> It’s become very fashionable in the last couple of decades to forget what good government can do, what good union organizing can do. The idea that benevolent capitalists will just take care of us and the people on top will magically distribute wealth and happiness and security to us little people … no. It’s time we wised up. Strength comes from community in all things. Dunkirk is one of those stories.
This reminds me of something that Hany Abu-Assad, a Dutch-Palestinian film director[0], once said in an interview. He was asked how it is possible that from countries like Iran, with its oppressive regime, we get such amazing directors as Abbas Kiarostami, who created beautiful humanising movies. After a brief moment of contemplation, Abu-Assad answered "society is stronger than the system."
> Would you say “Dunkirk” is your most hopeful film?
> Well … yeah. “Interstellar” is pretty hopeful. But then again, the whole world has ended. There is that. [Laughs]
Funny how one can interpret that both as "doesn't sound very hopeful to me", and "the more impossible the odds are that were overcome, the more hopeful the message inherently is".
WARNING: INTERSTELLAR ENDING SPOILER BELOW
What makes Interstellar especially tricky here is that on the one hand, saving humanity (and presumably as much other life as possible) from extinction when the entire planet is dying is about as big a challenge as it gets, and therefore makes the film feel very hopeful, but on the other hand the ending also implies that the universe is predeterministic, and that can be viewed as the opposite of hopeful.
How does the ending imply that the universe is predetermined? I might've missed that.
(It's also not surprising if it did because it's modern scientific dogma that the world is deterministic. Even if you take into account quantum uncertainty, as Hawking points out, it is determined probabilities. ).
Well in the end of the movie it turns out that the future humans built the tesseract (I believe it's called) and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole... you get the idea.
It's a time travel movie, and the whole thing becomes a paradox - if the humans didn't survive they wouldn't have developed to be able to make wormholes and time travel magic, but they did survive because of time travel magic.
So which came first? It's a paradox. One explanation is that there was nothing that actually came first but everything just happened as it should and there was no other way it could've happened, thus, predetermination.
Cooper actually says "a people built this", not necessarily insisting it was humans or descendants of humans (though that was my impression too the first couple watch throughs).
The other thing to keep in mind is he does not actually have any way to know who (or what) built the tesseract.
Just like how Brand earlier states the spacetime curvature hand she shakes hands with is "the first handshake" (implying first contact with an extraterrestrial), but it actually just turns out to be Cooper. The characters are confident of things they think are right, without actually being totally reliable narrators.
Well, that's... incorrect. Cooper actually says, "They're not 'beings.' They're us," and later says, in response to TARS saying that people couldn't build the tesseract, "No, not yet, but one day. Not you and me, but people." I really don't see any wiggle room in the actual events for claiming Cooper believes they are anything but human; or at least beyond human. But he sees them as an extension of humanity.
Whether Cooper is right may be an open question, but the film heavily implies it. That 'first contact' turning out to be Cooper may be evidence of wrongness, but we don't necessarily need that since we know the characters are not omniscient, and in the context of the film it implies that there aren't any aliens. There are also no signs of any other life, despite several habitable planets. Frankly, the film doesn't even make sense if "aliens did it"; any message of hopefulness about human spirit would fall apart.
There is another interpretation for that.
Future humans built the tesseract... but no one knows from which universe. The tesseract is supposed to be something trans-dimensional, maybe trans-universe. So it could be future humans from another Earth seeing this one dying, and doing something about it.
If an entity from "outside" built the (first?) wormhole and created that closed loop, there's no paradox.
I like this interpretation. It’s been a while since I saw Interstellar, but from my somewhat fuzzy memory of the film, that does seem to resolve everything nicely.
This is what ruined an otherwise good story for me. It would have been more interesting leaving it mysterious (like 2001) or implying aliens had decided to throw humanity a lifeline.
The entire film is an elaborate stable time loop (the protagonist provokes his own actions from the future). The film's big reveal is another stable time loop (future humanity saves past humanity).
> it's modern scientific dogma that the world is deterministic
Really? Maybe I've lost touch with dogma while working to complete my physics PhD with one of the big LHC experiments, but this sounds hyperbolic to me. Could you explain?
> Even if you take into account quantum uncertainty, as Hawking points out, it is determined probabilities.
That the probabilities are governed (determined?) by precise equations doesn't mean that quantum mechanics isn't stochastic; it gives us only probabilities. The indeterminacy principle is a better better name than the uncertainty principle. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.
Even if the universe is deterministic, its future is still unknowable, as in to predict the future of the universe you would need something to simulate every subatomic particle of all matter etc and so doing that computation would need something bigger than the universe.
I like to think of the universe as a deterministic computer that is calculating its own outcome - there is no shortcut to jump to the end.
If there is no one to determine "correct" behavior, then there can be no bugs. If the universe crashes one day due to a mishandled null atom, we'll just have to take it as correct behavior (too bad for us!)
Causality. We know that everything follows a cause-and-effect model. And if you're a physicalist -- philosophical term that you believed the world doesn't have any supernatural forces -- then, leaving aside quantum uncertainty for a second, the next state of the universe is determined by all the previous ones.
They didn't teach you in your physics PhD that stochastic != Undetermined. We may not know how to predict stochastic processes but that doesn't mean they don't follow cause-and-effect.
I loved movies as a kid and I felt 2001 was such a classic I made my family watch 2001 last year. (every kid should know what "Dave" refers to in a calm computer voice) Here's the comment's I got.
"There sure is a lot of music"
"This looks like a computer game"
"Those are aliens!" (a blip of crystals in the sky during the transition for Dave, little genius)
"They were happy about making tons of colors instead of a movie"
"They sure like red and green"
"Creepiest movie we've ever seen. It was boring, boring, boring, then scary."
"I should have known as soon as the monkeys, stupid, stupid." (from patient wife)
Whenever I get this reaction from my kids about something classic I feel indignant but most of all I feel old. Changing tastes in pop, trends and fashion can do that but the rejection of highly regarded things hurts the most.
2001 and most of Kubrick's other films are definitely part of "the canon" of films that everyone who appreciates film as art should see. Unfortunately, you can't just do a surprise screening of these films for your family or other audiences and expect them to be receptive.
They will need to "discover" these things on their own. The best thing you can do is to make sure they have opportunities to see this stuff and to talk it up when possible.
One of the best pleasures of being a teen is discovering, on your own, how rewarding a great film can be and developing "a taste" for films, music and other aesthetic experiences. You simply can't force this stuff.
You've gotta develop ways of thinking, ways of appreciating art to enjoy the better stuff. Without more finely-tuned perceptions and, in many cases, a base of knowledge and a kind of vocabulary, taken in a broad sense, you'll miss too much to really get it. Call it "taste" if you like.
True in pretty much any medium. Best you'll get from great art otherwise is maybe "yeah, I liked it", while missing much of what it offered. You may catch what you missed later when revisiting it. Much good art isn't very likely to give you even that much of a positive reaction if you watch it too early in your journey. Best way to get people into The Good Stuff is to show them one of the ones with good broad, surface appeal, then talk to them about the things that made it so good that maybe (probably) they didn't even notice, at least consciously. Show them some influences on that work, show them similar things that are worse and talk about why they're worse. Why is this character less effective, why is this similar scene so much better here than there, why did this film put this before that and how would it change if they swapped those things, why does this establishing shot make you feel uneasy all on its own (what is an establishing shot, and why are they there, and what happens if you take them away), and so on.
