Nothing you mention here means a damn thing when it comes to how watchable the movie is. Sure, it's art, and it's art I can appreciate but it's a boring movie with abhorant pacing. It's a form of entertainment first and foremost and the movie fails at being entertainment.
Also don't think about bringing Star Wars into this, anyone with a brain can figure out the two movies are not comparable at all. I've seen many great movies that moved at glacial speeds and enjoyed them greatly. I've also enjoyed my fair share of Kubrick films.
i don't really care how unwatchable u feel the movie is. about 5,000 film critics, who know much more about film than u or i ever will, will disagree with you on that one.
also i wasn't trying to promote it's "watchability" to you at all. i was explaining the filmmaker's reasoning behind the pace and silence of the film. if you don't understand that, i don't know what to tell you.
who was comparing this to star wars? i simply stated that movies like star wars have impacted/ fantasized are views of space/sci-fi while other movies, like 2001, give it a more realistic illustration.
Cinematography and pacing are two very different aspects of a film. It is possible for amazing cinematography to be badly mispaced and, thus, boring.
Man you took that a lot drier than I meant it. I'm aware that I care a lot, lot more about cinematography than most people. I guess I'm just surprised with how impatient people are given that I'm from allegedly the most impatient generation of recent time.
The only time I got at all bored was ironically during the stargate scene; as others have mentioned I actually liked that it gave me a lot of time to think.
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"Virtue, Jacques, is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it..."
2001 is considered a classic because it never gets dated.
This is ironic on so many levels.
Thats hilarious. Yeah like 1984 never gets dated either.
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bighaben I'm all for slower movies if they are at least engaging. This movie was terrible at hooking tHe audience, instead we get a borefest of epic porportions. Don't get me wrong parts of the movie were amazingly well executed and deserve some praise, but 20 minutes of greatness is not worth the 2 hours of struggling to find a reason to keep watching the movie.
I am with you. And for me particularly because the whole first contact thing itself is not much of a payoff at all.
I think the irritating thing is that certain people try to argue that not liking the movie is some kind of negative reflection on you.
They feel the movie is "objectively good", therefore your inability to enjoy the experience means you suck on some level (ADD, Transformers advocate, no taste in cinematography, whatever).
A lot of people are bored as hell by the movie. Simple as that. It's a made up story about made up aliens, an implausible first contact scenario, with a lot of arbitrary imagery at the end signifying something that is supposed to be of deep significance... Using dated looking space ships in a timeframe that is incompatible with current events, that may have been cutting age at the time they were made, but that was 54 YEARS AGO!
Movie was made in 1968!
Today is 2012.
2012 is to 1968, as 1968 is to WW-I. Not even WW-II, but World War ONE!
Which makes it an impressive achievement for it's time, an admirable movie, and fascinating for film buffs. But that doesn't make it enjoyable for most people. The movie is not timeless at all. It has an expiration date printed right on the DVD!
Human drama and interaction might be considered timeless. Visual razzle dazzle tends to not be.
I couldn't get through more than a half hour of Blade Runner.
Please try again. So so SOOOOOO good. Even if only the basis of what he does visually in that movie. It is just ****ing stunning throughout. The color, the lighting, the atmosphere..
re: 2001, A Space Odyssey: I admit the pacing is kinda bad but I actually like lots of pauses. I try and figure out what the director (presumably doing it on purpose) is trying to push me to think about during each pause. It is torturous, but kinda enjoyable when you hold it up next to 99% of today's movies where it's all
Movie pacing has sped up considerably in the last twenty years. Most young americans today probably wouldn't be able to sit through Three Days of the Condor, or other movie classics. I love old Samurai movies and old Westerns (which frequently borrowed plots from those Samurai movies). Sometimes you just have to let something reach a slow boil. It's why John Carpenter's The Thing was so much better than the recent prequel. But when I try to watch some of these movies with friends, unless they have that classic cheese factor to enjoy, they can't really watch them.
On the flip side, I'm one of those who didn't like Blade Runner. I was also never a fan of 2001: a Space Odysee either.
