Topical ! Any fans of Kubrick's 2001 here?

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I'm so glad that you mentioned 'Stalker', as I didn't know that there were many Tarkovsky fans around. I, too, enjoyed it more than 'Solarys'. I've seen both films about 10 times each on dvd and bluray.
 
BartholomewB said:
It must be nearly a quarter of an hour before the first line of dialog is spoken. And when, at long last, we think our patience is going to be rewarded, it’s something utterly trite. I don’t recall the exact words, but it’s more or less like this:

Passenger who has just landed on moon, to receptionist: “Good morning. I have an appointment with Dr. Mackenzie for ten o’clock.”
Receptionist, picking up phone: “Yes, sir, I’ll see if he’s in his office.”
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My problem is mostly with the HAL scenario. With the focus being on the monoliths and what was going on around Jupiter, the whole HAL issue just seemed out of place and the fact that it was never explained just made it seem like a waste of time. Thankfully, the movie 2010: The Year We Made Contact addressed it.
 
I’d like to watch Solayrs again, and in fact Andrei Rublev and The Sacrifice are on my Tarkovsky to-watch list too.

Stalker is very much open to interpretation, i’ll make a video on it when i get the chance !
 
It’s ambiguous isn’t it? …The character who vocalises the fulfillment of his aspiration - he has essentially attainted a piece of eternity - but the film ends with him back where he began, except for the revelation of his daughter.
 
But the Hal episode is what the movie is remembered for mainly, I think. The name “Hal” has had a second life in the culture at large. Did you ever watch Futurama?

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The spaceship on its way to Jupiter looks rather like a sperm cell heading for the ovum of Jupiter. Then we have the attempted landing on the monolith which turns into what could be a confusing journey down a celestial birth canal, ending in–a victorian era living quarters. But ultimately the astronaut is reborn as a star child.
 
I have good friends who think the same. There are friends who, by and large, pretty much share my own views about movies in general, who like the ones I like and dislike the ones I dislike, but who rank 2001 as the best movie ever made. I’ve never been able to see that. For me, as I said in an earlier post, it was the dullest movie I ever sat through in a theater. But I did sit through it right through to the end! There have been other movies that were so bad I got up and walked out, but I’ve never done that in the case of any Kubrick picture.
 
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I did that in the case of ‘Meet the Fockers’ (the only time, I think).
 
I will always remember the movie 2001 as providing one of the funniest moments of my life. I was in the USAF Basic Russian Course at a detachment on the property of Syracuse University. Our detachment had a “theater” with a 16mm projector, and that was the first place where I saw the movie. The second place was down on the main campus in a full-size theater facility with an industrial-strength projector. We had a full house, and everyone was enjoying the movie up to the scene where HAL had locked Dave out of the spacecraft and was refusing to answer his calls: “HAL . . . HAL . . . HAL . . .”

Right in the middle of that scene the arc light in the projector went out, and the performance went dark and silent. Amid the grumbles of discontent there was heard a querulous voice calling from somewhere in the middle of the theater: “HAL?”

It took about five minutes for the laughter to die down.

D
 
‘Look, Dave, I can tell that you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.’
 
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Oh common, the grand sweep of it is the history of human evolution!..so from a story-telling standpoint i think they found the perfect paradigm …visitation from and rendezvous with an emblem for the infinite
 
I read a TabletMag (Jewish cultural web-magazine) article on the film …the upshot was that as long as they keep making films …this will be in the canon of films which are unique one-of-a-kind, in fact that of one-of-a-kind movies, 2001 stands alone, there’s nothing like it.
 
tomarin said:
‘Look, Dave, I can tell that you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.’
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For a moment there I thought you were talking to me, and I was like, what the heck?

😃 😃 😃

D
 
The symmetry (synergy?) was too good not to make use of.
 
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BartholomewB said:
But the Hal episode is what the movie is remembered for mainly, I think. The name “Hal” has had a second life in the culture at large. Did you ever watch Futurama?

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For me (and I dare say for many people) there are really only three memorable parts of the movie -
  1. the apes learning to use tools,
  2. “open the pod bay doors Hal” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”
  3. the really trippy part at the end where it appears the astronaut is transformed into a fetus or something.
I would need to rewatch it to think of anything else - and it’s WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too long, though visually stunning, to bear a lot of rewatching.
 
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