So, as Act II begins, Barry has gone from being the not-particularly-distinguished son of a dead almost-lawyer to being the daring challenger to an English officer and gentleman to being a well-to-do fugitive to being an impoverished fugitive. With nowhere to turn and unable to get home, what can a penniless Irish lad do?

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As Barry Lyndon begins, the protagonist's father is shot dead in a duel. We haven't met the protagonist, we know nothing about him, we don't know anything. The duel takes place in a long shot, so we don't even get a good look at the guy who dies. The death of Redmond Barry's father treated as a kind of abstract narrative joke: Kubrick introduces a character, then seconds later dispatches him to his fate. And yet, I'm convinced that this brief scene contains the kernel of Barry's motivations and the themes of the entire movie. Barry Lyndon is a drama of class mobility and how the borders of class warfare are defended with lethal force. Barry's father was to have been a lawyer, which would have elevated Barry into a specific class; his death robs Barry of his status and sets him on a path toward bettering his class by any means necessary. He feels fate has robbed him of his rightful place in society, and he sets forth to regain his social equilibrium. There are many ways to advance, he finds, but fate has a way of striking back.

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Alex has been released from prison. He's been cured of his violent impulses (and his sexual ones, which society, for some reason, equates) . How do we feel about him now? The Ludovico Technique is harsh, but what will be the effect? Act I was about Alex striking out at society, Act II was about society striking back, now what will happen, now that Alex is all better?

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So Alex has become a murderer. That's pretty bad. Hardly anybody likes murderers. And yet, we didn't particularly like the woman Alex murdered -- she was kind of a jerk. Mostly, the viewer at this point is caught in the grip of a seething bundle of contradictions: Alex seems pretty darn bad, but the world he lives in seems worse -- one can, in a way, see Alex's response to his world as a valid one. The world has taught him that life is a meaningless, cruel joke and nothing has any meaning, who could blame him for acting in kind?

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Put most simply, A Clockwork Orange is about a viewer who gets jerked around by a movie. It is altogether fitting that it, itself, is a movie about jerking a viewer around. The protagonist of A Clockwork Orange is a young man, Alex, who wants what any young man wants -- to beat, steal, rob, rape, listen to Beethoven, dodge authority and boss people around. Do we like Alex? Are we supposed to like Alex? Does Kubrick like Alex? Can one even imagine a studio in the 21st century hearing a pitch for A Clockwork Orange? "Likability" and "Relatability" are what filmmakers hear every day from studio executives, but Kubrick couldn't be less interested. Dr. Strangelove had three sexually crippled men who want to blow up the world as its protagonists, and 2001 had a bunch of invisible aliens. And a computer. A Clockwork Orange gives us Kubrick's most complex, most paradoxical protagonist yet.

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Almost an hour into 2001, the movie starts.  We meet the narrative's third human-or-thereabouts protagonist, Dave Bowman (although Bowman's protagonist status doesn't really kick in for another half-hour or so).  When people complain that 2001 is slow, or draggy, I think this, not the pace of the editing or the speed of the narrative development, are what they're talking about.  We saw the same thing happen this summer with Inglourious Basterds, many viewers found the movie boring and without incident, not because it was but because it kept "starting over," introducing new protagonists an hour or more into the movie and asking us to invest in their stories.  The protagonists of 2001 (the human ones, not the invisible-extraterrestrials ones) never meet one another, and Bowman, the last, only has the dimmest awareness of what the hell is going on in the very last moments of the movie, and at that point the viewer is sometimes so baffled that it's easy to miss just what Bowman's revelation is about.

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ACT I of 2001 begins with a long, dialogue-less sequence describing a day in the life of its main characters. ACT II begins similarly, but is set a few million years later. Act I's hardscrabble hominids were hard pressed to make it through a day without being eaten, but the humans of Act II whiz through space in sophisticated machines and it's all perfectly boring. This is the "day in the life" of modern humanity, and it's as true today, in the real-life 2009, as it was regarding the pretend-future of 2001 -- we are surrounded by the most astonishing triumphs of human ingenuity, telephones and televisions and computers and the internet, airplanes and space shuttles and electric cars, and the thing that rivets us most is the cheap drama of petty gossip. Moonwatcher had to fight over weeds and worry about leopard attacks, but the alpha-monkey of Act II, Dr. Heywood Floyd, falls asleep while zooming through space en route to the moon. The bone-to-satellite cut at the top of Act II is justly cheered, but an even better cut might have been from Moonwatcher's bone to Floyd's pen, drifting lazily in space while Floyd snoozes in front of his in-flight entertainment of some lame movie or other.

