2001 was 1968, but yeah still the times don’t align. ill have to go back and see if i can find that reference in the art book i have. i think that’s where that came from…
im probably skewing some details or something.
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Yeah sorry I meant after.
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It might’ve been interesting if they had a mirror monolith. Maybe it would’ve changed their behavior in a different way. The violence in those scenes gets more disturbing every time I watch it.
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I also had the tabloid-sized Jack Kirby comic. One thing that stuck in my memory was that Kirby showed the apes fighting over a stream rather than a water hole. I thought the whole idea was that they were fighting to control the only local water source. If it had been a stream one tribe could have just ambled a mile or two downstream to get all the water they wanted without a hassle.
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netflix has been streaming V good two doccos re: men who worked for Kubrick. One is called Filmworker, the other is S is for Stanley.
Jee-yay-sus!
My God! It’s full of stars!
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There is a “Star Child” scene at the end of Oblivion which almost exactly matches the Star Child at the end of 2001, which for me qualifies Oblivion as a sequel to 2001.
And its a Kubrick sequel, at that. Not a Clarke sequel.
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Doing the rings with practical effects proved … impractical
The same FX crew tried again for Silent Running and it still didn’t work
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Personally I think it looks pretty good.
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They send more probes through the stargate
then astronauts
then therapists to find out WTF is happening to the astronauts
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My dad took me to see 2001 when it first opened in Melbourne Australia. He was a DJ at the time (radio disc jokey) and I was pissed that he took my older brother to see the Rolling Stones - apparently I was too young at 8!
The cinema was the Capitol, designed by Walter Burley Griffin, a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright. The ceiling and walls had a crystalline aesthetic which added to the surreal nature of the viewing experience.
When HAL was being decommissioned and started to sing “Daisy” I cried!
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Yeah I am in Melbourne too, but I don’t know where I saw it. I was four or five at the time. My dad worked in electronics and my mum had to restrain him from charging into the projection booth and demanding the right to re-calibrate their sound gear.
Pre-thx, cinema audio was pretty crap apparently.
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Shelly Duvall could tell you all about that. Kubrick was an absolute bastard to her on the set of The Shining.
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Reminds me of an installation at The Harry Ransom Center, part of which was a large rectangular box with mirrors on all sides that you could sit in. It was unnerving.
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The book Space Odyssey by Michael Benson Is a ridiculously thorough look at the production of the movie. There’s a whole chapter about the perspex monolith! Other crazy things like projectors rigged in crazy places to put content onto the flatscreens but that had to work upside down because the whole set rotates. And the relationship between Clarke and Kubrick from when they met. Every paragraph is fascinating.
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Speaking as a fictional scientist (science fictional scientist?), there would be a lot of interesting experiments and assumptions to be made about the monolith if it were clear and the physical properties of it.
Namely, what would the index of refraction be? Would it pass all electromagnetic waves with the same index, or would it be variable? What pattern if it was variable? Would there be any attenuation that could indicate what material it is made of? Bonus points if it were the spectral signal of hydrogen.
What about polarization of light? Does it obey conventional laws of optics? Etcetera, etc., &c.
So, being black and absorbing all light makes it more scientifically mysterious than if it were transparent.
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Norman Goodman: Can I ask you something about this reflective surface?
Barnes: Yeah, it appears to be mercury, doesn’t it? Except mercury is liquid at this temperature.
Norman Goodman: Oh, no. That’s not what I’m talking about. What worries me is that it’s reflecting everything but us.
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A clear acrylic monolith would have been reflective. I wonder if that’s really why Kubrick ditched the idea. A reflective surface would have posed issues and imposed limits on how it could be photographed, especially on a ‘live’ set (and on process shots).
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