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I have never seen the follow up, 2010. Is it any good?
2001's greatness -- and the root of its rejection by many -- is its eschewing of most melodramatic conventions. 2010 is nothing but conventional melodrama, a middling Star Trek movie without Kirk and Spock. Like most great stories, 2001's conclusion is the end. It doesn't matter what happens after that. The story's been told. All the rest, as that great extraterrestrial monolith, the Talmud, likes to say, is merely commentary.
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It's a film that really advanced the art of cinema, but one problem is the deliberate irony of the people who inhabit it acting like unemotional computers - and HAL the computer emerging as the most "human" character!
I prefer Tarkovsky's SOLARIS - another deliberately paced meditative film that largely takes place on a spaceship. The human element is more moving than 2001's.
I wrote the above nearly three years ago, and it still generally holds true for me. I still have more affection for the 1971 SOLARIS, but I seem to have been too dismissive of 2001 in my statement.
I watched 2001 last night, my first time in several years - and my first time ever on my widescreen TV. I sat close to the screen to get the home viewing equivalent of watching in the Cinerama theatre, did not distract myself with anything else, and allowed the slow, measured pace of the film to relax me - so that by the time of the "star gate" sequence I really felt the seductive, "trippy" aspects of it. It was a great viewing; one really needs to get into that state naturally to flow along with the film's rhythms, rather than feeling bored and impatient with it. Anyway, I've seen so many really slow art films of late that 2001 seems almost breathlessly paced by comparison.
Before I considered the human characters rather artificial, but I was more impressed with Keir Dullea's performance this time. Very subtle, but much more emotional than I ever remembered it to be.
I have read plenty of books and articles about Kubrick that analyze his films, so I find the storyline of 2001 to be quite straightforward. I think it's the odd structure of the entire film that throws many people off.
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Posted: |
May 13, 2013 - 7:37 AM
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By: |
Ado
(Member)
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I have never seen the follow up, 2010. Is it any good?
2001's greatness -- and the root of its rejection by many -- is its eschewing of most melodramatic conventions. 2010 is nothing but conventional melodrama, a middling Star Trek movie without Kirk and Spock. Like most great stories, 2001's conclusion is the end. It doesn't matter what happens after that. The story's been told. All the rest, as that great extraterrestrial monolith, the Talmud, likes to say, is merely commentary.
2010 is a less great cinematic accomplishment, but a better entertainment. You do not really watch 2001 to be entertained, but to be sucked in and tranquilized.
The story is sometimes a stretch, and the cold war angle is surely a stale one. On the other hand the effects in 2010 are really very good, representing some of the best model work and photo effects before CGI took over.
I like Roy Scheider and John Lithgow and Hellen Mirren in these roles. Peter Hyams style can be a challenge, lots of low light and grainy shots. It surely wraps up a little too neatly in the end, entirely the opposite of 2001.
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I still think they should've had William Sylvester reprise his role as Floyd in 2010, and had Scheider play a new role.
One thing that bugs me about 2010's efx are the visible "overlay/matte blocks" around some of the ship shots. Another is the use of the wrong Ligeti cue for the monolith.
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Posted: |
May 13, 2013 - 11:33 AM
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By: |
Ado
(Member)
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I still think they should've had William Sylvester reprise his role as Floyd in 2010, and had Scheider play a new role.
One thing that bugs me about 2010's efx are the visible "overlay/matte blocks" around some of the ship shots. Another is the use of the wrong Ligeti cue for the monolith.
Oh, I agree that there are visible matte lines, but it does not really bother me. The Discovery and the other model are so terrific, and even the little pod is great. The music is sometimes good, I think some of that Shire stuff backing Scheider's voiceover is nicely moody minimal electronic stuff. Other of it, the action beats, not as great, and the Ligeti was wrong somehow, not sure what they did there. What I do like about the film is Hyams does these really long wide shots from far away, on earth and in space, those are not used much nowadays.
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50!!!!
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Posted: |
Apr 2, 2018 - 7:56 PM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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GREAT article--from NY Times (print) a couple days ago:
The Story of a Voice: HAL in ‘2001’ Wasn’t Always So Eerily Calm
By GERRY FLAHIVE
"I'm sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you know the voice.
HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was the film’s most expressive and emotional figure, and made a lasting impression on our collective imagination.
Stanley Kubrick’s epic, a journey from pre-human history to a possible infinity that doesn’t need humans at all, is probably the most respected, if not the most beloved, science-fiction film of all time.