Using dated looking space ships in a timeframe that is incompatible with current events, that may have been cutting age at the time they were made, but that was 54 YEARS AGO!
Movie was made in 1968!
Today is 2012.
2012 is to 1968, as 1968 is to WW-I. Not even WW-II, but World War ONE!
Movie pacing has sped up considerably in the last twenty years. Most young americans today probably wouldn't be able to sit through Three Days of the Condor, or other movie classics.
Three Days of the Condor, nothing. I know a teenager who had a hard time sitting through Die Hard.
Die Hard.
So his father, older brother and I mocked his masculinity savagely to keep him awake through the thing. It was for his own good. He'll thank us in ten years.
But until that incident, I didn't really realize that, yeah, compared to modern films, the greatest Christmas action movie of all time is relatively slow.
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Three Days of the Condor, nothing. I know a teenager who had a hard time sitting through Die Hard.
Die Hard.
So his father, older brother and I mocked his masculinity savagely to keep him awake through the thing. It was for his own good. He'll thank us in ten years.
But until that incident, I didn't really realize that, yeah, compared to modern films, the greatest Christmas action movie of all time is relatively slow.
That's pretty... wow.
Can he only make it through Crank or something?
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"Virtue, Jacques, is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it..."
I think the irritating thing is that certain people try to argue that not liking the movie is some kind of negative reflection on you.
They feel the movie is "objectively good", therefore your inability to enjoy the experience means you suck on some level (ADD, Transformers advocate, no taste in cinematography, whatever).
A lot of people are bored as hell by the movie. Simple as that. It's a made up story about made up aliens, an implausible first contact scenario, with a lot of arbitrary imagery at the end signifying something that is supposed to be of deep significance... Using dated looking space ships in a timeframe that is incompatible with current events, that may have been cutting age at the time they were made, but that was 54 YEARS AGO!
no, not liking the movie is not a negative reflection on anyone at all. i don't think anyone even suggested that. an opinion is an opinion.
if u don't like the story of the film, or the pacing and wide shots, that's fine too. it did win an oscar for visual effects and was also nominated for best screenplay, so u not following the story probably says a lot more about you than the film.
if u can't appreciate the labor that went into the visual effects or cinematography, u probably just don't understand the laborious techniques used in making the movie, and i don't mean that disrespectfully. every director has their own style, and kubrick was, to say the least, a perfectionist.
timeless: not affected by the passage of time or changes in fashion.
this movie is in the top 100, has more critical acclaim today than it did when it first came out, and we are still talking about even today on this mtg message board.
50+ years old yet still couldn't have been done any better today.
the film is definitely timeless. people's attention spans, not so timeless.
My bad. That would be 1924. Somehow I subtracted 1968 from 2012, and came up with 54 (which is kind of sad on my part, since I was born before this movie was made, and I'm not 50 yet).
Either way, the point is still the same: Today (2012), looking back at the year 2001: A space odyssey was made (1968), is like people of THAT year looking back at (1924):
1924 technology:
1968 technology:
2012 Technology:
Just saying... 1968 was a long freaking time ago. There are plenty of grandfathers today who weren't born when Space Odyssey came out.
The special effects were cool for their time, but they're really, really DATED.
An influential film, yes, but asking 2012 NON-film students to appreciate it is sort of like asking a guy from 1968 to appreciate films like Eisenstein's Battleship Potempkin (1925) or Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925)
Three Days of the Condor, nothing. I know a teenager who had a hard time sitting through Die Hard.
Die Hard.
So his father, older brother and I mocked his masculinity savagely to keep him awake through the thing. It was for his own good. He'll thank us in ten years.
But until that incident, I didn't really realize that, yeah, compared to modern films, the greatest Christmas action movie of all time is relatively slow.
Yeah, ALIEN is glacially paced by today's standards. THE THING is slow.