Gotta start somewhere, and jumping in the deep end will turn almost anyone off.
It wasn't a surprise screening. I had been talking about watching it as a family for a few years. And my family enjoys movies that most simply do not. One of my kid's friends all said interstellar was boring, and he loved it. 2001, I think, is just a bit long in the tooth. If it's redone (properly, shot for shot, in the right spirit) with updated effects and sound, I think it would be way more impactful for modern audiences. (the monkey suits really require forced suspension of disbelief today, where in the past they did not)
I even explained the theory behind the movie, Dave ending up in an environment he couldn't understand, like an animal in a zoo. We discussed this movie, it wasn't a throwaway experience.
And to be blunt about Kubrik, he and the film makers were self indulgent in a few places. Where it wasn't art, it was conceit.
"If it's redone (properly, shot for shot, in the right spirit) with updated effects and sound, I think it would be way more impactful for modern audiences."
Yeah, as much as some people would like to jump on us for being "uncultured" if we say so, there have been certain unavoidable changes in the world that fundamentally change how a modern person can't help but see the movies. 2001 wants to send a message that this is a very high-tech world, and went to a lot of effort to do so, and I'd say is certainly an integral part of the foundation of that part of the movie. But how is my nine-year-old supposed to get that on a gut level when he turns off 2001, and picks up Mario Odyssey, something that is in some sense literally millions of times more advanced than the technology shown in the movie, and is real-time interactive to boot? The context has fundamentally shifted.
Even I, growing up in a time and seeing it for the first time when at least the difference was less glaringly obvious, can't help but now see a weird and thoroughly unintentional disharmony between what the film is trying to portray the world as, and what the images actually say to me now. It doesn't "ruin" it, but it would be silly to claim that it is doesn't affect the movie experience at all, either, when so many other similarly-sized details are routinely understood to be important.
I don't think giving in a New Star Trek makeover would do any good. The whole movie only makes sense in its time. If we made a film kinda like it now with our own ideas of what the tech should be like and how the future would look, we'd make a whole different film, not just add holographic displays or something. Story, themes, the texture of the film, it'd all be significantly different. The tech in the film is part of the perspective from which it was made, so IMO trying to update it is pointless at best and harmful at worst. I don't think that's true for all movies, but for 2001 I think it is.
I mostly agree with that, actually. I think it could be reasonably re-adapted... it is still future tech, even if it's closer to something we can at least imagine building now.
The only thing I'd grumble about, which isn't even strictly speaking disagreement, is that while I agree that Hollywood today would inevitably want to film a different story than what 2001-the-movie was, I don't know that that's a necessity brought on by our times so much as a sign of how culturally enfeebled Hollywood has become underneath the protective coating of the world's best special effects. Hollywood's horizons have really closed off in the past couple of decades. Nolan is notable here as one of the few people who still push back against this somewhat, IMHO. The ever-increasing growth of thoughtcrime in their philosophy/philosophies can be seen in how every year more and more movies of the past become unthinkable that they'd be made today.
Part of the problem is we've seen some of the nastiest predictions of past sci-fi come true... but in the most boring ways. 2001 has an optimistic space-ageyness to it that'd be hard to replicate now without it coming off as forced and false.
Our moon base would be covered in advertisements and each feature named after a corporate sponsor. Everyone on the Pan-Am flight (whatever we rename it to) would be some future-Youtube "personality" live casting their flight and future-gramming their in-flight meals. HAL would become vulnerable when some of his network-controlled doors and such lost their wifi connection and fell back on manual controls, turning the whole thing either comic or, if the manual controls also fail to activate and allow him to win after all, saving him even from his fate in the original film, tragicomic. All of this would come off as insufficiently pessimistic and no-worse-than-things-now to pass for an acceptable projection of our future.
Just doing a straight remake of 2001 with more iPhones won't help it, and my guess is it'll make it feel really, really weird, and not in the ways it was trying to be. Possibly laugh-out-loud funny at times. Its story isn't narrow enough, allegorical enough, or far future enough to ring true now without adding some of our cynicism. The retro-future tech of the original saves it from that scrutiny.
2001 can never be remade. It’s a singular vision, and it’s photography is still extraordinary, and it’s special effects still fine.
The weakest part was the hominid/monkey costumes. But in those scenes was also the amazing shot of the leopard. A modern director gets you more realistic hominids, burt you lose the amazing framing, coloring, and composition of the leopard scene and a hundred others.
And the story is definitive. It says exactly what Kubrick and Clarke wanted it to, no more, no less. There is no perspective a millennial can add to it without utterly ruining it.
It may say what Kubrick wanted, but he edited the final cut to strip out a lot of exposition which puts the story Clarke wanted to tell in. Clarke was in tears after he saw the premier because of the changes. I found the movie thoroughly disappointing after reading the book. There were pretty pictures, but far fewer interesting ideas.
It’s a different medium, and Kubrick didn’t want to spoon feed a resolution to his audience, he wanted them to think. I think Clarke got that in Rendesvous with Rams.
You are partly missing the point. 2001 was made for an audience that doesn't exist anymore. If Kubrick somehow made the movie today, it would not look the same,and possibly could be made to all. Not because "reeeeeee millennials",but because it was a work of art made for a very specific time and place in history.
Since my 8 & 10 year old daughters can not just sit through the entire film, but love it, I disagree. I don’t think audiences have changed that much, what I meant is I think the story is eternal and it’s filming can’t be improved by mortal man.
Maybe when we have real 3D or a medium that allows the audience to experience other senses, maybe it could be told better. But more likely it won’t be a good story for that medium.
I dunno. Transhumanism and the singularity are a thing, and the AI that is good and not trying to take over but nonetheless has poor consequences is something they will be coming to newspaper headlines soon.
The only part that seems dated is that the future of humanity is outward looking instead of innards. (Meant "inwards", but that one's pretty good, Android.)
> If it's redone (properly, shot for shot, in the right spirit) with updated effects and sound...
In a way, it already has with the 1984 sequel "2010: The year we make contact". That was a fairly mediocre film which simply didn't capture any of the wonder of 2001.
2001 is what it is. Simultaneously an auteur film, a vision of the future from the past, and fine science fiction.
Not everyone's cup of tea, but truly great films even from the distant past (like Nosferatu) can be appreciated today-- in spite of poor special-effects. On the other hand, re-makes (or sequels) are a mixed bag. The Blade runner remake/sequel was stunning but just doesn't have the gritty magic of the original. Similarly with Solaris or even The Terminator for that matter.
Never tell anyon that the movie you are about to show them is a classic, or your favorite, or that they’ll love it. You are setting them up to be hyper critical and easily disappointed.
Which is why I have mixed feelings the "IMDB pre-check". I've watched some middling-reviewed films that I found awesome and vice-versa (Spy Kids had an 8.0 - was a bad movie even for kids).
The sound design in 2001 is perfect. 2001 is usually cited as the top or one of the top movies WRT realism in space ever. If it ain't broke, don't fix it?!
No, I got that from reading Kubrik's own comments on the meaning of the film. I ignore speculations on what an artist means, it's a waste of time when I can just find out from the artist himself. (there's some interview of him online somewhere where he discussed this.)
The sound and effects are not perfect for today. They are perfect for the 60s. Even by the 80s I could see the effects were starting to look pretty dated.
