2001: A Space Odyssey revisited after 40 years
Scott says: "This is a great commentary on the 40th anniversary of Kubrick's masterpiece."
The site includes this YouTube clip from an interview with Kubrick.
The famously sniffish Renata Adler got to weigh in during her short-lived reign at the New York Times: "There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo... Its real energy seem to derive from that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block. The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday phone calls... [T]he uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking—and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its attention to detail—a kind of reveling in its own I.Q.—the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three unreconciled plot lines—the slabs, Dullea's aging, the period bedroom—are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, 'relativity,' does not really serve unless it can be verbalized."Link
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I can feel it.
Yeah, and "Citizen Kane" was about an old man who wished he still had his sled.
You know - aside from the first time I saw it at the age of 3 in 1968 (hey! it was rated G! what were parents to think?) which resulted in my being carried out the theater screaming as all my 3 year old neurons went into overload - i never had any plot/narrative problems with 2001.
It's about evolution. Of species. Of tech. Of consciousness.
In short, it's a birthday movie.
And the slabs appear to shepherd us along.
It's my favorite movie of all time. Partly cuz the special effects were awesome for 1968, still are good, partly cuz the music is the best.
What's this one? Ham? I think that's what it's supposed to be anyway.
My mom always said this was a stupid movie. Then, one night when I was in junior high, I saw that it was being run, uncut and without commercials, in the middle of the night. I sneaked into the family room to watch it, beginning to end, in the silence and darkness and cold, all alone.
And then I realized the truth.
It was my mom who was stupid.
Weird. I kept thinking it was dubbed. He does not sound like I thought he would.
#5, I'm with your mom: I thought it was kind of stupid. Well, maybe not stupid, but dumb. Remember, it was San Francisco, 1968, my friends and I had taken gaudier trips than that; a psychedelic movie, a trippy movie, couldn't have been a more sympathetic audience. We wanted it to be great. Perhaps we wanted it too much. When it wasn't, we became openly derisive. Somebody else in the audience loudly pointed out that "The fucking computer is gay!" We came close wanting our money back, but the sets and the colors and the Strauss boys were cool, so we stayed around for the dumb ending and then went up to Mike's Pool Room on Broadway for some minestrone. Ah, to be young during the revolution and be assholes together!
so when Star Wars came along, all was good?
I've seen this movie more than ANY other movie. And I see a LOT of movies. At one point, I was going to over 100 movies a year.
I OWN this movie on LASER DISK, for cry-yi.
This is the greatest movie ever. Haha! I mean it.
The greatest viewing of this movie was in the old McClurg Court theater in Chicago. They had probably the widest screen ever in a movie theater and at the time, the projectionist must have been a Kubrick nut or something, because he/she cranked the sound up to about ELEVEN. When they opened the curtains to start the movie, you said "NO! NO! Don't open any wider! It's beyond my peripheral vision!" Hahahaha! Great times.
Hahahaha! @ #2 DWIFF, my parents put me in the theatre to see "Some Like It Hot" when I was about 10 years old. I got to sit through it twice while they partied with friends. I owe them big time just for that alone.
We also saw "The Americanization of Emily" with James Garner, Julie Andrews and James Coburn when I was about 7, because the parents of my best friend thought that a birthday party wasn't a birthday party without going to a movie and this was the only movie showing. We got to see tits! At age SEVEN! No wonder I love the movies. TITS!!
My favorite movie when I was a child was Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana, with screenplay by Gore Vidal. The adults around me probably should have realized that something was going on.
not Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte?
My 9 year old mind was blown and it's still blown. That film was responsible for a lifelong obsession with Sci Fi, a career in computers and a deeply twisted outlook on technology. It can't truly be understood except in the context of the 1960s.
My parents were convinced by a family friend to see 2001 under the influence of pot brownies.
My mom took us kids to see it a week later. I was six. I was utterly hooked on SF after that. No pot necessary.