You need look no further than the "Favorite STAR WARS poll" thread, and the number of votes actually going to the original trilogy to see it. What it illustrates, isn't that episodes 1-3 were good movies (they were all junk to me, but I think the concensus to contemporary audiences was that 1-2 were mediocre (IMDB 6.4, 6.7), and episode 3 was goodish (IMDB 7.7) )...
...but that STAR WARS 4-6 are paced slow enough compared to modern tastes, that many young humans actually prefer 1-3, which are much inferior movies (based on ticket sales and reviews contemporaneous with their release) in their own respective eras.
no, not liking the movie is not a negative reflection on anyone at all. i don't think anyone even suggested that. an opinion is an opinion.
if u don't like the story of the film, or the pacing and wide shots, that's fine too. it did win an oscar for visual effects and was also nominated for best screenplay, so u not following the story probably says a lot more about you than the film.
You did it again. You insulted me instead of sticking to the movie. You really can't even see what you just did there? Sad.
And btw, the fact that it won an Oscar is impressive.
But to a person in 2012, the actual effects themselves are NOT going to be impressive. That's why we say 'the special effects were impressive... for the TIME'.
Looking through the IMDB database, something just struck me. The movies of his that I actually enjoyed (Spartacus, Dr Strangelove) got Oscar nominations for ACTING (and in my opinion Clockwork Orange, Malcom McDowell deserved one).
All of his movies which didn't have ANY great acting, I enjoyed far less.
if u can't appreciate the labor that went into the visual effects or cinematography, u probably just don't understand the laborious techniques used in making the movie, and i don't mean that disrespectfully.
Again. Gee, I don't know why I'd take being insulted to my face "disrespectfully".
I know exactly what went into it. Hell, in college (THIRTY years ago), I even took a film course entirely on Kubrick, and 2001 was a bit dated even then.
Cinematography is nice for its time, but I am part of a world that has seen Hubble telescope images in 1000+ lines of resolution on my 55" home TV. I am part of a world where James Cameron was asked by an expert to go back and fix ALL star positions of the night sky for 1912 in his movie, for the sake of accuracy... and he DID IT at the cost of a few million dollars.
I can be IMPRESSED by the achievement of what Kubrick did in 1968, but it doesn't mean I'll be IMPRESSED by the images themselves.
every director has their own style, and kubrick was, to say the least, a perfectionist.
timeless: not affected by the passage of time or changes in fashion.
Of course its perception was "affected" by the passage of time.
In 1968 when it came out, it was a speculation on... the FUTURE.
In 2012, it's a masterfully crafted, but quaint historical musing on a future that never happened... like reading 20,000 Leagues under the Sea or When Worlds Collide. Or looking at black and white footage of Man in the Moon.
this movie is in the top 100, has more critical acclaim today than it did when it first came out, and we are still talking about even today on this mtg message board.
I have great respect for Kubrick.
I can always have great respect for a chef's technique, perfectionism, and his genius...
...and still not like most of his food very much. It just may not be my taste.
50+ years old yet still couldn't have been done any better today.
the film is definitely timeless. people's attention spans, not so timeless.
What does that even mean?
You claim the film is timeless because it STAYED THE SAME over time; it's just that the audiences changed? So it's timeless because it would still be enjoyed by 1968 audiences if we time-machined them into 2012?
Guess what, ALL film STAY THE SAME over time. It's the audience that changes.
Seriously, explain what you mean by "the film is definitely timeless. people's attention spans, not so timeless" (other than saying that modern audiences just suck and dont like what you think is good).
ya it all stems back to the familiar argument, does life follow art, or does art follow life.
movies, songs, art, fashion all change dramatically with time. so when u get a throw back,
@ morphling like DRIVE, which is slow and kinda silent, it's a pleasant surprise.