Every time something takes me out of the experience of the movie, either it should have been edited out, or done better. In the case of 2001, it's an old movie. I am old, and I am a movie connoisseur.
I wanted to enjoy it with my family like I did when I was younger. But the effects look down right silly. And in a serious movie, you can't have silly looking effects. Compare how the movie gravity dealt with zero-G, it makes 2001 look like high school kids made it now.
The one thing that stood out, was there use of tablet computers, that was brilliant, and was done with rear projection, so it looked great even today. The rotating and curved floors are truly inspired work, but the music score is meaningless today, even to me, who grew up with classical music.
If the art of film making can't improve on something made in the 60s, then it couldn't have improved on something from the 30s, and we know neither is true. So, 2001 could be remade, just not by hollywood bozos.
The story is of a profound mystery, but it's not told from the perspective we have today of putting someone inside the mystery, it's told from an odd 3rd party perspective popular in older cinema. Compare how you felt in Interstellar and Gravity, __you__ were there. It was you who is in danger and in risk.
In 2001, the characters were in the mystery, and we were simply observers. Applying modern storying telling techniques (that Kubrik helped pioneer) would dramatically improve the enjoyability of the 2001 story for us today.
Edit: I wanted to add that the scene where he's rebooting/working on the computer (HAL), all he does is push in clear plastic blocks. That is just stupid. (He even just pushed them in IN ORDER, wth?) I work on computers, and he didn't even mildly pretend to do anything at all technical. I think this was pure laziness on the film makers part. They knew computers were complicated back then, and to make them seem so stupidly simple that you could find an error by looking and a sheet of clear plastic with no markings or anything? It fools kids and ignorant people, but anyone with any technical knowledge, it rips you out of the experience. Another reason to update it, or at least admit it is not as effective an experience as it once was. A classic doesn't mean it's good now, it means it was good at one time.
Kubrik said aliens had abducted him and put him into a zoo, more or less. And we were seeing it from a perspective of a human not able to understand the reality of the zoo's alien form. And the room was created for the human. And then, just like how humans were created from monkeys, the star child was created from a human...evolution.
Google it, I found his explanation for his own movie the only one worth considering.
Well said. I've always been a Kubrick fan, and a fan of off-the-beat films. For some odd reason I just never watched 2001 b/c I usually wait until I get inspired or "feel in the vibe" to watch things like that. I finally did about a year ago and I was so happy I waited until the time seemed right. Its like The Thin Red Line - only movie I ever walked out of the theater on (I was about 16 or 17). Fast forward about 10 years and upon rewatch I fell in love with it.
The same thing happens with great novels. I have recently been re-reading some of the novels I was forced to read (and hated) in high school, but I understand and appreciate them so much more as a middle-aged adult. I thought of myself as a pretty smart kid back then, but there were so many things I just could not understand without sufficient life experience.
I am personally a huge advocate of not forcing this stuff on high schoolers, on the grounds that it has the effect of inhibiting them from ever getting into ever again because they think they already tried it. I believe we should find ways to get the same ideas across, but with works that are more approachable to people of that age, and build a pathway for them forward into the great works of the past instead of trying to teleport them directly to the end goal. But until people in general stop essentially celebrating how awesome it is that we force students into unpleasant and unapproachable works, and consider their distaste and writing off of literature forever as a sign that things are being done correctly, nothing will change.
I've often thought I could make a pretty decent literature-appreciation course around the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which, no sarcasm, is what really opened my eyes to these issues for the first time, somewhere in my mid-20s. It would piss people off who would assume that it simply can't be possible that we could learn how to appreciate literature from such an accessible and fun (and not-stuffy) source, but I know it can be.
This is interesting to me as I've been trying to read books that I couldn't get into in high school like "1984" and "Fahrenheit 451" and I had to force myself through both because the interest wasn't there. I will say that 1984 was more interesting to me because of the parallels in the world today (and i'm sure every generation sees the parallels which makes it such a classic), but I didn't feel it was an entertaining read. The book within the book section was torture for me.
I will not say it's true for every novel. The Outsiders was a book that bored me in school, and I still find it boring. Cry, the Beloved Country on the other hand was completely over my head in high school, but it is one of my favorites now.
I don't mind "not getting" newer stuff. What I came to learn was that
a) I liked a lot of mindless pop culture when I was young.
b) There's still a lot of good, meaningful stuff released these days, it's just less popular. Of course this is subjective, but I doubt something like, for example, Pink Floyd would enjoy the same mainstream appeal today.
What I find worrying about the comments on the movie was why it was disliked. It sounds like the movie doesn't contain enough "action" to spark interest.
Is it? I'm a fan, but my perception is that for most people their career started and ended with Creep, and not only that, but the "you're so very special" cut of Creep.
I wonder if numbers like this are really a reliable indicator of what's going on. The world is big enough that you can be "niche" and still appeal to millions. I would also assume that fans of niche groups are more fanatical and supportive than fans of mainstream groups with broad appeal, which could equate to a much higher sales:fan ratio.
Not sure how this is relevant, "legacy" bands like Guns N Roses and ACDC headlined the previous 2 years and those bands have audiences that are shrinking to due to old age.
> I attended the Los Angeles premiere of the film, in 1968, at the Pantages Theater. It is impossible to describe the anticipation in the audience adequately. Kubrick had been working on the film in secrecy for some years, in collaboration, the audience knew, with author Arthur C. Clarke, special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull and consultants who advised him on the specific details of his imaginary future -- everything from space station design to corporate logos. Fearing to fly and facing a deadline, Kubrick had sailed from England on the Queen Elizabeth, doing the editing while on board, and had continued to edit the film during a cross-country train journey. Now it finally was ready to be seen.
> To describe that first screening as a disaster would be wrong, for many of those who remained until the end knew they had seen one of the greatest films ever made. But not everyone remained. Rock Hudson stalked down the aisle, complaining, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?'' There were many other walkouts, and some restlessness at the film's slow pace (Kubrick immediately cut about 17 minutes, including a pod sequence that essentially repeated another one).
> The film did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The closing sequences, with the astronaut inexplicably finding himself in a bedroom somewhere beyond Jupiter, were baffling. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie.
To be fair, it is certainly a long way from a movie like The Killing.
Sometimes appreciating something old requires digging into context. For example, most books released in the 1800s will seem like gibberish without an understanding of the sociopolitical climate. And then there's that whole situation where those same books were padded in a way that makes the modern one-book trilogy look concise because they were paid by the word.
I couldn't enjoy 2001 until I knew about all the detailed model work that went into it. The uncut version is still super boring, but it's easier to stay awake knowing what to look for. It's kind of the same situation with the various '90s Star Trek series. I am no longer impressed by long scenes of a ship passing by planets, so the intros are boring.
i find it 10% slow, and 90% thrilling, which is basically as close to perfection as a film can get. Ask wrote separately, Stephen Soderbergh recut 2001 to remove dead space and “unimportant” scenes, and it’s no where near as good as the original.
The reruns of TNG you're watching and likely the HD remastered copies which had the CGI redone for Blu-ray. So it isn't really 90s effects you're watching.
Furthermore I don't think those scenes you've described are there purely for the sake of impressing the audience. I think they are there to help explain the narrative. Like how in other - eg non sci-fi - shows you'll often get scenes of a car pulling up to a building to help explain that person has just arrived. Or scenes from outside a building to help explain to audiences where the following inside scene is based.