You young'uns may not remember these controversial Slashdot posts, about a theory that the whole movie is an allegory for Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra:
http://books.slashdot.org/books/01/05/01/1936213.shtml?tid=160
http://slashdot.org/science/01/05/27/1821227.shtml
After I read that stuff I could never see the movie the same way again. It's still, IMHO, the best SF movie ever made.
"and the old are often insanely jealous of the young."
(waiting for it...)
Seeing 2001 *in* 2001, on a massive screen, in a massive theatre in Times Square that literally did not have more than 15 people in it, all of us clustered in the middle of the 2nd and third rows:
That was the experience that made me love the movie. IMHO, if you haven't seen it on a screen larger than your apartment, you haven't seen it.
Perhaps you Happy Mutants would be interested in a rock opera version of 2001?
http://odysseyalbum.com/
"2001" was one of the few films we went to see as a family in the 60's (Sound of Music and Born Free might have been the other two). I was very surprised when my momsaid we were going to see a space movie. I couldn't imagine why my parents wanted to go to what had to be a slimy green alien movie.
We were all completely baffled by it and had no clue what it was about. But it didn't matter. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen and for the next four years I was building cardboard box spaceships with mechanical robot arms in our basement.
Here's a 28 minute mp3 that explains, or at least
attempts to, the movie '2001'.
http://www.frontiernet.net/~computerrepair/2001exp.mp3
Enjoy.
My friend Jeff writes some amazing stuff about kubrick. 53,000 words about the first twenty five minutes of EWS. The zooms in Barry Lyndon. Stunning.
http://www.jeffreyscottbernstein.com/kubrick/
Kubrickology could so be a module on a film studies course.
2001 was the best sci-fi movie ever.
Barry Lyndon was the best movie ever.
And it's not on Blu-ray.
Drat.
I was tunneling down through some links on the main linked site and found this:
http://www.halproject.com/
which had some nifty HAL9000 screen savers and active desktops. I have been staring down the active desktop version for a little while and I am thinking, wouldn't this be a nifty way to read RSS feeds? I went looking for one but no one seems to have made one yet. Does anyone know if one exists? Because if not, I'm going to start coding one up.
I was 12 when this movie came out. Our 8th grade English teacher took the whole class (bless her, she was fantastic). We also saw it on the widest screen imaginable, with speakers all over the theater. I was blown away, and to this day it's still one of my favorite movies of all time.
I always have a problem around the part where one of the astronauts goes EVA; there's this odd breathing sound effect which synchronizes my breathing and puts me to sleep.
I think this is how my folks used to put me to sleep.
@13: "It can't truly be understood except in the context of the 1960s."
Gotcha. Right. Another Baby Boomer experience that anyone born after 1960 must nod and pay homage to or seem a shallow, bitter tool.
It's a good movie. Parts are great. Parts are obtuse. And some of the parts that are obtuse are interpreted as great by folks who equate "long and slow" with "deep and thoughtful." Not always the case. Sometimes slow is just slow.
"Childhood's End" would have been a better film.
@13: "It can't truly be understood except in the context of the 1960s."
Gotcha. Right. Another Baby Boomer experience that anyone born after 1960 must nod and pay homage to or seem a shallow, bitter tool.
It's a good movie. Parts are great. Parts are obtuse. And some of the parts that are obtuse are interpreted as great by folks who equate "long and slow" with "deep and thoughtful." Not always the case. Sometimes slow is just slow.
"Childhood's End" would have been a better film.
Sometimes slow is just slow.
Speed kills. And I really, really recommend that you skip Barry Lyndon.
@15 Simra:
Wow. Thankyou for those links - i've always seen the symbolism reflect The Odyssey, but the parralels between Thus Spark Zarathustra and some of the plot-lines and visuals cues - you have broken my brain.
Gotta watch it again tonight.
Don't forget http://www.kubrick2001.com/ . This pretty much explains the entire movie with a nice flash animation.
Ah! The plight of the uninitiated.
Also thanks and RIP, Mr. Clarke. Godspeed.