(loved Drive. i have an affinity for movies that take place in LA. great cinematography with the LA lights, good soundtrack, and the acting was fine. reminded me lots of taxi driver, never knew what was going on in his head).
i see what u mean about 2001. and i think the point about the attention span of younger audiences in very interesting. to think, when 2001 came out, it probably wasn't considered a long movie at all. 2 hr 20 min back then was definitely not out of the ordinary.
personally, story is everything to me. action, quick cuts, that's all filler. true dialogue, plot twists, climax-resolution, that's all substance. i was watching the 2nd matrix the other day and was so BORED during the incredible fight scene, neo vs 10000 agent smiths. i was surprised at that, while an old Hitchcock thriller like Vertigo can keep my attention the whole way.
Instead of trying to define the objective quality of a movie (which is impossible), there's a much easier way to determine if it's timeless or not: do modern audiences still enjoy it?
2001 clearly has lost a significant part of its appeal nowadays, so it can't be a timeless movie. Does it make it a bad movie? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't say it's among the best ever made.
Now, an interesting question: will any movie, given enough time, lose its appeal to future audiences? I don't know, but I think some films are truly timeless.
2001 clearly has lost a significant part of its appeal nowadays, so it can't be a timeless movie. Does it make it a bad movie? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't say it's among the best ever made.
I don't think that's true. It never was well-received, it's pretty much been a well-known cult movie. It was panned hard early on and had it's big supporters, just like now.
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"Virtue, Jacques, is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it..."
Instead of trying to define the objective quality of a movie (which is impossible), there's a much easier way to determine if it's timeless or not: do modern audiences still enjoy it?
2001 clearly has lost a significant part of its appeal nowadays, so it can't be a timeless movie. Does it make it a bad movie? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't say it's among the best ever made.
Now, an interesting question: will any movie, given enough time, lose its appeal to future audiences? I don't know, but I think some films are truly timeless.
that was the whole point of my post, to explain that 2001 has received more praise TODAY than it did when it first came out. which, in my opinion, is why it is timeless.
Now, an interesting question: will any movie, given enough time, lose its appeal to future audiences? I don't know, but I think some films are truly timeless.
Casablanca. Totally Casablanca. My old roommate was a great guy, but he was an out-and-proud Philistine who'd watch any awful anime but found the Marx Brothers incomprehensible and boring (an offense for which he nearly became my ex-roommate in the same sense that JFK is an ex-president). Got him to watch Casablanca somehow, and he loved every minute of it.
Citizen Kane is definitely not like this, which is why Casablanca beats it in my own judgment of "best movie ever made". A good movie should appeal to all audiences at all times.
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Casablanca. Totally Casablanca. My old roommate was a great guy, but he was an out-and-proud Philistine who'd watch any awful anime but found the Marx Brothers incomprehensible and boring (an offense for which he nearly became my ex-roommate in the same sense that JFK is an ex-president). Got him to watch Casablanca somehow, and he loved every minute of it.
Citizen Kane is definitely not like this, which is why Casablanca beats it in my own judgment of "best movie ever made". A good movie should appeal to all audiences at all times.
citizen kane was known as the first with a non-linear story narrative.
i saw casablanca in a theater as well, it was awesome.
when i think of timeless and best, i think in terms of genre. this is why 2001 sticks out to me as a timeless piece in sci-fi cinema.
others i would mention, leone's the good the bad and the ugly, probably the tightest movie i could think of, in terms of editing.
chinatown, young Jack Nicholson, one of my favorite neo-noir pieces as well.
citizen kane was known as the first with a non-linear story narrative.
Which was revolutionary, but doesn't give it any special appeal for audiences who are accustomed to non-linear narratives. (Also, it's not exactly true.) Don't get me wrong, Citizen Kane is still a very good movie by its own merits. But it tops all the "best movies ever" lists because film students adore how innovative it was for its time, not because it has the broadest and deepest appeal for all times.
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Which was revolutionary, but doesn't give it any special appeal for audiences who are accustomed to non-linear narratives. (Also, it's not exactly true.) Don't get me wrong, Citizen Kane is still a very good movie by its own merits. But it tops all the "best movies ever" lists because film students adore how innovative it was for its time, not because it has the broadest and deepest appeal for all times.
it usually is the innovative, unconventional films that receive such praise. 2001 seems to fit that bill. not because it has the deepest appeal, but because it is taking movie making/art to a whole new level.
one that comes to mind is unforgiven. an unconventional western that did everything "wrong" which is why it was so brilliant. a protagonist that is washed up and old, not some heroic cowboy that we are accustomed to.
more recently, what about the artist? say what u want, but it was pretty innovative as well and certainly received much praise from the academy.
