141–150 of 169 posts
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Can’t recommend this highly enough for its complex (for TV) treatment of strong AI.
I tried a few episodes and thought it was stupid. I'd love to be wrong, so please tell me it gets better. I'm willing to give it a second chance.
I've watched 2001 twice in my life. Once on my laptop screen, and once in a theater. Wildly different experiences. On a laptop, it was maddeningly slow. I couldn't bear that scene where the spaceship docks on the space station while the Blue Danube Waltz played. Excruciating. I wish there was more explanation, as my mind was wandering watching this dull film. In a theater, I experienced a completely different film.On…
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You can get a flavour for it in 2010 , which had several production advantages and generally better acting from better-known actors. Roy Scheider as Heywood Floyd (compare him to William Sylvester's Heywood Floyd in 2001) does several voice-overs and there is a lot of unrealistic dialogue for expository purposes. There was plenty of discussion about what went wrong with HAL 9000 and whether HAL 9000 was fixable, alth…
I’ve always had a soft spot for 2010 and thought it could benefit tremendously from a Blade Runner -esque recut: Drop the voiceovers and make the ending much more ambiguous. It still wouldn’t be 2001 ; in has the bones of a very different film. But as a rare example of a hard SF movie with a terrific cast and largely excellent writing, it could certainly stand on its own.
To me, the universe of 2010 was just barely within stretching distance for society in some forseeable future, whereas Star Wars and Star Trek were unreachable. That somehow increased its appeal to me as a child, as I could envision living in the world of 2010 in a way I could not with other sci-fi universes. The universe of 2010 was my universe, in other words.
I've been afraid to rewatch 2010 as an adult, because I know I will see it differently.
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Yes, having read the book makes a huge difference. I tried watching the film first, but I failed and stopped watching a short way into it. Then at some point I read the book, which I really enjoyed. I thought I'd give the film a second chance and I'm glad I did because it was brilliant, having read the book. Strongly recommend treating them as two integral parts of one work of art -- consuming either one and not the…
Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now also has a pretty remarkable adaptation in video game format called Spec Ops: The Line. It's the same story premise cast as a modern military shooter. The gameplay is a fairly generic (some say this is an intentional statement on the drudgery of video game violence but I'm not so sure) but the story is excellent and there are lots of audible and visual details that show the gradual de…
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Lawrence of Arabia is supposed to be an immersive, "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" epic historical drama film which won Best Cinematography. But I couldn't avoid constantly glancing at the time and my notifications, when I watched it on a smart watch screen that also displayed a bar across the top showing the time and my notifications.
Serious question: How is it possible to view Lawrence of Arabia on a smart watch?
I can't blame Kubrick for cutting all the voice-overs, which probably would have made the movie unbearable to watch. At the same time, it's maddening in its ambiguity. Seeing it as a product of this enormous gulf between creative approaches explains a lot.
Maddening? No, it's glorious . A simple film, a dumb film, a useless film is one that wraps everything up in a tidy little bow with a neat little moral at the end. A smart film, an impactful film is one that raises questions without simple answers. A film that makes you dwell on those questions, a film that makes you think about and come up with answers to those questions yourself. That's a life altering film. That's…
Maybe if I watched it again I would get more of it.
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It would be fascinating to watch the Clarke cut. The spartan ambiguity of Kubrick's cut almost certainly makes it the better film, but to see A Space Odyssey from such a different creative perspective would nonetheless be a revelation. I wonder if prints of it still exist in a vault somewhere.
You can get a flavour for it in 2010 , which had several production advantages and generally better acting from better-known actors. Roy Scheider as Heywood Floyd (compare him to William Sylvester's Heywood Floyd in 2001) does several voice-overs and there is a lot of unrealistic dialogue for expository purposes. There was plenty of discussion about what went wrong with HAL 9000 and whether HAL 9000 was fixable, alth…
Arthur C Clarke wasn't the only person who was shocked at the premiere of 2001. Stanley Kubrick commissioned the prominent film composer Alex North -- famous for the scoring of Spartacus -- to write the music for 2001. However, film music is only recorded and added at the final stage of editing; normally all of the video is laid down first so that the music director knows exactly how long each scene will be and the m…
That's a great anecdote. Where do you have it from? I'd love to find more of this kind of stuff. And wow, by the way. That's harsh.
I have a feeling that these sorts of stories fall into the category of "well known in the industry but not thought to be interesting enough to write down or relate to outsiders".
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Stephen King is publicly critical of Kubrick's treatment of "The Shining", mostly about its unchanging and one-dimensional characters. While I expect "2001" would not have been improved by a lot of explanatory voiceovers, I think "The Shining" would be seriously improved by Jack not being obviously crazy right from the first.
Most authors complained about it yes. Burgess accused Kubrick of not having understood a single word of "Clockwork Orange". Nabokov was the most gracious when he said that while Lolita was a very good movie, he didn't recognize his original work at all :) I think it's a very difficult exercise to adapt a novel. Should you literally put on the screen what is written in the book ? What's the point ? You're not creating…