Now Playing: Actual Birds--"Crooked Smile"
I went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at the Michigan Theater last night. The people over there are running a whole series of classic films in order to compensate for our not having an actual revival house, which is all for which we can really ask. I'm only going to see the ones that have to be seen on the big screen, which is why I'm probably not going to The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) next week. I mean, it was nearly twenty years before CinemaScope!
The last time I saw 2001, it was while making homemade pesto at the Spring Street house before work one Saturday afternoon last year, on Turner Classic Movies. I'd seen it several times before that, and I can now say that seeing the movie in 70 mm on the big screen is the only way to properly see it. Sitting in the theater, listening to the organist run through Strausses (Johann and Richard) and then listening to the Gyorgy Ligeti orchestral-ambient drone signaling the movie's start, seeing the weird "futuristic" MGM credit at the beginning, and then the earth, the moon, and "Also Sprach Zarathrustra"--I consider myself a fairly jaded amateur cineaste, and one who finds Stanley Kubrick, for one, greatly overrated, but I couldn't resist the power of the movie.
The story and characters actually grow in importance when seen on the big screen--watching 2001 on TV, it can seem very remote, an academic "classic" the viewer is supposed to study and analyze. Watching it in the theater, the characters and situations were much more important to me--the growing paranoia on the parts of both HAL 9000 and David Bowman are palpable, and the climactic scenes just before the famous, mind-numbing visual sequence in the "stargate" are almost unbearably gripping. I rag on Kubrick a lot, but I think this is before he went off the deep end. The visuals and the story are superbly matched, and whatever megalomaniac foolishness he got up to later on, I think movies like Dr. Strangelove (1964) and this one should pretty much safeguard his reputation for decades to come.*
There were plenty of laughs, too. HAL's politeness and equanimity in the midst of madness--"You seem upset, Dave"; "I like working with people"--made me chuckle out loud, as did many of the audience. Anyone who's seen the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" renditions of "Riding With Death" and "Devil-Doll" will inwardly cheer when William Sylvester shows up as Heywood Floyd--"Leave Robert Denby alone!" His look of intense concentration as he studies the directions for the zero gravity toilet nearly killed me. I think I was the only one, though, who clapped when British comedy legend Leonard Rossiter showed up as Dr. Smislov, the Russian scientist who gets all nosy with Floyd over the alleged plague at the Clavius moonbase. Leonard Rossiter rules--he was in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), too, as the hapless Captain Quinn. Come to think of it, he was probably the best actor in the entire movie (apart from Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL). Does that mean he stole it? I wonder.
This week's been pretty uneventful--I finally got to listen to Actual Birds' The Sky Is Full Of Ghosts, half an hour of low-fi fun featuring the exquisite "Crooked Smile," which I can't quite get out of my mind. I also finally listened to the Dean Martin collection I got for $1 last Thanksgiving in DC--I was going to sell it, but now I can't. Damn you, Dino!
"Matt, have you ever seen a flying saucer?"
"Is that your way of offering me a drink?"
Arrivederci, Roma.
*While watching Full Metal Jacket (1987) with some Don Carlos chums a couple of years ago--and I can't believe it was that long either--we watched a scene where a helicopter landed at a firebase and I cracked, "You know, since this was Kubrick, they probably had to do two or three hundred takes of this scene." My friend replied, "Yeah! That's what makes him such a great director!" Whatever, dude.
Posted by Charles J. Microphone
at 8:04 PM EDT
Updated: 10 August 2005 8:10 PM EDT
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Updated: 10 August 2005 8:10 PM EDT
Post Comment | View Comments (6) | Permalink | Share This Post