70mm at the Castro theater in SF. High as shit.
Awesome, man.
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You’d think that with Peter Hyams directing, we might get some explosive decompression,. But No.
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Makes me think of how much joy filmmakers seem to have with vomit, and making new techniques for showing “realistic” vomit, like no-cutaway scenes where the actor starts with mouth full of hidden oatmeal and acts normal for a while.
Strange how they don’t put this same sort of effort into making uber-realistic diarrhea scenes. I wonder why?
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I saw 2010 long before I saw 2001. Honestly, I like them both for wildly different reasons.
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I can’t remember why I couldn’t get to that, but I remember how bummed i was that i couldn’t.
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Kubrick had no intention of spoon-feeding the audience. He was going to tell his story his own way, and if no ome could make sense of it, well, that’s what creative control is all about. I came away from my first viewing completely confused about what I’d just seen, and it wasn’t until I’d read the book and watched the film again that I could venture a guess what the movie was really about. There’s still enough room to wonder, after seeing many more times.
2010? Meh. There’s barely any room for interpretation, the only reason this movie got made instead of Childhood’s End or Rendezvous with Rama is that the studio execs figured it was “safe”, having already seen the prequel.
I don’t think Kubrick’s ambitions were ever even approximated again until Contact and most recently, Arrival. Those movies represent the true spiritual successors to 2001, in my mind.
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Nolan had Kubrickian ambition for Interstellar, but every time he’d get close, he’d stop and let someone talk, and ruin everything.
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I wanted to fight Nolan, and the entire cast, within 10 minutes of the first scene.
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Just the typical YT clickbait titling. Or the YT creator’s ignorance.
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Another interesting movie in this discussion is The Fountain. Originally cast with Brad Pitt it was likely just going to be another big budget movie without a soul. But then Pitt dropped out and the budget was lost, but then Hugh Jackman was cast and a very emotional and interpretive movie was cobbled together and released.
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I also enjoyed 2010 and still do; the Cold War plot added interesting dynamics as a necessary change from Kubrick’s artful depiction of the “real” boredom of space travel. Only a couple of things bothered me about the film, though. 1) Some of the interiors shouted gloss-painted-plywood; 2) Bulging CRT screens and horrible computer game graphics, possibly driven by cost. (2001 used gorgeous elaborately techy animation projected onto the backs of flat screens.)
BTW: Does anyone know what Helen Mirren’s character shouted out in Russian, near the end of the film when her spacecraft blasted away from Europa?
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In addition to the sloppiness of his ideas and his poor attention to detail, this presenter has vocal fry, making it really annoying to listen to him.
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One of the Russian actors, Oleg Rudnik, was an instructor teaching Russian at the Defense Language Institute.
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awright awright awright…
Wasn’t Kubrick implying that space is a hostile place, better suited for intelligent machines than for old fashioned hominids?
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Yeah, the entire Reagan era was a feeling that the question of global thermonuclear war was depressingly inevitable. Ronny seemed all too happy to play chicken with nukes, and the Soviet Union was led by old men who seemed to not care at all about human life. Even the nostalgia of the time, for the Fifties, recalled fallout shelters and the naïveté of “duck and cover”.
2010 was made at a time when “us versus them” was at its height. And yeah, its only real fault is that it tries to be a sequel to a movie that is best left as a standalone. It is a conventional followup to a very nonconventional movie.
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That was a common theme in Clarke’s novels, most noticeably in Childhood’s End, with one of the Allen visitors to earth saying “man is not meant for the stars.”
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It’s a sequel by virtue of its source material being a sequel. There are only a handful of films ever made that are in the same class as 2001. I think Hyams did a great job basing the movie on Clarke’s sequel and not Kubrick’s original, and stands on its own quite well. I love 2001 from the first time I saw it in 1969. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it since, with the most recent being last weekend. Trying to maintain orthodoxy in art is a fool’s errand. All art is derivative, so saying that 2001 should remain forever on its own potentially robs us of a great derivative work. Speaking of which, has anyone seen Soderbergh’s The Return of W. de Rijk, his 110 minute re-cut of 2001? Warners and the Kubrick estate made him take it down, and I’ve been looking for a copy ever since.
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The Expanse has ruined explosive decompression scenes for me, what with an asteroid miner calmly opening his visor in vacuum (after carefully and fully exhaling first) to remove a stray wire, and Naomi escaping her abusive ex and interplanetary terrorist by flinging herself out of an airlock towards that of another ship without a space suit. The Googles suggest that these are more scientifically accurate than the stereotypical balloon full of ketchup going pop.
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