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2001 is a movie that my Dad and I have bonded over for some 15 years now. He was a scifi nerd in college when the movie came out and it's stayed with him ever since. As a child I unknowingly played with his model Moon Bus and PanAm Space Clipper, effectively ruining them, but he just told about the movie and wasn't even mad. Eventually when I get into films we watched his LaserDisc copy of the film and on every format since (except VHS).
Starting last Christmas, I started buying him the Mobius Models 2001 re-releases to replace the models I broke (He's getting a new Moon Bus for Christmas). Our highlight of the year though was going to the Smithsonian to see the IMAX restoration of 2001; it was like seeing the film all over again for the first time.
I'm incredibly fortunate to have been able to bond with father over the years around this special film. My dad is the stoic engineer type, but this movie is a window into him that I’m grateful to have. All this is to say that I’m 100% a Kubrick cultist.
(I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")
> (I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")
Reminds me of taking a few of my friends to a screening of Blade Runner 2049. On the way there I was gushing about how the original Blade Runner is amazing and one of the pillars of cinametic sci-fi. After the movie was done I was going off on how this was an amazing homage to the original etc., one of my friends interjected with ‘I don’t understand what the hell did I just watch’ and the others were just staring at me with this ‘???’ look on their face. They even thought I pulled a fast one on them in saying that the original wasn’t required viewing as the links are only tangential.
In contrast to the other comments about how 2049 was slow etc., let me say that I took my wife and daughter to see 2049.
We watched the original "Final Cut" Blade Runner a couple of weeks before 2049 and both wife and daughter felt that the original was slow but they respected the movie.
After seeing 2049 my wife said she enjoyed the movie better than the original but wished it could have been an hour shorter.
My daughter was ecstatic and said that 2049 could have been another hour even longer and she would have been happy. But my daughter is a cinematographer, so possibly that's partly why she loved it.
This is going to sound pretentious, but I think some people just don’t enjoy the artistic aspects of film making beyond plot and action. It can be the most beautiful, awe-inspiring imagery ever put to film, and if there isn’t a clear plot and a love interest and a chase scene, they just aren’t interested.
Interstellar is another movie that’s polarizing like that. To me, watching it in imax was just an overwhelming, powerful experience, but about half of the people I saw the movie with hated it because the plot is sort of a mess.
I had a similar experience after taking my girlfriend to see the original. But after watching a movie we always sit in the lobby to discuss the themes, motifs, plot, etc. (one of the things that endears me to her) and after that she began to appreciate it.
“Like tears in the rain...”
> I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!"
I had a similar experience :) I gushed for years about how 2001 was one of my favorite movies and finally a few months ago there was a local 70mm showing, so I dragged her to it.
When it ended I said "wasn't that amazing?" and was met with "um... I can see how someone could like that movie"
Like you, I think I'll stick to talking to my dad about it. He loves telling me stories of when he saw it in the original 65mm or 70mm in theaters.
Just want to say that Michael Benson's Space Odyssey[0], the oral history of making the movie, was the best book I've read this year. Kubrick somehow, through a lot of luck, determination, and frankly a hefty dose of delusional thinking, managed to gather the best minds of a generation to work on what basically amounted to a crazy art project. The book does a good job of impressing that for a lot of people involved it became the apex of their professional and personal lives. In the end, they made something that truly mattered and changed culture. I left the book wishing I got to experience something as intense as that. Most of what we do doesn't matter.
[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-Odyssey/Michael...
"Most of what we do doesn't matter"
One of the pernicious aspects of our culture of celebrity worship is that it leads to the feeling that if something won't be recorded in a book, or on TV, or in a movie, that it doesn't matter.
This is wrong, the instance to instance living of our lives matters, it all matters.
I've seen Space Odyssey a few times, its a cool movie.
How I treat the people I come in contact with today, will matter as much to their lives as how they spent 3 hours several years ago.
It all matters.
Agree that Benson's book _Space Odyssey_ is great.
I just finished _Space Odyssey_ and was appalled by the way Kubrick treated Arthur C. Clarke, excluding him from receiving a percentage of the proceeds and delaying the publication of his book until after the much-delayed film was released and lying to him about his reasons.
Kubrick also abused Dan Richter, who did the choreography for the "Dawn of Man" sequence and played "Moonwalker", the leader of the hominids. Kubrick insisted he could only give Richter one credit. "I'm the only one with more than one credit," Kubrick said, according to Richter. Kubrick gave Richter the choice of a starring credit or the choreography credit. Richter chose the starring credit.
