered director from the opening frames, Colour Me Kubrick would seem the kind of tribute that the late Stanley Kubrick would have appreciated. Anchored by a hilariously fearless and jarringly off-kilter performance from John Malkovich, the film features a clever if episodic script from Anthony Frewin, brought to bear with a surfeit of visual wit by first-time feature director Brian Cook. The writer and director both worked with Kubrick, and their liberal use of his grand visual and aural cues for their unseemly little tale seems affectionate, but it's also scathingly funny. At one point in the film, Malkovich, playing notorious Kubrick impersonator Alan Conway, impresses a fan by telling him that he's readying a sequel to 2001 ("3001," naturally) starring none other than John Malkovich. The actor's name doesn't generate much of a response, but his deranged turn holds Colour Me Kubrick together. Trying on one ludicrous "American" accent after another, Malkovich plays Conway as a desperate sociopath. His lack of resemblance to Kubrick and ignorance of the director's work -- at one point he claims to have played Pip in David Lean's Great Expectations -- and his transparent grubbiness make the filmmakers' point that Conway's various victims were misled as much by their own eagerness to attach themselves to Kubrick's wealth and fame (and, in a few cases, his genius) as by whatever cunning Conway could muster. In these times, there's nothing particularly earth-shattering about these themes, but Conway's story is put forth with such an unapologetic sense of depraved fun that it becomes startlingly entertaining. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide