Posted on 03/09/2018 6:09:34 PM PST by Rummyfan
Fifty years ago next month, invitation-only audiences gathered in specially equipped Cinerama theaters in Washington, New York and Los Angeles to preview a widescreen epic that director Stanley Kubrick had been working on for four years. Conceived in collaboration with the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was way over budget, and Hollywood rumor held that MGM had essentially bet the studio on the project.
The film’s previews were an unmitigated disaster. Its story line encompassed an exceptional temporal sweep, starting with the initial contact between pre-human ape-men and an omnipotent alien civilization and then vaulting forward to later encounters between Homo sapiens and the elusive aliens, represented throughout by the film’s iconic metallic-black monolith. Although featuring visual effects of unprecedented realism and power, Kubrick’s panoramic journey into space and time made few concessions to viewer understanding. The film was essentially a nonverbal experience. Its first words came only a good half-hour in.
Audience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day’s reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie “a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.” And yet that afternoon, a long line—comprised predominantly of younger people—extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee.
Stung by the initial reactions and under great pressure from MGM, Kubrick soon cut almost 20 minutes from the film. Although “2001” remained willfully opaque and open to interpretation, the trims removed redundancies, and the film spoke more clearly.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
1. Dr Strangelove his best by far IMHO...
2. Paths of Glory
3. Spartacus
4. The Killing
5. Full Metal Jacket....
In his later films I think he became too.... clinical, even antiseptic.
That movie was just a mess.
One of the best sci-fi-fi movies, period.
Thanks for that list. Glad you mentioned “The Killing,” surely one of the greatest of all caper/heist films, up there with “Asphalt Jungle” and “Rififi.”
Well, there's a Tesla flying around up there
““Full Metal Jacket” - sucked big time. So full of hatred for the American military that it had things in there that were as viciously anti-Vietnam as any communist propaganda I saw there or in their publications.”
Viet Nam was just a plot device.
That movie could have been made just as well about any soldiers in any war, on any side since 1800.
And it was a masterpiece.
I think if Full Metal Jacket was anti American Military, R Lee Ermey never would have agreed to do it.
Yeah, it’s like saying Apocalypse Now was anti-American.
Both movies were surrealistic studies of human weaknesses and strengths with Viet Nam as a plot device.
That's a point I tried to make to younger people.
Given the advancements we all saw from 1963 to 1968, nothing we saw in the film (as far as technology goes) seemed anything but a reasonable expectation.
Now if you'd have told me we wouldn't even have gone back to the Moon by 2001 (much less 2018) I flat wouldn't have believed it.
What happened to us?
They taught the baby HAL to think of himself as half crazy when he’s in love, and he was in love with Dave.
I didn’t think it was made for TV but it was a long time ago. I don’t remember that they actually let the computer shoot missiles off.
NASA people were probably too practical-minded for that kind of artistry. After all, they had just pulled off the moonwalk with their computers.
Sorry, got the dates mixed up. I was still thinking of Colossus, which was 1970. But still, some of them may have known that the actual moonwalk was about to take place, and the fictionalized version of space travel may have seemed too Hollywood. There was some secrecy around the moon landing project also, so many of them may not have known about it.
thanks!
Apocalypse Now was basically “Heart of Darkness”, only in Vietnam instead of The Congo.
Correct, thus my assertion that Viet Nam was just a plot device, for both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.
It was definitely a very long movie.
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