Film buffs please don’t crucify, but I couldn’t finish that shit it was so boring. My “Classics” are shit like The evil Dead and American werewolf in London.
Do you have to be like wired differently to enjoy that film?
Read the book. The movie is not based on the book and the book is not based on the movie. They were written at the same time, collaboratively, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. The book is much more fast-paced than the movie and actually explains everything. The movie is definitely more art than entertainment, while the book is more entertainment than art.
They are like 75% the same, 25% different. In the book, the prehistoric ape-humans have a lot more description. The monolith is clear instead of black. There is also big sub-plot about nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament. And it makes clear the transhumanist storyline, that the point of the Monolith is to help humans evolve even more - beyond the flesh.
The book also clearly explains what’s happening with David at the end. I remember it goes into great detail about things we’d regard as supernatural, like spaceships that somehow operate by adhering to certain ratios, or aliens that can see every moment of time at once. When I read it for the first time I thought Clarke was trying to show something transcendent yet mundane at the same time, and I think it worked. I really love that book.
It’s just a slow movie. You have to nestle in and wait for it to happen.
Psychedelics help. It’s a unique movie and has no parallel. It’s Stanley Kubrick and he famously pulled no punches when it came to making his movies accessible.
Assuming you meant Evil Dead 2 and not the original, that’s a horror/slapstick combo. Yeah, 2001 isn’t for you. I’d suggest Smokey and the Bandit instead.
Kubrick’s movies are slow but get better each time you tackle them. Most also have pretty obvious leftwing messages: Spartacus is about a slave revolt (the writer was blacklisted I believe), Paths of Glory is anti-war, The Shining is about American genocide and the horror of the bourgeois family, Eyes Wide Shut is about Kubrick getting assassinated because he discovered Epstein decades early. 2001 might be his most rightwing film? It’s about human evolution and tools and has a strong Nietzschian element, but the film’s writer, Arthur C. Clarke, was not a rightwing dude and was definitely interested in cooperation at least between the USA and the USSR (which is positively depicted in 2001 and 2010).
Yes Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted
Some AM radio types think 2001 was Kubrick’s admission of guilt for faking the moon landing. According to these same people, Eyes Wide Shut was his attempt to reveal the power structures preventing him from coming clean about the moon landing. They say that was the movie that got him killed.
Obviously this is some wacky bullshit, but watch it with that context in mind and the movie is super interesting. Also, if you have any mushrooms sitting around then maybe eat them first.
I don’t know how early there were moon landing conspiracies, but I’m convinced Kubrick had heard of at least one or two. He gave Danny in The Shining a sweater with Apollo 11 on it, probably to screw with their heads. That seems like something Kubrick would do.
15 minutes in you’re like barely past the black screen that seems to last forever right at the beginning lol.