Which was revolutionary, but doesn't give it any special appeal for audiences who are accustomed to non-linear narratives. (Also, it's not exactly true.) Don't get me wrong, Citizen Kane is still a very good movie by its own merits. But it tops all the "best movies ever" lists because film students adore how innovative it was for its time, not because it has the broadest and deepest appeal for all times.
Not only experimental, but where are the great ACTING performances? They're not there. 2001 could have been done with puppets, a la Captain Scarlet, and lost nothing in the translation.
I think its tough to give the title timeless to any movie at this point. We need movie history to be on the realm of 200-300 years to really see which movies are still being talked about a century or two from now.
Yes strong older movies are still doing quite well, but to pretend that they will still be classics in 100-200 years from today is easier said then done. This coming from a fairly young guy that enjoys movies like Some Like it Hot, The Good The Bad and The Ugly(and others in that trilogy), The Godfather 1-2, etc...
God, I tried so hard to stay out of this thread. 2001 is, IMO, not only one of my favorite films of all time, but I subscribe to the idea that it is also one of the best films of all time. So, against better judgement, here I go...
Speaking of evolution, everything was very unclear about the monolith. I knew it jumpstarted human evolution because the film's 50 years old and by now that's common knowledge, but I'm unsure if I could have figure that old otherwise. And don't even get me started on the psychodelic ending! I have this little rule of thumb: if something is so cryptic to the point that it can mean anything, then it means nothing.
The ending isn't "so cryptic that is could mean anything". The monolith did a forced evolution to Dave and he is the fetus in the end. I don't think that's very ambiguous. He is the next step in evolution, seems fairly straight forward...
I liked the book (written and released I think simultaneously with the movie, right?), but the movie wasn't my cup of tea. The beginning wasn't very clear (though I knew what was supposd to be happening) and nothing else was either. And holy cow was it boring. You can tell me it's great and all, and I see people still praising it today, but I'm not sure I'll ever really appreciate it. It may have been good for its time, but if I can't stay awake during a movie it can't be one of the best of all time.
Just because you couldn't stay awake doesn't mean it's not "one of the best of all time". Personal taste doesn't determine quality.
Nothing you mention here means a damn thing when it comes to how watchable the movie is. Sure, it's art, and it's art I can appreciate but it's a boring movie with abhorant pacing. It's a form of entertainment first and foremost and the movie fails at being entertainment.
At what point did you think this film was supposed to be "entertainment"? Art is art; entertainment is entertainment. I can appreciate Abram's Star Trek on an entirely different level from 2001. Not every film has to be a form of entertainment. 2001 proves that.
Using dated looking space ships in a timeframe that is incompatible with current events, that may have been cutting age at the time they were made, but that was 54 YEARS AGO!
.
There are shots in the film that I, with years and years of film knowledge and understanding of production, cannot figure out. Specifically, there is a shot of the astronauts walking down a corridor to a spinning location at the end and they switch from the non-spinning corridor to the spinning end and climb down a ladder. At no point during this shot is real world gravity betrayed. I don't think they could have spun one part of the set then stopped it and simultaneously spun another part of the set. That single shot, to this day, blows my mind. You cannot say the films effects are dated when there is at least that one, and maybe more, that are impossible to figure out.