You're talking about establishing shots. I'm talking about the intros where the ship passes by planets and things with an orchestra booming from the cosmos for what seems like several minutes. It's the exact same thing in every episode and comes after the establishing scenes in the first 1-3 minutes. This is true of every single Star Trek series post-TOS, aside from Enterprise with its cheesy theme and clips from aviation history. (I haven't seen Discovery)
Oh the opening credits? Almost every show - old and new - has them. It's not even something that is specific to Sci-Fi. So I don't really get why you're comparing that to 2001.
Anyhow I do agree they're often boring. The most annoying one is for House of Cards - it goes on forever. Thankfully you can usually fast forward the intros. Which I what I reckon most people do - at least for the longer ones anyway.
They tend to be a lot shorter in newer shows though. Older shows' credit sequence would typically last over a minute, whereas IME they tend to be 30 seconds or less on newer shows, some even less, and some only have a title card sting.
Sometimes that's the case but it varies from show to show. IIRC the House of Cards intro goes on for more than 2 minutes. Game of Thrones isn't exactly quick either. Where as some older shows, eg UK sitcom from the 90s, "Spaced", only lasted a couple of seconds (literally).
If there is any correlation I've observed, it's more to do with the genre of show and it's running time.
GoT intro is actually an establishing shot, showing you which regions are featured in the episode. It varies per episode. It is a bit long, but not compared to the previous generation, and it has a lot of fast moving detail that takes many viewings to see it all. Six Feet Under (2001-2006), also by HBO, intro is over 90seconds and the same every episode, and it's very slow and low-detail.
That's my point though, the length of intros varies too much from show to show to really make any meaningful correlation based solely on the series age.
Take Boardwalk Empire, another really long intro. Yet Lost, which is an older show, only had a title graphic that lasted a couple of seconds.
You mean, the opening credits/music? Well yeah, those are the same in every episode, but I assume almost everyone skips those after they've seen it the first few times. Even the Battlestar Galactica reboot had an opening credits sequence which I usually skipped.
You know you're old when you have to explain opening credit sequences to people because everyone younger than you is just used to TV shows jumping right in (often in medias res)
The thing is, I get why opening credit sequences have fallen out of fashion. They were a holdover from the broadcast television era where they served a legitimate purpose, but they are completely unnecessary in an online, on-demand viewing environment. It actually annoys me now to have to sit through a title sequence of any kind, whether it be in a television show or a video game (I am one of those people who will edit a game's config files to get rid of them).
Opening sequences weren't required for the old broadcaster either as the had a special pre-show clock that would count down on the tape before the start. I'm fact You sometimes saw this on TV.
Moreover, some older shows didn't have opening credits and a great many that did, often only did so after an acted prelude
Lost was the first big show I can remember that just had a one to two beat opening theme.
It's weird that it took so long. Early films, the Jazz Singer if you go way back, had a fifteen minute overture, reminiscent of the orchestral opening to stage plays while people found their seats.
Movies eventually realized that, artistic merit notwithstanding, that was boring. They first shortened those intros to a card of the main players. Sometime later the guilds required credits include all craftsman, but just stars. A fair and egalitarian move with the unintended consequences of reexpanding credits, making them... Less fun. Studios just moved the credits to the end and began with some establishing scene instead, as a compromise between the contributors and audience.
I guess anyone who mostly watched things after Lost wouldn't expect long tv intros. But then, most streaming services let you skip them, so it shouldn't be a big deal
Murphy Brown was the first show I can recall that dispensed with a theme song entirely and just displayed the credits over the opening scene. I remember thinking it was a revolutionary change (especially for a sitcom) when I first saw it back in the early 1990s.
Great catch. I think Sorkin followed that model in Sports Night, probably trying to emulate MB's feeling of crashing into a busy production room. Can't think of an earlier one though.
I, Claudius also just had a title card, a snake crawling across a mosiac, but it somehow dragged that out for a full thirty seconds according to YouTube, so I'm not sure that really counts.
In film apparently Lucas got in trouble for not crediting the director in his title-only opening for Star Wars, leading him to resign from the guild. The practice became more common though, Clint Eastwood has done title-only openings for everything he's made.
> Sometime later the guilds required credits include all craftsman, [not] just stars.
Don't forget studio executives, marketers, accountants, IT support staff, and babies born to all of the above.
And today with the rise of the post-credits sequence, it's getting hard for the audience to skip the credits and still see all of the meaty bits of the movie.
I'm 29 and loved 2001, for what it's worth. It's not really just age, I don't think. I remember showing college friends Hard-Boiled (the John Woo film starring Chow Yun Fat) and they all got bored and stopped watching. Meanwhile I'm wondering how anyone could find a scene where there's a shootout involving guys on motorcycles with machine guns not to be simulating enough. I guess the mind of the cineaste works differently.
On the other hand, I watched High Sierra recently and the pre-Bullit notion of a car chase scene was, uh, less than thrilling.
Ugh, I hear you. That B-word is what really grinds my gears, and frankly makes me a little frightened at how society's tastes are seemingly permanently changing. Anything that doesn't have continuous in-your-face stimulation nowadays is boring. Nobody can tolerate a movie anymore if it has any "slow" parts. Everything has to be a Vin Diesel explosion-fest. Nobody can sit through a full 60-70 minute CD unless every song is 130BPM+ and full volume. Nobody but me even buys full albums anymore really, it's just 2 minute blips on iTunes. My own 5 year old daughter can't even make it through any of the old Disney movies that are specifically made for kids because as soon as the action slows down and the characters start talking, her mind wanders off and she wants to go do something else.
We've lost the concept of sitting down for the sole purpose of enjoying a single work that is more complex than a 3 minute YouTube clip.
> Nobody can tolerate a movie anymore if it has any "slow" parts.
As someone (from several generations ago) who watches plenty of "slow" movies (try a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes or some of the early monster movies), I found 2001 to be profoundly boring and dull - to the extent that it's only one of three films that's caused me to fall asleep in the cinema (the others being "Transformers: The Last Knight" and "Avengers Apocalypse" - neither of which can be said to be "slow".)
2001 has a 9(?)-minute scene of nothing. It's intentionally boring, in a way like John Cage's 4'33".
It's fine if you don't like it, but part of the point is to experience the feeling of slowness of space travel, and appreciate the pain. Compare to a horror movie "I don't like it because it makes my stomach turn" or a drama "I don't like it because it made me sad".
> Nobody but me even buys full albums anymore really
Nobody but very few people even buys full symphonies anymore really, to play them themselves. Nobody can tolerate a piece of music if it doesn't have someone singing on it. Young people with their "songs" and their "Elvis"!
> My own 5 year old daughter can't even make it
Duh, of course she can't - she's a kid. But if you are saying that her inability is somehow due to consuming "bad media", or too much media... well, that's your fault as a parent, isn't it?
I've never been sure what to make of that movie. The writer/director obviously know how to make a high-quality, engrossing movie, as demonstrated by everything that happens on Discovery One during the middle part of the movie. But the final segment does such a terrible job at communicating to the audience what is going on in the narrative. Did they cut a bunch of content because the movie was getting too long? Does Kubrick just not care whether the viewer can follow the story he's telling?
