2001: A Space Odyssey's Recent Activity - Spout

Film:2001: A Space Odyssey

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:01:02 GMT

Title: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Year: 1968
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Plot: A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity. Based on Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel, Kubrick and Clarke's screenplay is structured in four movements. At the Dawn of Man, a group of hominids encounters a mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings. To the strains of Strauss' Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a hominid invents the first weapon, using a bone to kill prey. As the hominid tosses the bone in the air, Kubrick cuts to a 21st century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of years in technological development. U.S. scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a strange object on the moon's surface: a black monolith. As the sun's rays strike the stone, however, it emits a piercing, deafening sound that fills the investigators' headphones and stops them in their path. Cutting ahead 18 months, impassive astronauts David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) head toward Jupiter on the space ship Discovery, their only company three hibernating astronauts and the vocal, man-made HAL 9000 computer running the entire ship. When the all-too-human HAL malfunctions, however, he tries to murder the astronauts to cover his error, forcing Bowman to defend himself the only way he can. Free of HAL, and finally informed of the voyage's purpose by a recording from Floyd, Bowman journeys to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," through the psychedelic slit-scan star-gate to an 18th century room, and the completion of the monolith's evolutionary mission. With assistance from special effects expert Douglas Trumbull, Kubrick spent over two years meticulously creating the most "realistic" depictions of outer space ever seen, greatly advancing cinematic technology for a story expressing grave doubts about technology itself. Despite some initial critical reservations that it was too long and too dull, 2001 became one of the most popular films of 1968, underlining the generation gap between young moviegoers who wanted to see something new and challenging and oldsters who "didn't get it." Provocatively billed as "the ultimate trip," 2001 quickly caught on with a counterculture youth audience open to a contemplative (i.e. chemically enhanced) viewing experience of a film suggesting that the way to enlightenment was to free one's mind of the U.S. military-industrial-technological complex. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 223
Number of Lists: 140
Number of blog posts: 39
Number of discussion threads: 42
SpoutRating: 3

Spout Post: Re:Which of these movies directed by Stanley Kubrick is your favorite?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:19:24 GMT

Post By: Risselada
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 9/30/2009 11:19:24 AM
Body: [quote user="Dr_Gor"] [quote user="Risselada"] [quote user="laurabot"] DON'T MAKE ME DECIDE!!! ;) Lolita. Big ups to the ladies! One of my favorite books as well. [/quote] I really need to read that! Did you know that every one of Kubrick's films after Killer's Kiss was based on a novel? Except for 2001 which he wrote with Arthur C. Clarke, but was also made into a short story. [/quote] All I know is that "The Shining" is one of the best and most terrifying stories that I have ever read. Perhaps second only to "The Stand" ... I feel that Kubrick's vision of this novel is altered a bit but it IS a VERY good Horror Movie and quite effective (mostly due to the saving graces of Jack Nicholson...) ... To be honest, I thought that Shelley "Olive-Oyle" Duvall and the kid who played "Danny" were pretty annoying at times. That is one of the reasons why I liked the TV "mini-series" better... But Kubrick's "The Shining" is a VERY good and respectable Horror Movie and it will be remembered for many years to come... < GOR > [/quote] I don't know that Kubrick was trying to be entirely faithful to the book. If you look at his adaptations, he likes to take the material and put his own spin and ideas on things. His version of The Shining is certainly a horror film, but a little more expansive in some themes than your typical horror film.

Spout Post: Re:Which of these movies directed by Stanley Kubrick is your favorite?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:42:58 GMT

Post By: Dr_Gor
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 9/28/2009 8:42:58 PM
Body: [quote user="Risselada"] [quote user="laurabot"] DON'T MAKE ME DECIDE!!! ;) Lolita. Big ups to the ladies! One of my favorite books as well. [/quote] I really need to read that! Did you know that every one of Kubrick's films after Killer's Kiss was based on a novel? Except for 2001 which he wrote with Arthur C. Clarke, but was also made into a short story. [/quote] All I know is that "The Shining" is one of the best and most terrifying stories that I have ever read. Perhaps second only to "The Stand" ... I feel that Kubrick's vision of this novel is altered a bit but it IS a VERY good Horror Movie and quite effective (mostly due to the saving graces of Jack Nicholson...) ... To be honest, I thought that Shelley "Olive-Oyle" Duvall and the kid who played "Danny" were pretty annoying at times. That is one of the reasons why I liked the TV "mini-series" better... But Kubrick's "The Shining" is a VERY good and respectable Horror Movie and it will be remembered for many years to come... < GOR >