About pacing, I understand that some people just don't like the slow pace of the film, but that does not make it a bad film. I think, in the case of a lot of films, pacing is a personal taste. The filmmaker obviously had pacing in mind while editing the film, so it should never really be a fault of the film unless there truly was nothing going on (try watching a film like Jonah Hex where nothing is going on and the film truly is boring). In the case of 2001, I believe there is always something happening. Even during the long takes, there is mundanity being conveyed (space travel is old hat for the characters in the film), or suspense being built.
i don't really care how unwatchable u feel the movie is. about 5,000 film critics, who know much more about film than u or i ever will, will disagree with you on that one.
also i wasn't trying to promote it's "watchability" to you at all. i was explaining the filmmaker's reasoning behind the pace and silence of the film. if you don't understand that, i don't know what to tell you.
who was comparing this to star wars? i simply stated that movies like star wars have impacted/ fantasized are views of space/sci-fi while other movies, like 2001, give it a more realistic illustration.
The only time I got at all bored was ironically during the stargate scene; as others have mentioned I actually liked that it gave me a lot of time to think.
Thats hilarious. Yeah like 1984 never gets dated either.
I am with you. And for me particularly because the whole first contact thing itself is not much of a payoff at all.
I think the irritating thing is that certain people try to argue that not liking the movie is some kind of negative reflection on you.
They feel the movie is "objectively good", therefore your inability to enjoy the experience means you suck on some level (ADD, Transformers advocate, no taste in cinematography, whatever).
A lot of people are bored as hell by the movie. Simple as that. It's a made up story about made up aliens, an implausible first contact scenario, with a lot of arbitrary imagery at the end signifying something that is supposed to be of deep significance... Using dated looking space ships in a timeframe that is incompatible with current events, that may have been cutting age at the time they were made, but that was 54 YEARS AGO!
Movie was made in 1968!
Today is 2012.
2012 is to 1968, as 1968 is to WW-I. Not even WW-II, but World War ONE!
Which makes it an impressive achievement for it's time, an admirable movie, and fascinating for film buffs. But that doesn't make it enjoyable for most people. The movie is not timeless at all. It has an expiration date printed right on the DVD!
Human drama and interaction might be considered timeless. Visual razzle dazzle tends to not be.
World War ONE... Yeah.
Please try again. So so SOOOOOO good. Even if only the basis of what he does visually in that movie. It is just ****ing stunning throughout. The color, the lighting, the atmosphere..
re: 2001, A Space Odyssey: I admit the pacing is kinda bad but I actually like lots of pauses. I try and figure out what the director (presumably doing it on purpose) is trying to push me to think about during each pause. It is torturous, but kinda enjoyable when you hold it up next to 99% of today's movies where it's all
A modern example of this kinda thing was, surprisingly, Drive. It was FULL of pauses, almost bordering on unsettling. It improved the movie, imo.
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On the flip side, I'm one of those who didn't like Blade Runner. I was also never a fan of 2001: a Space Odysee either.
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Three Days of the Condor, nothing. I know a teenager who had a hard time sitting through Die Hard.
Die Hard.
So his father, older brother and I mocked his masculinity savagely to keep him awake through the thing. It was for his own good. He'll thank us in ten years.
But until that incident, I didn't really realize that, yeah, compared to modern films, the greatest
Christmasaction movie of all time is relatively slow.candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Can he only make it through Crank or something?
no, not liking the movie is not a negative reflection on anyone at all. i don't think anyone even suggested that. an opinion is an opinion.
if u don't like the story of the film, or the pacing and wide shots, that's fine too. it did win an oscar for visual effects and was also nominated for best screenplay, so u not following the story probably says a lot more about you than the film.
if u can't appreciate the labor that went into the visual effects or cinematography, u probably just don't understand the laborious techniques used in making the movie, and i don't mean that disrespectfully. every director has their own style, and kubrick was, to say the least, a perfectionist.
timeless: not affected by the passage of time or changes in fashion.
this movie is in the top 100, has more critical acclaim today than it did when it first came out, and we are still talking about even today on this mtg message board.
50+ years old yet still couldn't have been done any better today.
the film is definitely timeless. people's attention spans, not so timeless.
Either way, the point is still the same: Today (2012), looking back at the year 2001: A space odyssey was made (1968), is like people of THAT year looking back at (1924):
1924 technology:
1968 technology:
2012 Technology:
Just saying... 1968 was a long freaking time ago. There are plenty of grandfathers today who weren't born when Space Odyssey came out.