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Viewers sometimes find 2001 to be opaque, baffling, boring, slow, tedious and pointless. I find it the opposite -- it's fascinating, suspenseful and, when one considers the wealth of narrative packed into its running time, quite fast-paced indeed, almost humorously so. What baffles people about 2001 is not in the nature or purpose of its collective scenes, but in the choices Kubrick made early on in the devising of the screenplay.

Depending on the way you approach narrative, Kubrick has done one of two extraordinary, innovative things in the narrative of 2001. One, my personal belief, is that he's created a narrative in which the protagonist never appears. The other, a slightly more conventional way of looking at it, is that he's created a narrative with three protagonists, three protagonists who never meet but are related thematically and whose motivations all revolve around the same item, the maguffin of the piece, the mysterious black monolith.

Here is my notion of the story of 2001:

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The question of Act I of Dr. Strangelove is "How could a thing like this happen?" The question of Act II is "Why would a thing like this happen?" and the question of Act III is "What if this happened?" The narrative takes us right up to the brink of unthinkability, then, rather incredibly, goes over it.

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One thing I neglected to mention the other day regarding Kubrick's screenplays is his propensity for long scenes. This wonderfully cinematic director has, paradoxically, a yen for long scenes, very long in some cases, another preference he shares with Tarantino. Generally in Kubrick movies, he'll present a long scene, and then there will be a big leap forward in time where a bunch of stuff happens we don't see, and then there be another long scene. The most famous of these cuts is in 2001, where we jump cut a few million years from an ape using a bone as a tool to satellites orbiting in space, but they occur in most of Kubrick's work. Act I of Dr. Strangelove has a total of eight scenes, eight (a typical screenplay would have at least twenty, and probably more) and Act II has even fewer. There are seven actual scenes, but the bulk of the act is actually two scenes broken up into six sections.

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Stanley Kubrick is lauded, justifiably, for his uncanny eye for composition and his chilly way of setting up a shot. But for me, Kubrick's genius, like Tarantino's, begins long before the cameras roll. It begins with his understanding of character and his approach to narrative, both of which were mind-bending for their times and still arresting today.

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The protagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey is:

a) Moon-Watcher
b) The Monolith
c) Dr. Heywood R. Floyd
d) Dr. Dave Bowman
e) Dr. Frank Poole
e) HAL 9000
f) The frozen astronauts
g) None of the above

If you, like me, are writing a haunted-house movie, it's a worthwhile exercise to compare the structures of Stanley Kubrick's hypnotic masterpiece The Shining with Steven Spielberg's thrilling, personable Poltergeist. Both are movies about families trapped in haunted houses, but The Shining is grand, quiet, still and stately, while Poltergeist is small, noisy, casual and antic. The Shining is, unquestionably, the greater of the two, but I would argue that Poltergeist comes up with more ingenious solutions to the haunted-house-movie problem than The Shining does. Where Poltergeist can't wait to throw all kinds of wild ghost stuff at you, The Shining hoards its secrets extremely carefully, keeping us waiting over an hour before the first ghost shows up, and two hours before we're absolutely sure the ghosts are real.

(Much later, Spielberg tried, again, to make a definitive haunted-house movie, The Haunting, a movie that turned out so poorly he took his name off it.)

The plot of The Shining, for those recently born, goes like this: Jack, Wendy and little Danny move into a hotel that's closing down for the winter. The hotel, we're told, does not have a sterling history. Jack, a frustrated writer, starts to act testy with his family while Danny starts seeing ghosts. Then Jack starts seeing ghosts, only to him they're not so scary. Wendy remains clueless pretty much throughout. The ghosts pressure Jack to murder his family and Jack finally gives in and tries to do so.

What does it do with a running time of 140 minutes?