Spout Post: Re:Which of these movies directed by Stanley Kubrick is your favorite?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:49:02 GMT

Post By: Risselada
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 9/28/2009 4:49:02 PM
Body: [quote user="laurabot"] DON'T MAKE ME DECIDE!!! ;) Lolita. Big ups to the ladies! One of my favorite books as well. [/quote] I really need to read that! Did you know that every one of Kubrick's films after Killer's Kiss was based on a novel? Except for 2001 which he wrote with Arthur C. Clarke, but was also made into a short story.

Spout Post: Re:Which of these movies directed by Stanley Kubrick is your favorite?

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:47:44 GMT

Post By: pippin06
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 9/22/2009 7:47:44 PM
Body: Of these Kubrick films listed, I've seen: 2001: A Space OdysseyA Clockwork OrangeDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BombThe Shining (part)Spartacus (part) I don't really count the partial ones. And, after a few gos at viewing, as it's one of my favorite movies, I feel like I completely understand 2001, so that one's my favorite hands down. A Clockwork Orange was powerful but too disturbing for my sensitive palette, and Dr. Strangelove was darkly funny and funnily dark, but 2001 is just an amazing film to me on every level.

Spout Post: Re:Which of these movies directed by Stanley Kubrick is your favorite?

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:29:48 GMT

Post By: tadiv
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 9/22/2009 5:29:48 PM
Body: If I completely understood 2001..., it would get my vote, but since I don't, I'm punting over to FMJ. Tom

Spout Post: Which of these movies directed by Stanley Kubrick is your favorite?

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:12:36 GMT

Post By: Risselada
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 9/22/2009 2:12:36 PM
Body: Please reference this thread for the rules of this group. Please vote only once in each poll. Movies referenced in this poll:2001: A Space OdysseyBarry LyndonA Clockwork OrangeDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BombEyes Wid ShutFull Metal JacketKiller's KissThe KillingLolitaPaths of GloryThe ShiningSpartacus

Spout Post: Bullets of Summer: Movie Edition

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:01:02 GMT

Post By: ShaunHuston
Post To: ShaunHuston filmblog
Post Date: 7/27/2009 7:01:02 PM
Body: Picking up more pieces from this summer of non-blogging. Now, summer films. Star Trek. Like, well, pretty much everybody, I found the new Trek film to be well-cast and thoroughly entertaining. Structurally, I think that the intro for Kirk could have been tighter – the joyride scene in no way needs to be as drawn out as it is, especially not when followed by the bar fight. For me, the movie really gets started when Spock shows up. And yet, I do agree with Chris Wisniewski at Reverse Shot about the lack of philosophical ambition in JJ Abrams' reboot. Trek's creators have always strived to make the franchise about something, and while this hasn't always led to good film or TV, it does, I think, help explain the durability of the storyworld. The new movie is not only the first installment that seems to have been made purely for thrill and spectacle, but allows horrific genocide to go by with hardly more than a nod in the direction of the profundity of such an event. I still enjoyed the movie, but after the fact, I felt myself missing the typical moral and intellectual earnestness of the series. Sugar. An interesting and sometimes beautiful film, particularly in its handling of cultural juxtapositions and the deftness with which it wraps an immigration story in a sports movie. I need to watch it again though to fully develop my thoughts; my expectations were pretty high going in and sometimes it helps to see a movie like that once, with those burdens, and then again later, without them to gain some perspective. The Brothers Bloom. Another film I was looking forward to, and enjoyed, but need to see again. I mentally composed, but never wrote, a post on the movie's production design, which I think works well to shift the core cast into their own version of reality, one where Stephen's elaborate and literary cons might actually work. Motivated quirkiness of this kind, which is probably most often associated today with Wes Anderson's movies, works better for me than unmotivated oddness, as in Juno (2007), where the quirks are pretty much their own arguments, and not in the service of anything of consequence. The Girlfriend Experience. Not sure what to write here; a film I'm glad I saw, but can't say that it left much of a lasting impression. Public Enemies. This is a movie I like and appreciate more now than when I first saw it. I am compelled by the use of HD for a period piece like this, a device that clearly announces itself as a product of now, a movie about the 1930s, not of or from the period, which is the more conventional way of approaching historical material. Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. As the film franchise has progressed, I am less enthused about seeing these movies. In part, this is because the films are becoming more what they should have been to begin with, which is directed at fans and readers of the books, which I am not. Moon. The best film I've seen this summer, easily. Beautiful, cool, provocative, anchored by a surprisingly understated lead, almost one-person show, performance from Sam Rockwell. Love the way the film quietly and cleverly plays with the memory of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs

Spout Post: I can see why tis is a classic

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:35:39 GMT

Post By: BostonBean
Post To: BostonBean Blog
Post Date: 6/11/2009 2:35:39 AM
Body: I had never seen this movie before, but I had heard a lot about it. So I rented it and was not disappointed at all! What a really wonderful film. Stanley Kubrik was a visionary and he put together this marvelous movie with his great talents. Actors - Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain, Daniel Richter, William Sylvester all were really good.

Spout Post: Re:Which of these films from Kevin Jackson's list of "The Ten Greatest Movies Never Made" would you most like to have seen?

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:45:30 GMT

Post By: Risselada
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 6/10/2009 11:45:30 AM
Body: Here are some more if anyone cares: 8. Stanley Kubricks's 'Napoleon' Riding high on the critical success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Kubrick believed that he had MGM in the palm of his hand, and was finally in a position to make 'the one film I've always wanted to make, the life of Napoleon'. He was almost right: Napoleon came so close to being shot that some filmographies - such as that in Joseph Gelmis's The Film Director as Superstar (1970) - actually list it as a completed work. Cynics were not slow to point out the reasons why Kubrick might have found the Corsican such an appealing subject, but their quips were blunted by the director's own willingness to confess how much he identified with Bonaparte, even down to copying the undiscriminating manner in which Napoleon wolfed his food. Kubrick planned to start shooting in the winter of 1969 - three months on location, four in studio - using as many as 40,000 infantrymen and 10,000 cavalry. Jack Nicholson, still a hungry young actor, was the unconventional choice for the title role. By August 1969, however, corporate changes at MGM meant that Kubrick no longer had approval for his grandiose scheme, and he went on to develop the much more modestly budgeted A Clockwork Orange, from the novella by Anthony Burgess. One of the few concrete survivals from this busy period is Burgess's novel Napoleon Symphony, dedicated to Kubrick. 7. Bernardo Bertolucci's 'Red Harvest' Ever since the late 1960s Bernardo Bertolucci had been telling people that one of his dream projects would be a film based on Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel. He came closest to achieving the dream in the early 1980s, when Jack Nicholson and Debra Winger were both attached to the project. It soon fell through, partly because of a complication concerning rights to the book. But perhaps it would have been a rather redundant project anyway, since the essential plot of Red Harvest has turned up, only lightly disguised, in everything from Kurosawa's Yojimbo (a samurai version) to A Fistful of Dollars to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome to Miller's Crossing to Last Man Standing...