The special effects were cool for their time, but they're really, really DATED.
An influential film, yes, but asking 2012 NON-film students to appreciate it is sort of like asking a guy from 1968 to appreciate films like Eisenstein's Battleship Potempkin (1925) or Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925)
Yeah, ALIEN is glacially paced by today's standards. THE THING is slow.
You need look no further than the "Favorite STAR WARS poll" thread, and the number of votes actually going to the original trilogy to see it. What it illustrates, isn't that episodes 1-3 were good movies (they were all junk to me, but I think the concensus to contemporary audiences was that 1-2 were mediocre (IMDB 6.4, 6.7), and episode 3 was goodish (IMDB 7.7) )...
...but that STAR WARS 4-6 are paced slow enough compared to modern tastes, that many young humans actually prefer 1-3, which are much inferior movies (based on ticket sales and reviews contemporaneous with their release) in their own respective eras.
You did it again. You insulted me instead of sticking to the movie. You really can't even see what you just did there? Sad.
And btw, the fact that it won an Oscar is impressive.
But to a person in 2012, the actual effects themselves are NOT going to be impressive. That's why we say 'the special effects were impressive... for the TIME'.
Looking through the IMDB database, something just struck me. The movies of his that I actually enjoyed (Spartacus, Dr Strangelove) got Oscar nominations for ACTING (and in my opinion Clockwork Orange, Malcom McDowell deserved one).
All of his movies which didn't have ANY great acting, I enjoyed far less.
Again. Gee, I don't know why I'd take being insulted to my face "disrespectfully".
I know exactly what went into it. Hell, in college (THIRTY years ago), I even took a film course entirely on Kubrick, and 2001 was a bit dated even then.
Cinematography is nice for its time, but I am part of a world that has seen Hubble telescope images in 1000+ lines of resolution on my 55" home TV. I am part of a world where James Cameron was asked by an expert to go back and fix ALL star positions of the night sky for 1912 in his movie, for the sake of accuracy... and he DID IT at the cost of a few million dollars.
I can be IMPRESSED by the achievement of what Kubrick did in 1968, but it doesn't mean I'll be IMPRESSED by the images themselves.
Of course its perception was "affected" by the passage of time.
In 1968 when it came out, it was a speculation on... the FUTURE.
In 2012, it's a masterfully crafted, but quaint historical musing on a future that never happened... like reading 20,000 Leagues under the Sea or When Worlds Collide. Or looking at black and white footage of Man in the Moon.
I have great respect for Kubrick.
I can always have great respect for a chef's technique, perfectionism, and his genius...
...and still not like most of his food very much. It just may not be my taste.
What does that even mean?
You claim the film is timeless because it STAYED THE SAME over time; it's just that the audiences changed? So it's timeless because it would still be enjoyed by 1968 audiences if we time-machined them into 2012?
Guess what, ALL film STAY THE SAME over time. It's the audience that changes.
Seriously, explain what you mean by "the film is definitely timeless. people's attention spans, not so timeless" (other than saying that modern audiences just suck and dont like what you think is good).
ya it all stems back to the familiar argument, does life follow art, or does art follow life.
movies, songs, art, fashion all change dramatically with time. so when u get a throw back,
@ morphling like DRIVE, which is slow and kinda silent, it's a pleasant surprise.
(loved Drive. i have an affinity for movies that take place in LA. great cinematography with the LA lights, good soundtrack, and the acting was fine. reminded me lots of taxi driver, never knew what was going on in his head).
i see what u mean about 2001. and i think the point about the attention span of younger audiences in very interesting. to think, when 2001 came out, it probably wasn't considered a long movie at all. 2 hr 20 min back then was definitely not out of the ordinary.
personally, story is everything to me. action, quick cuts, that's all filler. true dialogue, plot twists, climax-resolution, that's all substance. i was watching the 2nd matrix the other day and was so BORED during the incredible fight scene, neo vs 10000 agent smiths. i was surprised at that, while an old Hitchcock thriller like Vertigo can keep my attention the whole way.
