Film buffs please don't crucify, but I couldn't finish that shit it was so boring. My "Classics" are shit like The evil Dead and American werewolf in London.
Do you have to be like wired differently to enjoy that film?
It's one of those films that you have to want to watch, if you're looking for a particular cinema / film experience. For me, it's almost peerless because I totally sink into films where nothing much happens or it happens very slowly and because it is science fiction - those two things together are entirely my thing. But it's not for everyone - just in the way I have no real desire to watch fantasy things like LotR, Witcher, or whatever.
100% you need to be in the mood for it. For me that was a quiet late night with no one around ready for a slow thought provoking movie
Kubrick’s movies are slow but get better each time you tackle them. Most also have pretty obvious leftwing messages: Spartacus is about a slave revolt (the writer was blacklisted I believe), Paths of Glory is anti-war, The Shining is about American genocide and the horror of the bourgeois family, Eyes Wide Shut is about Kubrick getting assassinated because he discovered Epstein decades early. 2001 might be his most rightwing film? It’s about human evolution and tools and has a strong Nietzschian element, but the film’s writer, Arthur C. Clarke, was not a rightwing dude and was definitely interested in cooperation at least between the USA and the USSR (which is positively depicted in 2001 and 2010).
Yes Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumbo_(2015_film)
Do you have something to read about the shining or a short explanation?
There’s actually a great documentary about all the different theories about the shining you should definitely check out. I can’t remember the name but you can probably find it on the google. I’ll search for it if you aren’t successful.
Nice, that is hilarious. I have a big book of his short stories I should probably read at some point. I read the entire 2001 series quite awhile ago but don't remember this.
I took the course in college and it was in fact pretty mindblowing. Watch it back to back with The Shining and pay attention to the color palette - visually and thematically, The Shining is pretty much a perfect continuation of 2001.
That makes me want to take a class on it. Was the class under film studies or what department?
Film studies! It was a grad level course that I somehow talked my way into auditing. The professor was exactly the sort of alcoholic that you would want to teach a class on Kubrick, too - it was exactly what you'd imagine.
Hell yeah sounds dope. Would I typically need prerequisites to take a course like that?
Yes and no. It took some convincing but I got the requirement waived. Prereqs were more of a recommendation than a hard rule, in my experience - you just have to talk to the professor directly instead of going through your academic advisor.
It's just a slow movie. You have to nestle in and wait for it to happen.
Psychedelics help. It's a unique movie and has no parallel. It's Stanley Kubrick and he famously pulled no punches when it came to making his movies accessible.
Assuming you meant Evil Dead 2 and not the original, that's a horror/slapstick combo. Yeah, 2001 isn't for you. I'd suggest Smokey and the Bandit instead.
People just like different shit, its a pretty slow film so not everyone will enjoy just sitting through it while less stuff happens than usual.
I saw it at a specific one day showing in 70mm and I think that helps a lot with how visuals need to carry a lot of it, but thats not exactly an accessible method to watch it for most people.
It helps if you're high off your balls and you pause, take a break, and come back and resume a few times. I think it wound up taking me around seven hours to finish. The film is slow as shit even by Kubrick standards.
I love the movie, but it is a slow lumbering beast. Kubrick leaves a lot of the details on the periphery, and it takes a little bit to piece everything together. Story aside, it's an amazingly shot movie, wonderful to look at beginning to end. Working with Clark also made it a very forward thinking and radically different scifi movie for the time.
Have you read the book/novelization Kubrick and Clarke wrote? Turned the film from pretty good to incredible for me.
Yeah I read all of Clarke's 2001 series and a lot of his other books. The book obviously fills in a lot of the details especially with the ending.
It took me several tries to get into this movie, but I do appreciate it now. They screened it in a nearby cinema for its 50th anniversary in 2018 and it was REALLY dope on the big screen with the fancypants speakers.
Some AM radio types think 2001 was Kubrick's admission of guilt for faking the moon landing. According to these same people, Eyes Wide Shut was his attempt to reveal the power structures preventing him from coming clean about the moon landing. They say that was the movie that got him killed.
Obviously this is some wacky bullshit, but watch it with that context in mind and the movie is super interesting. Also, if you have any mushrooms sitting around then maybe eat them first.
I don't know how early there were moon landing conspiracies, but I'm convinced Kubrick had heard of at least one or two. He gave Danny in The Shining a sweater with Apollo 11 on it, probably to screw with their heads. That seems like something Kubrick would do.
Especially someone as self-fellating as Kubrick. Don't get me wrong, he really was a master of his craft, but he was 100% the kind of guy who would get off on the knowledge that people thought he was the only director capable of faking the moon landing.
Read the book. The movie is not based on the book and the book is not based on the movie. They were written at the same time, collaboratively, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. The book is much more fast-paced than the movie and actually explains everything. The movie is definitely more art than entertainment, while the book is more entertainment than art.
They are like 75% the same, 25% different. In the book, the prehistoric ape-humans have a lot more description. The monolith is clear instead of black. There is also big sub-plot about nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament. And it makes clear the transhumanist storyline, that the point of the Monolith is to help humans evolve even more - beyond the flesh.
The book also clearly explains what's happening with David at the end. I remember it goes into great detail about things we'd regard as supernatural, like spaceships that somehow operate by adhering to certain ratios, or aliens that can see every moment of time at once. When I read it for the first time I thought Clarke was trying to show something transcendent yet mundane at the same time, and I think it worked. I really love that book.
15 minutes in you're like barely past the black screen that seems to last forever right at the beginning lol.
I love it but admittedly it's a tough film to get through. There are 2 ways I've watched it multiple times that works for me.
- Turn off your phone and any distractions, clear your calendar, turn down the lights, and just watch the movie. Try not to pause it. Soak it in and don't get up no matter how fucking long it takes for the ape-man to pick up that bone and get some business done. No matter how long it takes for the space waitress to walk down the aisle. No matter how long it takes for the dude with HAL to get his work out in. You muster all your concentration and just let it happen.
Or
- Treat it like a 4 part mini series. Part 1: the before times. Part 2: Pan Am flight to the moon. Part 3: Hanging With My Homeboy HAL. Part 4: WHATTHEFUCKISHAPPENING?!?!?!
Both are rewarding.
It's a great film. Hard to get through. Harder to understand. But a pure piece of art that can be enjoyed time and time again after reexamination.