Kubrick also messed with Doug Trumbull (effects), Stuart Freeborn (makeup), Gyorgy Ligetti (music), and many others.
I understand many of the people who worked with Kubrick looked back on all they learned and how they grew professionally while working for him. But I don't understand why he seemed to be such a jerk.
A home cooked meal, a kind word, a smile matters.
> Most of what we do doesn't matter.
Speak for yourself.
Interesting take. I've always felt his work was "art: the useless kind." Ambiguous to a T as stipulated by art guidelines. His praise is the unimaginative patting themselves on the back for sitting through an editing mess.
>> Most of what we do doesn't matter.
"Most of what we do doesn't impact culture as immensely as Kubrick's work."
>Most of what we do doesn't matter.
Most of what we do does matter, just not at the same scale.
> In his films, Kubrick exists as a kind of deep state, while his fans are conspiracy theorists.
I love Kubrick, but does anyone else grow a little tired of the legacy management around him? With each generation of film fan, he's become the go-to-guy to project this archetype of the cinematic Godhead onto. Meanwhile, scores of equally detail-focused and enigmatic auteurs of his era slip through the cracks (eg, Visconti, Antonioni, Bresson, De Palma, to name a few).
Kubrick's unparalleled achievement will always be becoming a film-artist on studio dime (he established himself just before New Hollywood took off - and had cultivated enough of a mystique to carry-on after it crashed in the early-80s). But plenty of his contemporaries exercised the same degree of control that this article talks about, yet they're consistently overlooked because Kubrick became this meme of the cinematic Übermensch.
But that's always how it works. A Kubrick, a Gates, a Bezos is one percent their efforts and virtues (without which there'd be nothing) and 99 percent being in the right place at the right time. Malcolm Gladwell (another example of this!) is glib but has talked about that in relation to the Silicon Valley titans: they were born at a historical moment, and were part of a small cohort (you mention four directors who didn't become 'Kubrick', not 4000) and among that cohort, their talent and effort lined up with good fortune.
You can say luck so long as you understand that ONLY luck won't get you this result. But among those with talent and determination, it's really fairly arbitrary who becomes the titans of art, industry, finance. You get good enough to meet the bar, and then it's up to Fate.
This is normal. It's more about what celebrity/stardom/ultimate merit IS, rather than what Kubrick is. It's a lot like internet virality. The pool of possibles is not large, but moderate: from that point onward it's luck and self-reinforcing prophecy. And again, you can't make a nothing into this sort of total winner because they must meet the bar first, they've got to earn their spot in the pool, but anyone in the pool would do as well.
Absolutely, I found especially annoying the statement in the article that says "films are never the work of an individual: they are products of a collective, and children of compromise." Well, Hollywood blockbusters for sure, there's scarcely a hint of directorship in those. But smaller or independent productions, which are not directed to the masses, are another thing.
Maybe what Kubrick did was to make movies that look like big Hollywood productions, with the big budgets and the polished look, but at the same time keeping the type of control and freedom that usually only small independents have. His movies are at the same time beautiful, extremely original, and very approachable- things that rarely go together.
Tbh, Stanley Kubrick is vastly overrated. Yes every one of his movies has great cinemotography, and is technically excellent, but many of his movies are not excellent as movies. Eyes Wide Shut, full metal jacket, and the shining are not 10/10 movies, and David Fincher, Harmony Korine, Charlie Kaifman have all created movies better than all those movies listed. The problem with Stanley Lubrick is because he has a style that is very attractive to viewers, and his movies are very accesible also, he gets massively overrated by a lot of casual film watchers, which is fine so are a lot of directors, but his hype has leaked even to actual film critics with years of experience. It also doesn't help that movies like Room 237 come out that jack of Stanley Kubrick and draw meaning out of things that had no meaning. Sad that people glorify Kubrick but don't even know who Charlir Kaufman or Harmony Korine are, even though both directors have created movies that are just as good as a lot of Kubricks films.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, Kubrick's skills were so highly thought of that many people believe he had a key role in "faking" the moon landing.
https://variety.com/2016/film/news/stanley-kubrick-moon-land...
Having re-watched 2010 a couple days back, I'm again impressed by someone even attempting to make a sequel to 2001. It required a serious amount of courage (and a lot of arrogance).