I'd recommend reading the novel; it's a wonderful read. Clarke wrote it alongside the screenplay (which he cowrote with Kubrick), and it helps clarify some of the more mystical happenings at both the beginning and the end of the film.
Kubrick, via wikipedia[1]:
"There are a number of differences between the book and the movie. The novel, for example, attempts to explain things much more explicitly than the film does, which is inevitable in a verbal medium. The novel came about after we did a 130-page prose treatment of the film at the very outset. This initial treatment was subsequently changed in the screenplay, and the screenplay in turn was altered during the making of the film. But Arthur took all the existing material, plus an impression of some of the rushes, and wrote the novel. As a result, there's a difference between the novel and the film ... I think that the divergences between the two works are interesting."
The novel and the film are two different things. I actually don't like Clarke's novel because I disagree with the interpretation he put on the film (even though the screenplay was based on one of his previously published short stories).
2001 is certainly a unique movie. I was a little disappointed or unsatisfied the few times I've watched it (esp. as a kid) because I didn't understand everything. But I think it's on purpose and it is partly what makes this movie so fascinating.
They didn't know how to end it. Only that Dave was to take the next step in evolution. For more background on the aliens/Clindar, there's a book called "The Lost Worlds of 2001"
“And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the field of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.”
That’s not the meaning of the end. If it was, Kubrick could have said so. Clarkes book is NOT the film, Kubrick wanted more ambiguity, because the film and topic deserves it.
Kubrick trusted his audience. The point of the ending is to make you think, and surface your own meaning. What it makes me think is what if Alien intelligence is just so far beyond ours that we can’t comprehend what they are or why they did what they did? Like ants to humans?
(My interpretation:) It's supposed to be about Dave transcending humankind to move to the next stage of evolution, and so all the weird stuff that happens is, yes, supposed to be confusing and nonsensical, because we can't understand it because we're humans. Just like the first monolith taught the apes how to kill to move further along their evolutionary path, this monolith taught Dave Bowman how to ?!?!? we have no idea because it doesn't make sense to us.
Or, that you cannot interpret it. At the beginning of the movie, the monolith changed monkeys to be intelligent enough to use tools. At the end of the movie, another encounter with the monolith causes a similar change that - to our unchanged, stupid minds - looks like a chaotic mess that cannot be understood.
If you think that's bad, I've even heard people say that the original Star Wars movie is too slow and boring for them to sit through.
As for 2001, it is a very meaningful film to me, but it does not surprise me that kids would have trouble with it. I think you really need to be an adult, and be prepared to think and put your own interpretation on it, in order to appreciate it.
> If you think that's bad, I've even heard people say that the original Star Wars movie is too slow and boring for them to sit through.
This is how we get the JJ "uh oh, two characters talked for more than 30 seconds, better cap this bit with an action scene even if it does precisely nothing to provide characterization, exposition, or advance plot" Abrams school of film-ruining.
Don't get me started on JJ; I still haven't been able to get through any of his Star Trek films. The same person who said the original Star Wars is slow and boring also said that he cannot watch any movie that was made before the year 2000, because filmmaking styles have changed too much and he finds all of the older films boring. Personally, I have trouble watching anything that was made after 2000.
Hey, at least this era gave us the improbably-awesome Mad Max: Fury Road.
In any sane universe that would've made every other action filmmaker go "oh, that's how you write and film engaging modern-feeling action that's meaningful to the film itself and its characters and, therefore, to the audience. If it's possible to keep that up for practically an entire film—and, apparently, it is—I can and must do it in my action scenes".
We don't live in a sane universe, unfortunately. But at least we have MM:FR.
Probably just an effect of longer shot lengths (some modern action films are under two seconds average shot length) and not being able to color-correct the hell out of every individual scene separately. Both made possible (or practical, anyway) by digital editing. Without them films tend to be more naturalistic. And like your average stage play they leave you space to think about what you're watching.
You want actually stage-like films you have to go back farther. Wide shots galore, with stage-style blocking. Check out the opening scene of the original Ocean's 11.
I think I've had all the same thoughts about 2001.
However, I'm surprised you got your family to sit through it. I don't know any kids under say 10 who could pay attention long enough. Heck, I don't know many adults that could either these days!
Saw it in the theater when I was six or eight (not exactly sure which re-release I saw). Loved it, couldn't wait to see it again. Oh, for sure I didn't get most of it. But even as a kid I viewed it as I think Kubrick intended: an experience of sight and sound. Did I "get" the pre-human monolith sequence? No, I was a kid. Psychedelic sequence? Nope, but it sure was pretty. Space baby? "I dunno", said my little skull full of mush. The consequences of an artificial intelligence that is given conflicting objectives, all while placed in a new environment that it might not have been prepared for? Umm, that would be a "no" for that eight year old. I was still a little sad when HAL got unplugged, though.
So I dunno, I'd say it depends on the kid. Might also depend on the era in which it's viewed, because I viewed it shortly after we had first landed on the moon. After forty years of Star Wars, maybe it doesn't seem so cool anymore.
The _interesting_ 20 minutes are much closer to the end. If you are going to skip most of the movie, skip to the "Jupiter Mission" title card and watch until things get pyschedelic.
If it makes you feel better, i made my 8 and 11 year old daughters watch it, and they loved it. i was afraid it was going to be too slow because of my childhood memory, but surprisingly it wasn’t.
We then watched the Soderberg cut, cause i always thought 2001 had too much dead space. Again, surprisingly, we all agreed the original was way better. Soderburgh took too much out.
Reminds me of first impressions to “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” Weird, strange, boring, lots of pointless cinematography, but it really is excellent.
That one's all feel. It's gritty and realistic, but unsettling and dreamlike at the same time. Take out the pointless cinematography and that goes away :-)
The movie is paced really slow. A lot of it was to show off the special effects. I find Blade Runner to be similar.
It was a good call at the time, since that's what got them awards, but I'd like to see both of them with the non-critical bits sped up to see if it improves my viewing experience.
The inability of adults to get totally absorbed into experiencing a movie (or a book) is a clear obstacle of enjoying the experience. Allowing the experience to wash over you without analyzing it while experiencing gets harder. Getting 3d or perfect reality virtual reality hardware is not going to fix that.
If you can do it as an adult, 2001 is great and Inland Empire from David Lynch is amazing. Inland Empire speaks directly to the unconsciousness and goes past of any explanation. You walk out from the theater wondering what happened. It's like you have been injected with something. The experience that lingers has no explanation.
> Allowing the experience to wash over you without analyzing it while experiencing gets harder.
I agree, and I didn't realise the extent to which this was happening with me until a few years ago, when one of my children got interested in performance magic. Because he was young, I went to various magic conventions and meetings with him, and listened to a lot of people talking about the practice of magic as well as its technical aspect. Turns out, a big preoccupation of magicians is how hard it is to get people to just watch the magic without them being distracted by trying to figure-out how its done. If anything, its harder for magicians than film directors because what they do clearly does merit disbelief.
Anyway, I learned that it really is ok to just watch a difficult film and experience the feelings that it produces without picking them apart. As an analytical person this was both a relief and a learning experience for me.
I had that problem with magic a long time ago, when I learned a fair amount about it (a friend of mine is a magician and I learned while he did, though only casually). I had to retrain myself to watch a performance with the intent to just enjoy it rather than try to figure it out as it happened. Ignoring the how and just enjoying the what makes it a lot more fun.
