Great first half, 2nd half was dull ....really dull

First of all, no one in here is trying to undermine your experiential quality. If we watch a movie, we are bound to witness exactly what is the mindset of what is our subjective experience and expectations towards this particular movie. What we see is exactly what we kind of want to see. We have watched movies for entertainment purposes for well over few generations now, to the point where we take for granted that we don't have to regurgitate any information about what we've seen. But there are not a lot of directors these days who put out amazing artistic experiences that will leave you baffled decades after viewing.

Yes, I am a fanboy, and Stanley Kubrick is by far the greatest movie director this world has ever seen, but I don't believe this overrides what I'm trying to say. I agree with your opinion about 'generational preference'; kids growing up these days don't understand the passive-aggressiveness, the devastatingly morbid subtlety or the humor stemming from the insanity of the entire human experience that Kubrick repeatedly portrayed in his films. Movie-goers these days, even the ones with a niche for artistic portrayals of concepts, seek instant gratification. The whole medium of a movie has become so pastime for us that we have an indie band so 'cleverly' called "French Films".

And Kubrick has always overthrown that in his films: we always see his main characters irrevocably trade away something that defines their integral core. We see people witnessing their most dreaded nightmares become reality. We see it with no sugar-coating whatsoever. We see it in ACO when Dave realizes he has to let his dead friend go to save himself, in Barry Lyndon where he finally realizes after all his successfullness that dying has none of the glory he thought, The Shining where a troubled family man attempts to brutally destroy in all levels on what he values the most, in FMJ where Joker faces the repercussions of how he betrayed the one he always strove to nurtre, and finally on EWS when a family conceptually falls apart when none of it actually matters. Us viewers never see something we would like to see: what Kubrick always delivers is the beauty in how cognitive dissonance placed against western sense of morality plays out in real life. It is ugly, it has no glory, it has none of the assumed repercussions, but most of all: it is devastatingly indifferent. To me, Kubrick had a funky way of reiterating Nietzsche's nihilism on steroids.

To me, each of Kubrick's films is a manifest of how stupid - in all of its fabricated and self-enthroned intellect - can humanity be even during the most civilized of times. To me, Kubrick attempts to show how animal we always are regardless of our societal class, ideological stance or anything of the likes: we are animal, and that is what we will ever be. I'm fairly sure that none of the current move binge-watchers will find his movies entertaining, they are far too complex even to the obvious eye. But he made all of his movies in a manner that will shudder these people: they will not like the cinematographical choices he made, they will shy away from the general atmosphere, or they will find his depictions of violence far too haunting.

What I meant to say is, that don't be so stupid to overlook anything that you know is made by a person who doesn't care about making a product. Always respect art, because those people always pinpoint the erroneous paradigms we know exist but are not yet within our domain of conscious thought. That being said, Kubrick is one of the finest existential artists known to man. His work is right on par with Jeremy Bentham, Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Stephen Hawking and Nick Bostrom.