The story of the creation of HAL’s performance — the result of a last-minute collaboration between the idiosyncratic director Stanley Kubrick and the veteran Canadian actor Douglas Rain — has been somewhat lost in the 50 years since the film’s release in April 1968. As has its impact: Artificial intelligence has borrowed from the HAL persona, and now, unwittingly, a slight hint of Canadianness resides in our phones and interactive devices.
Mr. Rain’s HAL has become the default reference, not just for the voice, but also for the humanesque qualities of what a sentient machine’s personality should be. Just ask Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home — the cadence, the friendly formality, the pleasant intelligence and sense of calm control in their voices evoke Mr. Rain’s unforgettable performance. As we warily eye a future utterly transformed by A.I. incursions into all aspects of our lives, HAL has been lurking.
To Scott Brave, the co-author of “Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship,” HAL 9000 is a mix between a butler and a psychoanalyst. “He has a sense of deference and of detachment,” Mr. Brave said, adding that he saw a ripple effect on, for example, the iPhone’s virtual assistant. “When I listen to something like Siri I feel there is a lot in common.”
Even when Kubrick was making the film, the director sensed HAL’s larger implications. He said in a 1969 interview with the author and critic Joseph Gelmis that one of the things he was trying to convey was “the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities that have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.”
So how was this particular creature created?
The “2001” historian David Larson said that “Kubrick came up with the final HAL voice very late in the process. It was determined during ‘2001’ planning that in the future the large majority of computer command and communication inputs would be via voice, rather than via typewriter.”
But artificial intelligence was decades from a convincing facsimile of a human voice — and who was to say how a computer should sound anyway?
To play HAL, Kubrick settled on Martin Balsam, who had won the best supporting actor Oscar for “A Thousand Clowns.” Perhaps there was a satisfying echo that appealed to Kubrick — both were from the Bronx and sounded like it. In August 1966, Balsam told a journalist: “I’m not actually seen in the picture at any time, but I sure create a lot of excitement projecting my voice through that machine. And I’m getting an Academy Award winner price for doing it, too.”
Adam Balsam, the actor’s son, told me that “Kubrick had him record it very realistically and humanly, complete with crying during the scene when HAL’s memory is being removed.”
Then the director changed his mind. “We had some difficulty deciding exactly what HAL should sound like, and Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American,” Kubrick said in the 1969 interview. Mr. Rain recalls Kubrick telling him, “I’m having trouble with what I’ve got in the can. Would you play the computer?”
Kubrick had heard Mr. Rain’s voice in the 1960 documentary “Universe,” a film he watched at least 95 times, according to the actor. “I think he’s perfect,” Kubrick wrote to a colleague in a letter preserved in the director’s archive. “The voice is neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish. Despite this, it is interesting.”
In December 1967, Kubrick and Mr. Rain met at a recording studio at the MGM lot in Borehamwood, outside London.
The actor hadn’t seen a frame of the film, then still deep in postproduction. He met none of his co-stars, not even Keir Dullea, who played the astronaut David Bowman, HAL’s colleague turned nemesis. The cast members had long since completed their work, getting HAL’s lines fed to them by a range of people, including the actress Stefanie Powers. Mr. Rain hadn’t even been hired to play HAL, but to provide narration. Kubrick finally decided against using narration, opting for the ambiguity that was enraging to some viewers, transcendent to others.
It’s not a session Mr. Rain remembers fondly: “If you could have been a ghost at the recording you would have thought it was a load of rubbish.”
Kubrick was attracted to Mr. Rain for the role partly because the actor “had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part,” he said in the 1969 interview with Mr. Gelmis. But Mr. Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all; it’s Standard Canadian English.
As the University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal’ — that’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from.”
Mr. Rain had played an astonishing range of characters in almost 80 productions at the Stratford Festival in Ontario over 45 years, understudying Alec Guinness in “Richard III” in 1953 and going on to play Macbeth, King Lear and Humpty Dumpty. Sexy, intimidating, folksy, sly or persuasive, he could deliver whatever a role needed.
Mr. Rain had to quickly fathom and flesh out HAL, recording all of his lines in 10 hours over two days. Kubrick sat “three feet away, explaining the scenes to me and reading all the parts.”
Kubrick, according to the transcript of the session in his archive at the University of the Arts London, gave Mr. Rain only a few notes of direction, including:
— “Sound a little more like it’s a peculiar request.”
— “A little more concerned.”
— “Just try it closer and more depressed.”