I think the inability largely stems from the manner in which we consume our content nowadays. How many movies or TV shows have you watched recently on Netflix using your laptop from your bed lately? Nolan has always been a big proponent of the movie theater experience. So much so he was against the idea of having a ~$50 monthly pass the allowed you to watch in-theater movies at home.
Overconsumption is the one issue, distractions from phones and such another, and IMO so is advertising, which over here would cause a break from immersion every half an hour or so, and in the US every ten minutes. Can't watch a movie like that.
With that in mind, the Netflix binge is a good example of how immersion is still very much a thing.
"Upstream Color"[0] by Shane Carruth, the writer and director of "Primer"[1] is another example of this kind of filmmaking. He aspired to create a film that you could watch in the same way one listens to albums/CDs over and over again and discover something new with each listen.[2]
I wonder how much of this is because we are increasingly watching movies at home or on portable devices with lots of distractions around us?
I've seen 2001 in 70mm a few times in recent years in a nice theater (and I'll see it again when it comes back), and it's very engrossing in a dark theater with no technology. You can let the entire film and all of its implications just wash over you. You can't get up, nor can you check your phone. You have nothing else to do other than just be in the moment.
This is harder to do at home. People should see more seminal movies in theaters, and I wish more theaters showed them. I live by American Film Institute's theater in the DC area, which is how I am able to see all of this stuff, but many other people do not. I think it's a big miss that more theaters don't show older movies year around.
My local art house showed the 4K restoration of Night of the Living Dead just before Halloween. It was a really fantastic experience, and I think you're right that more theaters should do this.
I love 2001, but Inland Empire was almost too much for me, I'm pleased I went to see it though. From Lynch watching Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive (heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergman's Persona) were much more pleasurable.
After leaving an afternoon screening of 2001 directors cut I felt like I'd been taking acid. I really respect Nolan as one of the best modern filmmakers, creating blockbusters with integrity is a big ask.
I haven't seen Inland Empire yet. I discovered David Lynch in the last 5 years and it's taking me a lot of time to get through his movies because it takes a whole lot of processing to really understand every one of them. It creeps into your psyche and sometimes your dreams. And for me it takes time to muster up the energy to put myself through another one of those experiences.
Eraserhead was a trip, I still haven't totally figured it out. But in terms of pure cinematic enjoyment Blue Velvet would be my favorite.
Now that I hear other Lynch fans talk about Inland Empire I'm really excited to watch it.
I wouldn't try to understand them completely, he is an artist and transcendental meditator. Try to appreciate them as painting not as a narrative and I think you'll enjoy them even more. Inland Empire is really a fan film in my opinion and should/can only really be watched which an existing knowledge of his background works.
I agree with this - his works may have a logic of their own, or they may not, or the logic may not be a logic that can be understood by any human. For me, it helps to think of them as dreams - there's some normal looking stuff, but then there's that bit where you're cycling up a lane that looks like one you used to ride almost weekly, with the head of the sister of a teenage girlfriend looming large somewhere you can't quite place. It doesn't have to mean anything.
I believe to have read Lynch himself say that Inland Empire doesn't have a deeper interpretation that makes sense. As far as I remember it's even largely made up of footage from other projects.
As a long time Lynch fan (I discovered Lynch from watching the original Twin Peaks series back when it was first broadcast in the early 90's) I'd probably put Inland Empire aside for a bit if you're just getting started.
I don't think adults have an inability to get absorbed that way; I think they still get that when they watch more "traditional" blockbuster movies. The problem is this mental division between what is perceived as commercial and fun, and what has to be seen as art. Basically, once people realize that something is very different from the baseline of normal movies, they will start to get into art+interpretation mode and spoil the pure experience. Christopher Nolan is probably one of the people who really manage in all their movies to keep the balance between those two worlds.
I agree - we went with fiancee to watch latest Star Wars few weeks ago. I don't recall the last time I enjoyed a movie in cinema so much, was drawn into the story 100% of the time, not a single blip that would distract & make me come back from being right there in the story.
It didn't happen with any previous SW movies, in fact maybe this was unique experience. For both of us. I didn't question logic of anything (which I usually do), everything just clicked and hummed along the story.
When I checked IMDB, I couldn't wrap my head around why it's rated so low and first 50-100 user reviews gave it either 1/10 or 2/10 and kept repeating how disappointing it is and how it is a worst movie in cinema history. Didn't bother to check their arguments, I enjoyed it profoundly and I still smile when remembering those moments.
Maybe I was in right mental setup for it, but that would be valid for both of us symmetrically.
In fact, as writing this, I recall once I watched Apocalypse Now, and somehow, for some reason, it felt very similar. I saw it before, and I saw it after this, but it was never so intense, so 'right'
I never though about it, but thinking about the last movies I've watcher, I agree that the mental setup/mood at the time can have a great influence on how much I'd be drawn into a movie.
I've seen 2001 at least 10 times in my life and I love it to death, but I got to see it in the theater once and it was like I'd never really experienced it at all before. You can't appreciate the incredible sound design until it's absolutely filling the air around you. Not just the music, but the klaxons and the moments of dead silence.
I've seen it in the cinema a couple of times over the years, and you're right, it's a truly amazing thing to experience; previously I'd only watched on VHS or on the BBC.
It wasn't until the blu-ray release came out that I felt the same experience and immersion in the film as I did with viewing in a theatre.
Yeap. Never had the chance to see 2001 in a theater, but I've watched Apocalypse Now after having seen it on a TV, and it was a whole new experience. The helicopters scene was overwhelming.
It’s about the idea of community, what we can achieve together, as opposed to this cult of individuality that we live in right now. Whether you’re talking about Silicon Valley billionaires or politicians, I think we’re living in an era that over-prizes individuality at the expense of community.
This seems terribly relevant. And it's interesting coming from a director - the leader of creative communities behind the camera while commercial success often depends on the individual standing in front of it.
It's incredibly interesting to me, coming from this director, as I class him as one of the best, up there with Kubrick, and I also will discriminate on movies based on directors and screenwriters more than any other factor, because that's how I have found quality.
This I disagree with. There is a sort of Nolan cult, which I think is undeserved. He is a fine film-maker, but his dialogue is often stilted, the scores overstated and the characters under-developed - and while he is a decent cinematographer, his pictures aren't something that he will be remembered for.
His films are good and incredibly entertaining, but Kubrick is on a completely different plane.
I suppose I'm in the cult. About the only complaint I can lodge against Nolan is that the exposition is heavy handed in a few of his films, which he spoke to in the article, and I agree he was forced into that position with the intense story he's often trying to communicate in a film's runtime. He's also not a cinematographer, and has generally worked with Wally Pfister or Hoyte van Hoytema.
I would disagree if you're saying the cinematography won't be remembered; van Hoytema's work on Interstellar and Dunkirk is something I remember quite positively even while typing this comment. I would also disagree on character development, as Nolan directed Robin Williams into one hell of an antagonist in Insomnia, a spectacularly underrated film.
His stories are often lazy, too. The notion of a magic machine that lets everyone wifi and have dreams inside dreams inside dreams together is fun but absurd. The same with the end of Interstellar. Too conveniently we've got a magic wormhole which saves him and drops him a few feet away from a ship around the ring of Saturn. The first half of TDK is incredible, the second is very anti-climatic (maybe not his fault).