2001 clearly has lost a significant part of its appeal nowadays, so it can't be a timeless movie. Does it make it a bad movie? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't say it's among the best ever made.
Now, an interesting question: will any movie, given enough time, lose its appeal to future audiences? I don't know, but I think some films are truly timeless.
that was the whole point of my post, to explain that 2001 has received more praise TODAY than it did when it first came out. which, in my opinion, is why it is timeless.
Casablanca. Totally Casablanca. My old roommate was a great guy, but he was an out-and-proud Philistine who'd watch any awful anime but found the Marx Brothers incomprehensible and boring (an offense for which he nearly became my ex-roommate in the same sense that JFK is an ex-president). Got him to watch Casablanca somehow, and he loved every minute of it.
Citizen Kane is definitely not like this, which is why Casablanca beats it in my own judgment of "best movie ever made". A good movie should appeal to all audiences at all times.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
citizen kane was known as the first with a non-linear story narrative.
i saw casablanca in a theater as well, it was awesome.
when i think of timeless and best, i think in terms of genre. this is why 2001 sticks out to me as a timeless piece in sci-fi cinema.
others i would mention, leone's the good the bad and the ugly, probably the tightest movie i could think of, in terms of editing.
chinatown, young Jack Nicholson, one of my favorite neo-noir pieces as well.
Which was revolutionary, but doesn't give it any special appeal for audiences who are accustomed to non-linear narratives. (Also, it's not exactly true.) Don't get me wrong, Citizen Kane is still a very good movie by its own merits. But it tops all the "best movies ever" lists because film students adore how innovative it was for its time, not because it has the broadest and deepest appeal for all times.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
it usually is the innovative, unconventional films that receive such praise. 2001 seems to fit that bill. not because it has the deepest appeal, but because it is taking movie making/art to a whole new level.
one that comes to mind is unforgiven. an unconventional western that did everything "wrong" which is why it was so brilliant. a protagonist that is washed up and old, not some heroic cowboy that we are accustomed to.
more recently, what about the artist? say what u want, but it was pretty innovative as well and certainly received much praise from the academy.
Yes strong older movies are still doing quite well, but to pretend that they will still be classics in 100-200 years from today is easier said then done. This coming from a fairly young guy that enjoys movies like Some Like it Hot, The Good The Bad and The Ugly(and others in that trilogy), The Godfather 1-2, etc...
Feel free to bid on my cards here!
The ending isn't "so cryptic that is could mean anything". The monolith did a forced evolution to Dave and he is the fetus in the end. I don't think that's very ambiguous. He is the next step in evolution, seems fairly straight forward...
Just because you couldn't stay awake doesn't mean it's not "one of the best of all time". Personal taste doesn't determine quality.
At what point did you think this film was supposed to be "entertainment"? Art is art; entertainment is entertainment. I can appreciate Abram's Star Trek on an entirely different level from 2001. Not every film has to be a form of entertainment. 2001 proves that.
There are shots in the film that I, with years and years of film knowledge and understanding of production, cannot figure out. Specifically, there is a shot of the astronauts walking down a corridor to a spinning location at the end and they switch from the non-spinning corridor to the spinning end and climb down a ladder. At no point during this shot is real world gravity betrayed. I don't think they could have spun one part of the set then stopped it and simultaneously spun another part of the set. That single shot, to this day, blows my mind. You cannot say the films effects are dated when there is at least that one, and maybe more, that are impossible to figure out.
About pacing, I understand that some people just don't like the slow pace of the film, but that does not make it a bad film. I think, in the case of a lot of films, pacing is a personal taste. The filmmaker obviously had pacing in mind while editing the film, so it should never really be a fault of the film unless there truly was nothing going on (try watching a film like Jonah Hex where nothing is going on and the film truly is boring). In the case of 2001, I believe there is always something happening. Even during the long takes, there is mundanity being conveyed (space travel is old hat for the characters in the film), or suspense being built.