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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
Google it, I found his explanation for his own movie the only one worth considering.
"A theory", not "the theory". There's quite a lot of theories about this movie.
Example:
The Monolith is the movie screen
http://www.collativelearning.com/2001%20chapter%202.html
Also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_2001:_A_Spa...
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>effects and sound
No, no, no!
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember seeing a bbc introduction where Pink Floyd were introduced as a ‘pop band’ and you could see the derision on the presenters face.
They've sold tens of millions of records, and nearly every album has gone platinum (I believe the last two were merely gold...).
Just speculating, though.
Radiohead hasn't had a Top 40 single in more than 10 years. 15 years?
Their album sales from the last 10 years aren't comparable to the current selling giants.
Their streaming numbers aren't comparable.
Radiohead has an audience, and indeed it's a large audience, but I would not call them popular.
> 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.
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.
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.
I still get wistful and sad when I hear someone dimly recall "those TVs with the big things on the back".
Moreover, some older shows didn't have opening credits and a great many that did, often only did so after an acted prelude
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
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.
Brief history of the length of opening credits sequences here, with Family Matters as one of the most excessive examples: https://theweek.com/articles/632836/brief-history-tv-shows-o...
Even that misses Murphy Brown though, so now I'm not sure anyone's thoroughly done the research. Where's Abed when you need him?
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.
If opening credits are done right, they can serve a function, e.g. The Wire.
An example from the cinema world would be Michael Mann's films.
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.
If there is any correlation I've observed, it's more to do with the genre of show and it's running time.
Not just that, but the images in each region are subtly altered to reflect the events in the storyline in that region.
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.
I find every minute of it to be thrilling (in case you were interested in another datapoint).
On the other hand, I watched High Sierra recently and the pre-Bullit notion of a car chase scene was, uh, less than thrilling.
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.
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".)
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?