Check out anything by Roger Deakins for world class cinematography. Nolan is just good. If you are looking for a director who people might one day consider in the realm of Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson might fit it, but he's got a lot of "weird" movies (even his masterpieces) which don't give him the same wide appeal. [0]
Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't attribute that to Nolan. The greatest directors elevate their actors (see the crazy stories about Kubrick and The Shining). Nolan works with great talent, but the performances often leave a lot to be desired, this is uncontested even by fans.
Nolan makes movies with interesting themes and he never really does anything bad. But for him to be even be discussed in the same thread as Kubrick shows how overrated he is. I say this owning Interstellar (the teaser gives me chills) and I thought Dunkirk was great simply because he toned it down and worked within something realistic. Given 20 years and a Jurassic Park, we might see Nolan the same way we do Spielberg today, but Kubrick? Forget about it!
> Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't attribute that to Nolan.
I don't know, I might. You don't even see Finch for half the film, only hear him, and the villain left an impression on me not unlike Kiefer Sutherland's villain in Phone Booth (an otherwise unremarkable film). I can't think of another villain role that Robin Williams performed, probably because nobody was brave enough to take that kind of risk with a heavyweight positive actor -- Insomnia came out a few years after Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society, which helped establish his mastery of drama, but nobody wanted to make him the bad guy. Nolan did, and it was very satisfying to watch.
(I take that back, One Hour Photo was great, too. I knew I was forgetting one.)
> His films are good and incredibly entertaining, but Kubrick is on a completely different plane.
I agree perhaps I misclassed Nolan with Kubrick. That being said, "Memento" and "Inception" really stand out to me. Could be that I just really relate to the themes of romantic loss, and as a musician I found the scores for both made a big difference to me. Granted, Zimmer's score for "Inception" was bombastic and could justifiably be called Wagnerian; I still find listening to that soundtrack cathartic, and in spots it's even very cerebral.
I'm glad to find someone else who agrees. I find Nolan to be an unremarkable director. He has inventive ideas but the actual direction is fairly pedestrian. I have a hard time remembering what his Batman films were even about let alone any outstanding direction (the terrible voice Bale used and the Sean Connery impression Hardy did show he needs to tell his actors no sometimes.)
I haven't seen Dunkirk so maybe it will totally change my mind
A good director has a chance to salvage bad everything else— no one else does. Stars with good taste can be a signal (think Tom Hanks), but that's a measure of potential rather than the final product— once they're on board, they don't really control that much beyond their own performance.
I can't think of any case where a good director has made a good movie out of a bad screenplay. At best they can distract you with style and spectacle, e.g. Gladiator.
I can't supply a specific example, but I'm thinking of writer/director types like Joss Whedon, JJ Abrams, Bryan Singer, who are able to understand the larger story elements and at least work within the individual scenes to excise the worst dialogue, give characters meaningful and believable motivations, etc.
Commercially successful but mediocre. Dialog in X-Men is still widely mocked (Whedon and Singer), X-Men 3 was horrible, Abrams has never made a great movie (getting the Trek and Wars franchises is a lot of help). I find very little about what Whedon writes believable (maybe that's why he does superhero movies). It's all lowest common denominator snark so they can make a billion dollars.
Not sure why am going after you on this, but surely there are better examples than those guys.
Fair criticisms. I'm definitely coming at this from the perspective of a mainstream media consumer; I think the most off-beat thing I watched last year was Colossal, and I didn't particularly care for it.
That said, despite everything else, these guys really do understand storytelling. Looking at Star Trek 2009 vs. Nemesis or The Force Awakens vs prequel trilogy, and there's just no comparison. And as far as Whedon, I haven't watched his recent superhero stuff; I'm basing that on being a long-time fan of the dialogue and plotting in Firefly.
> Not sure why am going after you on this, but surely there are better examples than those guys.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm with you on this. A single line from "Avengers" really sticks out to me, and it seems all too Whedonesque:
> "What were you lying?"
I can understand that Whedon was going for a cutesy play on "what were you saying?", but it just feels so clunky. And it's delivered by a fairly widely recognized as at least competent thespian. This, and the fact that Whedon wrote the screenplay for "Alien: Resurrection" tells me that Whedon is not world-class. He's certainly very good, and definitely mainstream successful, but not in the same class as Kubrick, or even Nolan.
Abrams also feels to me like a one hit wonder, relying far too much on his "mystery box." I actually liked most of "Lost", and his Star Wars and Star Trek were entertaining enough popcorn flicks, but not really memorable.
> the fact that Whedon wrote the screenplay for "Alien: Resurrection" tells me that Whedon is not world-class
I think that's a bit unfair. Joss wrote the original screenplay, but it was butchered en route to the screen. He's still pretty narked about having a story credit: "There is always going to be a shitty Alien movie out there. A shitty Alien movie with my name on it."
I liked the original Avengers, and I think it did a great job handling a sprawling and convoluted brief (there's a 17-part breakdown out there if you're really keen [1]), but TV was his natural medium. Firefly, obviously, but there are moments in Buffy that I'd honestly defend as the best TV ever made.
Not going to argue about JJ Abrams, though. Possibly the most overrated director ever, with a perfect reverse-Midas track record when it comes to franchises.
I lost all respect for Tom Hanks when he became the history channel's boy: Nostalga and ww2 fantasy plays are not my thing. Bring back the Tom Hanks of Joe v the volcano, not melodrama about another captain america.
This is a meaningless and inaccurate observation. US government spending has been at all time sustained highs (excluding WW2) as a percentage of GDP, about 50% higher than the decades pre Sep 11. We’ve silently been asking for more contributions and han is very, whether thru taxes or future debt to be foisted on your children.
A truer statement is that the last 90 years we’ve steadily diminished the value of the individual.
On a practical basis (civil liberties, economic freedom, power to affect change), I agree with you.
But it's hard to ignore the deification of certain individuals through celebrity. If some of society's foundational institutions are failing, it's fair to suggest the deification of power brokers as a root cause.
Auteur - that was the word I was looking for. It's interesting how people deride the auteur concept (including Nolan!), but "auteurship" is exactly how I have found many movies I love: I'll take a chance on something I know nothing about, and if it's really good, I go looking for other movies by the same director or screenwriter. Similarly, I skip anything by Michael Bay or McG. I've not oft been disappointed with this process.
I think Christopher Nolan is the best all-around modern director. His movies are huge critical hits: most of them are in the IMDb Top 250 (most directors would be happy to have one film up there). His films are also huge box-office hits, which means that the audience, not just movie nerds, like his movies.
I think the distribution for films is bimodal, one huge peak for box-office/mass-appeal hits, and another smaller peak for critical hits/film-nerd-appeal hits.
Nolan would be right in the center between these two distributions: he pushes cinema forward while keeping it accessible to all.
People keep saying Hollywood is dead and they don't make movies like they used to and I think the exact opposite is true. The median level of quality of Hollywood films is absolutely better than ever and the number of masterpieces per year seems to keep increasing to the point that I can't keep up.
IMDB isn't really a good meter of critical opinion, its score is based on the opinion of its users. Rotten Tomatoes is the one that aggregates opinions of the critics. That said, his movies usually get 80%+, which is pretty good.
I love Nolan's films, the first one I saw was Memento when it came out. I was quite blown away.
