:: Guy in a Suit Productions ::

Sunday, October 06, 2002

posted by Travis at 12:50 PM

Last week Kim and I went to the 70mm screening of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a space odyssey at The Egyptian theater in Hollywood. It was very big and very loud and very enjoyable...by me. Kim fell asleep during the stargate sequence. She noticed that there were a lot of backpacking youths in the audience, and she felt that the only reason a lot of them were in there was because they were getting extra credit for it in a film class. I gave her my best offended/you-must-be-joking look but then she told me that the guy next to her asked, "Do you know how much longer this is?" during the movie. Lucky for him, he did not ask me that. I might have removed him from the theater Casino style, using his head to open the door. 2001 is one of those movies that I understand why people may not particularly like it, but they must still respect its significance. My friends in college used to refuse to watch it because, "It is nothing but monkeys for 2 hours." The actual time of the Dawn of Man sequence is approximately 17 minutes, and it is very important to the story. I've read 2001, 2010, and 2061, but I never made it through 3001. I think the movie and book 2001 tell the story just fine, and the other books are just OK by comparison. 2010 has Jupiter turning into a second sun and Europa becoming a new life-bearing planet. They completely ignore that a second sun in such proximity to Earth would have catastrophic effects. 2061 has a bus of tourists or something trying to land on Halley's Comet, but something goes wrong and they have to stop at the forbidden Europa. 3001 is about the body of Frank Poole, killed by HAL in 2001, being retrieved and brought back to life. So, I felt it was reaching. A much better set of books by Arthur C. Clarke is the Rama series: Rendezvous with Rama, Rama II, Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed. Rendezvous with Rama was picked up by David Fincher a few years ago, and he and Morgan Freeman have been trying to get a movie of it off the ground since then. It would be a really good movie, as long as they kept the message in the book intact.