Though HAL has ice water in his digital veins, he exudes a dry wit and superciliousness that makes me wonder why someone would deliberately program a computer to talk this way. Maybe we should worry about A.I.
When HAL says, “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal,” Mr. Rain somehow manages to sound both sincere and not reassuring. And his delivery of the line “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do” has the sarcastic drip of a drawing-room melodrama and also carries the disinterested vibe of a polite sociopath.
Kubrick had Mr. Rain sing the 1892 love song “Daisy Bell” (“I’m half crazy, all for the love of you”) almost 50 times, in uneven tempos, in monotone, at different pitches and even just by humming it. In the end, he used the very first take. Sung as HAL’s brain is being disconnected, it’s from his early programming days, his computer childhood. It brings to an end the most affecting scene in the entire film.
Scott Brave said the moment “is so powerful that you feel very uncomfortable; all of sudden HAL feels incredibly close to being alive and being human. You start to empathize with that experience, and you are responding to the death of a machine.”
For a character that’s been endlessly caricatured — in “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” television commercials — HAL has inspired a surprisingly rich range of adjectives over the years. He and his voice have been described as aloof, eerily neutral, silky, wheedling, controlled, baleful, unisex, droll, soft, conversational, dreamy, supremely calm and rational. He’s discursive, suave, inhumanly cool, confident, superior, deadpan, sinister, patronizing and asexual.
Anthony Hopkins has said it influenced his performance as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Douglas Rain himself has never seen “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For the retired actor who spent decades at the Stratford Festival and turns 90 in May, the performance was simply a job.
A.I. voice synthesis can’t yet deliver a performance as compelling as his HAL, but it is becoming more … human. The HAL era is almost over: Soon, an A.I. voice will be able to sound like whoever you want it to. In Canada, even Alexa has a Canadian accent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/movies/hal-2001-a-space-odyssey-voice-douglas-rain.html
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I saw this on my calendar today.
I remember going to a movie theater to see this, but I can't have been even 5 yet. It was in a mall or something that was white. I remember seeing a woman dressed in a geisha outfit.
That's all I remember.
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Posted: |
Apr 4, 2018 - 6:33 AM
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By: |
ryanpaquet
(Member)
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I'd love a re-release with that additional 17 minutes of footage found, and an option to watch the film scenes with Alex North's score.
Article on the footage found - I reporoduced the text below the link:
http://www.slashfilm.com/17-minutes-lost-2001-space-odyssey-footage/
Almost like discovering a monolith buried underground, Warner Brothers recently found 17 minutes of lost footage from Stanley Kubrick‘s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey in a salt-mine vault in Kansas. But before you go and drop acid in anticipation of an extended cut of the film, consider the slippery slope this footage constitutes. One, just because the footage was found doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to make it into the public eye. Two, Kubrick himself reportedly cut the footage from the film because he felt it created pacing issues. And three, the film is just about perfect as is, do you really want to screw it up?
The Film Stage first alerted us to the news of this footage. They point us to a reports from Forgotten Silver and Blastr about an event in Toronto where Douglas Trumbull and David Larson, who were working on the now canceled documentary 2001: Beyond the Infinite: The Making of a Masterpiece, mentioned the footage had been found in perfect condition. Though they weren’t sure what the plans for the footage are, they did show images of never before seen scenes that will be in an upcoming photo book. It was unclear if these images were from the found footage or not.
According the 2001 IMDB page, when the film premiered in 1968, it ran 160 minutes. Kubrick then went in and trimmed a good 19 minutes or so. It’s assumed this would be the footage that was found in Kansas. Here’s what the IMDB says was cut:
Some shots from the “Dawn of Man” sequence and a new scene was inserted where an ape pauses with the bone it is about to use as a tool. The new scene was a low-angle shot of the monolith, done in order to portray and clarify the connection between the man-ape using the tool and the monolith.
Some shots of Frank Poole jogging in the centrifuge.
An entire sequence of several shots in which Dave Bowman searches for the replacement antenna part in storage.
A scene where HAL severs radio communication between the “Discovery” and Poole’s pod before killing him. This scene explains a line that stayed in the film in which Bowman addresses HAL on the subject.
Some shots of Poole’s space walk before he is killed.
While none of that sounds particularly exciting, new Kubrick is new Kubrick and it would be pretty cool for this footage to make its way onto some sort of epic, mega Blu-ray release one day. Still, I don’t know if I’d want to see it edited into the film. Kubrick cut it, why would anyone want to go against his wishes? But, if there is any money to be made from this footage, Warner’s will surely find a way.
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