2010 is not a bad movie, the same way its original material is not a bad book (unlike 2061 and 3001), but it's also no 2001 and doesn't come even close. The best scenes are exactly the Bowman appearance aboard the Discovery, which kind of follow from the hotel room scene from 2001 with long silences and a Bowman that's no longer human, but still remembers what human is.
Gone, unfortunately, are the distinctive flat square screens, the careful walks in zero gravity on top of velcro strips. Hyams and the actors certainly forgot the Discovery lacked artificial gravity in everything but the carousel (and propulsion would be a lot easier if we knew how to do artificial gravity everywhere). Quite frankly, the lack of attention to detail is a big turn off for me.
I'll certainly schedule a trip do London to visit it.
> “The essence of a dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated,” he said. “When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.”
I watched 2001 with some friends on 1 January 2001. Unfortunately I picked the wrong group of friends, people who couldn't settle back into to the slow pace and no appreciation of mystery - they were constantly asking me to explain everything. Later that day I watched 2010 (by myself). That movie never raises a question that it doesn't answer within about 10 minutes.
Having re-watched 2010 a couple days back, I'm again impressed by someone even attempting to make a sequel to 2001. It required a serious amount of courage (and a lot of arrogance).
2010 was a different kind of book from 2001. Its not quite as extreme as Alien vs Aliens, but its close. The movie really suffered from the lack of China in the movie which was an important part of the book. I get the feeling they really didn't have a budget or spent it all on the actor's salaries.
Kubrick was also a fairly skilled photographer and contributor to "Look" - a widely popular pictorial magazine that had a peak circulation of over 7 million copies. The Museum of the City of New York is hosting an exhibit of his photographic work entitled "Through a Different Lens". Unfortunately the exhibit ends January 6, 2019. There's also an accompanying book for sale.
https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/through-different-lens
https://shop.mcny.org/products/through-a-different-lens-stan...
An interesting case study that's recently had me revising my views on Kubrick's obsessiveness is one of his less-appreciated films, Barry Lyndon.
To reproduce the not-yet-electrified world of its 18th-century setting, Kubrick famously spent huge amounts of time on that project finding ways to shoot scenes using only natural light (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography). This went so far as shooting interior scenes set at night using only candlelight, since that's how they would have been lit in real life. Cameras aren't really designed to work well with such low and inconsistent lighting, so he had to go to great lengths to get usable footage.
Ever since its release, the standard take on Barry Lyndon has been that the results didn't justify all that effort. The unusually low lighting made scenes seem willfully obscure, like Kubrick was capriciously forcing the viewer to work extra hard just to keep up. This (along with a sadly weak performance by Ryan O'Neal in the critical role of the eponymous Barry) is a big part of why Barry Lyndon has languished for decades in the "lesser Kubrick" bargain bin.
But a recent remastering has produced a 4K version of Barry Lyndon, and I was surprised to discover when watching that version on a large TV that suddenly the film popped visually in a way it never had before. Where before it had seemed dark and hard to watch, now it felt more like observing a great painting, with lots of subtle detail I'd never noticed before. And then I realized that all those years of bad feelings about Barry Lyndon had come from watching it in low resolution on small screens, while Kubrick had been shooting for the big, bright cinema screen. I'd literally been watching the movie wrong all that time.
So it turns out Kubrick's obsessiveness in this case really did pay off. Those of us who'd only ever seen it on home video -- which is to say, most people -- just had to wait for the quality of the home viewing experience to catch up to his standards in order to see it.
I would agree that his films very much suit themselves to the silver screen, and watching them, e.g. on a laptop or computer-monitor sized screen is certainly not going to do it justice.
I was fortunate enough to catch many of his films during the Toronto International Film Festival during an exhibit. 'Eyes Wide Shut' was particularly fantastic.
Wasn't a lot of the work for Barry Lyndon borrowed from Kubrick's abortive project to make a biopic about Napoleon?
(One of the more obsessive notes about Kubrick: his notes included a daily breakdown of every documented event in Napoleon's life.)
If you're in Barcelona and even slightly intrigued by Kubrick's work I strongly suggest you spend an afternoon at the CCCB exhibition, the 6 euros are worth it: plenty of props, costumes, camera gear, some interesting documents as well.
Thanks, I'll definitely visit that exhibition next time I visit Barcelona :)
I attended the exhibition last Friday. It's impressive. A lot of original objects from Kubrick and it's films. Truly great.
I took the guided tour, which is free. (Note that the guide is in Catalan; the exhibition is in Catalan, Spanish and English.) It was really great. The guide had read many of the books and made many interesting comments. For example explained what other actors said about Kubrick. It was like 1 hour and a half. There is also a audio guide (they provide you with a card and a headphones).