Interstellar is (by a country mile) the film that really does it for me, and is the one I'll watch two or three times a year. The strange thing about Interstellar is that after having watched it the first couple of times, every subsequent viewing gets me fairly emotional. I never ever shed tears when watching films, and I've seen a lot of movies in my 51 or so years on this planet, but this is the one that gets me welling up inside and a bit teary eyed. So well done Mr Nolan you've managed to crack a fairly hard (film) nut.
The scene where Cooper comes back from the time-dilated planet and has years of messages to catch up on really makes me emotional. McConaughey really kills it in this movie.
Jeez that scene is truly heart wrenching. I wasn't awfully keen on McConaughey films previously, but you're right, there's something about this role where he knocks it out of the park. I then watched Dallas Buyers club, he nails that as well.
> That’s outstanding. And that’s the thing. It’s become very fashionable in the last couple of decades to forget what good government can do, what good union organizing can do.
In my opinion this is missing the problem. Government, in a democracy, is decided by the masses. I think people, as individuals, are generally quite intelligent. But I also think people, as groups, are quite stupid. Mob mentality is very much a real phenomena and it's something we've not come even remotely close to growing out of. Similarly for tribalism.
In the instance he's referring to (film critics associations boycotted Disney after Disney blacklisted writers from an influential publication, leading Disney to rescind the blacklisting) you had a very small and very well informed demographic working together. That has very little to do with the democratic process. Most people do not know much about any given topic, and so when you query the masses on anything the majority opinion is going to be heavily influenced by marketing and 'propaganda.' What people do or think is not really based on reality, but who presented their argument in the glossiest case.
So to bring this theoretic into the practical. Imagine you ask people about a certain hotkey issue, in most recent times perhaps it would be Trump's tax plan. Many people would have extremely strong opinions one way or the other. Now ask people to actually describe, without handwaving, what the plan actually was. People, for the most part, are going to be completely ignorant. We, collectively, form strong decisions about things we don't even know the basic fundamentals of!
I don't know how this can change in practical terms. It's the nature of a democracy. But that just kicks the can to another problem. If we can't come to informed decisions on an individual policy, how are we supposed to be expected to come to informed decisions on candidates using every resource available to make us believe that they are who we, collectively, want in office? As tools and technologies for directing the masses in one way or another become ever more effective, this disconnect between reality and mass opinion is only going to increase.
I absolutely love most of that movie. The pacing, the set design, the score - fantastic.
The end with the nutty lights -- I hate. It's hard for me to believe it's all in the same movie because I hate it almost to the point of anger. If that part wasn't in the movie I would probably have watched it a lot more than the two or three times I have.
I agree with you, but then I think the same can be said of movies such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", wherein the pacing was awesome back in the day, when you had to actually be somewhere to watch a movie, but now when everyone can stream to their own private space, 'tis a bigger challenge. I watch a lot of 70's movies with this slow, boring pace ..
That's probably not primarily a factor of needing to be somewhere to watch a movie as much as it's a factor of changing expectations set by other media: the effect was frequently commented on as early as the 1980s, and widely attributed to, among other media factors, the impact of MTV and music videos.
I've also seen it commonly attributed to Star Wars. Star Wars, for better or worse, completely and almost single-handedly changed the pacing of sci-fi movies in the 70s. You can almost spot Star Wars as a line in the sand and tell which sci-fi films predate it, which postdate it, and which got stuck being released too close for comfort (the multiple editing cut fiascos of Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture seem to be in part due to the pull of pre-Star Wars pacing versus changing film audience expectations).
Many people can't handle the pacing of older sci-fi movies. I remember watching the Andromeda Strain with my wife when we were teenagers. She said it was the most boring movie she had ever seen.
I watched Tarkovsky's Solaris a few weeks ago. The pacing is very slow, but the long silences are calming like reading and evokes a certain mood. It's a nice change from non-stop action Youtube clips and Twitch streams.
That is completely true and at the same time terrifying. What does that say about how our brains have changed? Maybe it's not a problem, but if it is a problem I'm afraid it might be a big one.
I think it's a conditioning thing. I don't like some modern movies because it seems like every scene is meant to be a money shot. You have to build atmosphere to tell a story.
Interesting on Dunkirk; I was skeptical of why someone would make a war film in the present day, but it sounds like his intention in expressing what it means to people is good.
I would say that my childhood would be lost if it was not for the fact that I did not had any TV.
Or more correct to say is that children now do not have childhood as people had 30 years ago.
Rarely you will see someone who know the trill of climbing 40m high tree(age of 7). Swimming in lake while thunderstorm rages around you. Grabbing red coal with hand. Eating baked stolen potatoes in middle of forest where you got lost. Making an failure of bow to hunt. Starting a fire, then living the consequences. Giving no shits about drama and other people's feelings. Slicing up toad to see what is inside. Running from crazy animals. Crossing the voltage wires for shits and giggles. No child died in our village from these bullshits, just got smarter.
Movie will do that for you and tell you how to feel. They will provide you with fake imagination and experience.
> It’s about the idea of community, what we can achieve together, as opposed to this cult of individuality that we live in right now. Whether you’re talking about Silicon Valley billionaires or politicians, I think we’re living in an era that over-prizes individuality at the expense of community. It’s the Silicon Valley billionaire as opposed to the union. We’ve steered too far in one direction. We need to be reminded of the potential of what we can do together.
Said the universally-acclaimed multi-millionaire Hollywood blockbuster director in his interview for LA Times
That said though, I like the message and also respect the man and his work. That just struck me as a little hypocritical :) although as a storyteller I suppose he is in a position to change narratives like that
I thought the headline was confusing and hard to parse, and sure enough when I click through to tfa I see "2001" is quoted. Strictly, the film is titled "2001: A Space Odyssey".
I wonder what he hopes his children will take from it. I know he says its just something you experience, but there is also a lot of meaning behind the movie, and I wonder if he saw something specific in it that he believes is a valuable lesson for his children at 3-4
I suspect it depends on whether you view Musk as an unparalleled world-changing genius, just a good businessman with an instinct for good fields to invest combined with a talent for hiring the right smart people, or an overhyped hack who got lucky (anecdotally my personal feeling is that most people on HN seem to fall into these categories with ratio 5:1:3)
Either of the last two could conceivably be considered an insult given the difference in jobs, and creativity and control inherent in the task of directing.
This reminds me of something that Hany Abu-Assad, a Dutch-Palestinian film director[0], once said in an interview. He was asked how it is possible that from countries like Iran, with its oppressive regime, we get such amazing directors as Abbas Kiarostami, who created beautiful humanising movies. After a brief moment of contemplation, Abu-Assad answered "society is stronger than the system."
> Would you say “Dunkirk” is your most hopeful film?
> Well … yeah. “Interstellar” is pretty hopeful. But then again, the whole world has ended. There is that. [Laughs]
Funny how one can interpret that both as "doesn't sound very hopeful to me", and "the more impossible the odds are that were overcome, the more hopeful the message inherently is".
WARNING: INTERSTELLAR ENDING SPOILER BELOW
What makes Interstellar especially tricky here is that on the one hand, saving humanity (and presumably as much other life as possible) from extinction when the entire planet is dying is about as big a challenge as it gets, and therefore makes the film feel very hopeful, but on the other hand the ending also implies that the universe is predeterministic, and that can be viewed as the opposite of hopeful.
[0] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0009463/?ref_=tt_ov_dr