Spout Post: MOON Review

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:01:02 GMT

Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 6/9/2009 3:01:02 PM
Body: This review was originally published in slightly different form during the Sundance Film Festival. Moon opens in New York and LA on Friday. A small, personal story wrapped in the trappings of classic sci-fi epic, Moon manages to be both derivative (most notably, of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001) and deliberately rebellious in its treatment of sci-fi tropes. Moving through familiar territory and yet sparked with a spirit all its own, like any great work of genre cinema Moon’s future-world scenario and super-slick techno-artistry are put to the service of a story that ultimately downplays the traumas wrought by technological possibility in order to dig deep into the trauma of being a person. The film, directed by Duncan Jones (once known as Zowie Bowie, son of David), begins with a pitch-perfect advert for the company that contracts an astronaut named Sam (Sam Rockwell) to live and work on a space station for a three year stretch, accompanied only by a HAL-meets-Short Circuit robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and able to communicate with his wife and child on Earth only via taped video message. Wedding exposition (the ad is how we learn that the massive machines to which Sam tends on auto-pilot are “harvesting solar energy frpm the dark side of the moon”), to a sense of ease that’s almost unsettlingly easy, the opening sequence perfectly sets the tone for the coming inquiry into a fractured personality and the relationship between surface and depth. Moon relies on a major twist to set this inquiry into motion, one which I’d feel criminal in giving away. Suffice it to say that Sam is at once not as alone as he thought he thought he was, and as fundamentally, incontrovertibly lonely as anyone could ever be. This dramatization of Sam’s sudden, tragic self-awareness gives Rockwell a platform for a terrifically exciting dual performance which, thanks to seamless, non-showy effects and a magic of faked chemistry, allows Moon to feels more casual and accessible than any cinematic exploration of the Lacanian mirror stage has a right to be. What marks Moon as a potential sci-fi game changer is the complexity of its philosophy on The Future, one which allows for both limitless faith in human feeling and a skepticism over the human cost of innovation, particularly in regards to Saving The Planet. 2001 predicts that the more human-like machines become, the more they’ll take on the worst of humanity and, as an added bonus, that humans will lose the passion and compassion that makes them human in direct proportion to the degree to which they engineer machines to become more human-like. Moon approaches a similar scenario from a very different tack, imagining that the artificial intelligence that humans create will embody the best of what humanity can be, but will probably be used to the ends of, if not evil, than at least the individual-indifferent banality that keeps a capitalist society ticking along. The timing is a bit uncanny. Is this a projection into a post- (or maybe post-post-post-) Obama world, in which “no drama” promises of a better tomorrow simply placate us into ignoring that even the most utopian visions of “change” must be fed into the capitalist machine in order to become a reality, and will likely be contracted out to the higest bidder even at the expense of human lives? Corporate culture bears the burden of Moon’s cynicism, but that critique is part and parcel of a film about self-knowledge, and the tragedy of stumbling upon it only when it’s nearly too late. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Spout Tag:beautiful

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:08:38 GMT

beautiful
Number of films tagged: 259

Number of people who tagged: 149

Number of times used: 416

Spout Tag:brilliant

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:28:43 GMT

brilliant
Number of films tagged: 179

Number of people who tagged: 137

Number of times used: 285

Spout Tag:overrated

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:37:37 GMT

overrated
Number of films tagged: 152

Number of people who tagged: 106

Number of times used: 240

Spout Tag:Boring

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:44:27 GMT

Boring
Number of films tagged: 177

Number of people who tagged: 105

Number of times used: 207

Spout Tag:sci-fi

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:33:53 GMT

sci-fi
Number of films tagged: 217

Number of people who tagged: 102

Number of times used: 375

Spout Tag:future

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:46:43 GMT

future
Number of films tagged: 492

Number of people who tagged: 101

Number of times used: 258

Spout Tag:masterpiece

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:28:28 GMT

masterpiece
Number of films tagged: 226

Number of people who tagged: 101

Number of times used: 215

Spout Tag:adventure

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:49:03 GMT

adventure
Number of films tagged: 228

Number of people who tagged: 95

Number of times used: 368

Spout Tag:mystery

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:01:30 GMT

mystery
Number of films tagged: 156

Number of people who tagged: 82

Number of times used: 208

Spout Tag:surreal

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:29:29 GMT

surreal
Number of films tagged: 73

Number of people who tagged: 73

Number of times used: 134

Spout Tag:moving

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:15:30 GMT

moving
Number of films tagged: 286

Number of people who tagged: 68

Number of times used: 160

Spout Tag:favorite

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:22:58 GMT

favorite
Number of films tagged: 85

Number of people who tagged: 62

Number of times used: 127

Spout Tag:epic

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:08:37 GMT

epic
Number of films tagged: 63

Number of people who tagged: 58

Number of times used: 104

Spout Tag:genius

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:26:43 GMT

genius
Number of films tagged: 227

Number of people who tagged: 56

Number of times used: 96

Spout Tag:space

Mon, 25 May 2009 14:36:30 GMT

space
Number of films tagged: 494

Number of people who tagged: 54

Number of times used: 139