I'll have to visit the exhibition again to see it in detail. A friend said he had already seen it twice. Note that with ticket of 1 day you can visit it twice, which is nice.
Also note that the exhibition in Barcelona has content of another exhibition about 2001 Space Odyssey. So it's a '2 in 1'.
There's a lot of people there tough :/
One of my favorite bars in Mexico City was this place that was sort of, Stanely Krubic themed. It was a weird but cool place.
They had a replica of the room from the final scene of 2001 Space Odyssey, in the back of the bar. You would go in there, lie on the bed. You could smoke a cigarette and enjoy your cocktail. It was so awesome.
Where, what was it called?
All about the fonts in 2001: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyss...
I recommend anyone interested in Kubrick as a person check out the documentary Filmworker on Netflix, about his personal assistant Leon Vitali. (Warning that if you have a very black-and-white hero worship of Stanley, the film might disabuse some of your notions.)
Ian Watson, who was one of the writers who worked on AI, also wrote a bemused article about his experience working with Stanley:
Stanley Kubrick movies reveal some new aspects each time I watch it.
All of the movies by him that I’ve watched are brilliant.
Dr Strangelove is my favourite movie. The Shining is excellent, A clockwork orange, Barry Lyndon, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut ...
He was also a fantastic photographer.
For those in the UK:
London Design Museum 26 April - 17 Sep 2019
General tickets on sale 1st Jan. Adults £16, Concessions £12 [1].
Such a shame to see yet another exhibition confined to central London. It's absurd that I can fly to Barcelona quicker, and for less money, than it takes me to have a day trip via train to London!
[1] https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/stan...
I mean, depends where you are in the UK. I can train from London to Leeds for ~£25 if I book sufficiently in advance. On the day it's £120. (I hate this model of train fares with a passion, but it feels overstated to suggest that Barcelona is both cheaper and quicker when neither is true for me)
London Design museum was a huge disappointment for me when I lived there.
All exhibitions were prohibitively expensive, especially the Ferrari one last year.
The Tate modern is my second love to hate museum.
After watching 2001, I was completely underwhelmed. I felt like the kid in The emperor’s new clothes that yells “Mommy, the emperor is naked”. I later watched a 1 minute LEGO parody of the movie https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4aQ2YbN-E and thought it covered all the basic themes of the movie in a minute instead of taking 2.5 hours.
I liked the Rob Ager video 'the meaning of the monolith revealed', along with 'Kubrick's cover story'. Although these are paywalled video essays.
The $5 version is that the monolith is the movie screen, and that the movie and actors are becoming self aware that they are in a movie. The hints are all in the details, regarding camera angles, lighting, camera positions, and all the arrows telling people to tilt their view.
What really sells it is the documentary/advertisement on how Kubrick is raising money to make the film, and all the industry people he is tapping and getting money from. People really thought it was going to be a hard core 'done right sci-fi' movie, but if you look closer you can see how much of it is stilted, and done incorrectly even though they obviously could have done better.
TL;DR Kubrick played the 'space race propaganda' hysteria of the mid 1960's to finance and make his art house film about actors being aware of how they are making a movie.
Paywalled.
I wonder if we'll ever see a sci fi movie as deep as 2001 again...
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
Arrival (2016), based on a short story by Ted Chiang should work for you.
Maybe I should try the book. I like me some good sci-fi (the Hyperion series is probably my favorite read-wise). I've never gotten through the 2001 movie. Several goes at it. I literally pass out asleep. Maybe I need to try a morning viewing. I think of movies as entertainment. Trying to watch this one has become a chore.
I loved Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". I know it's not everyone's favorite movie but I keep thinking about it "in a deep manner" (for lack of a better phrase) from time to time, it makes me question my essence as a human being: "Would I be able to love a robot child? Yes, I would, wouldn't I? Or would I? I know I should, robots like the ones presented in the movie are just like humans, I should love them the same, if not more" and stuff like that.
Dune by David Lynch. A true masterpiece.
To me, "Solyaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky comes close, even though the sweep is much more limited when compared to 2001.
And let's also not forget the greatest sci-fi movie never made, Jodorowski's attempt at "Dune". Even artifacts from that aborted attempt are iconic, like the Harkonnen chair:
There are many of them. they are not made by the US film industry. Check out "Mr. Nobody", check out "The Congress", "Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind"... come on now, these are masterworks.