Andre Lieven wrote:
NASA no emotion crew images.

Further, it told an SF story in a visual medium where the humans do
not succeed in interacting or understanding the aliens and their
civilisation and motives. Its far too conventional a trope of much visual
SF that the humans and aliens will be able to interact, communicate,
and deal with each other on comparable planes.

Remember how well humanity interacted with the Martians in Pal's "War Of
The Worlds"?

We held up a white flag; they burned us down to ash with a heat ray.
Then they started taking out everything with their meson charge nullifier.
They had no more concern about us understanding them, or them
understanding us, than a person trying to figure out what the ants in
their yard were thinking when the insecticide hit.

Even in "The Day The Earth Stood Still" our relationship with a alien
race consisted of: "Take our advice, or this solar system is going to
have a asteroid belt between Venus and Mars as well as one between Mars
and Jupiter. We can do that; it'd cost a lot to do, but believe me, we
can do that. We did it before regarding the planet that used to be
outboard of us; we can do it again regarding the one inboard of us."
They should have put that in the movie, that would have really shaken
people up.

If for nothing else, 2001 is a valuable addition to the visual SF
patheon for that very reason. The rest is all gravy, albeit very nice
gravy.

Boring.

"Silent Running" had a better story, better visual effects, and came in
at around 1/10th the cost.

"Forbidden Planet" beat either of those movies for outright imagination,
and a intriguing storyline.

"2001's" ending was very cryptic in its meaning (at best).

"Forbidden Planet" was a examination of Lord Acton's concept of "power
corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely" driven forward as not
only as a challenge to Prof. Morbius...but to all humanity, by realizing
what had happened to the Krell's civilization.

That's a pretty deep concept when you come right down to it.
Is the end of technology to be gods of gold with feet of clay?
"Silent Running" had the profound concept of "don't give a tree-hugging
loon access to nuclear detonators, or all hell is going to break loose".
Rush Limbaugh has been warning us about this for over a decade.

Both concepts sure beat the hell out of split-screen filming technology
with reversed colors over Alaskan ice fields, a old fart dropping his
wine glass, and a fetus hanging around in HEO.

Good News - there are other forms of life than us in the universe, far
more advanced than we are, that wish to bring us their knowledge.
Bad news - that knowledge consists of the concept: "Acid is groovy man!

Dig this endsville star-trip we are laying on your heads. Fetus _FLYING
AROUND_ your planet! Can you dig it, man? Can you REALLY dig it? It's a
pure Zen super-mellow brain-change."
Babylon 5 addressed the problem far better in regards to the Vorlons and
humanity.

The Vorlons are trying to tell us something, and their way of thinking
and communicating and our way of thinking and communicating are so
completely different that both sides are very confused about what one
is trying to tell the other.

To us, their statements seem cryptic and evasive; to them, our
statements probably sound about as comprehensible as gibbering baboons.
Imagine if we could actually crack the complete dolphin language, and
ended up with a whole pile of info on water depths, size of squid
schools, and how thermal layers in the water affect your nose
sonar...with philosophical insights based on those inputs?
It might be very profound to the dolphins and their world view, but we'd
be very hard-pressed to interact with them in any form that wouldn't
completely confuse them as to what we were trying to talk about.
Christ, it would be like William F. Buckley sitting down to have a
insightful heart-to-heart conversation with ex-president George W. Bush.
(I leave the extraordinary possibilities of that surreal event to the
reader's imagination; Buckley wisely died at the right time, which is
more than can say about Dubya... that time, in his case, being during
his infancy. Where's SIDS when you really need it? The little tike
might have rolled over in his crib, gurgled out something about wanting
a cup of "aw-aw", emitted a snide snicker, and turned blue.)

Now, let's run into a alien race. Sure, we could agree that 2+2 = 4, and
maybe that pi is pretty difficult thing to put a end on...but beyond
anything concrete like that, we are going to be a real morass regarding
anything subjective in regards to our world views because we are
different species with brains wired to work in different ways.
It might be like this:
"You have the ability to destroy stars, aren't you concerned that
some of those stars might evolve species that could be friends to you at
some future point from the planets around them?"
And we are expecting a answer like this:
"We are very conservative... we consider any species that might evolve
in the universe to be a potential future threat to us and destroy those
stars as a means to protect ourselves against that possible future threat."
But instead we get back: "Total energy to destroy a selected star is
lower than the energy our Bussard ramscoops derive from traversing the
hydrogen bubble created by the star's destruction. Are you saying that
you intend to pose a threat to us at some future point? The energy
required to destroy your star, "Sol", is more than the hydrogen bubble
created by its destruction would generate. We do not understand why you
would suggest you are a threat to us that would lead us to destroy your
star, as the math is not in our favor. You are a very confusing species,
and we don't understand what you are trying to tell us."

One of the top-ten most over-rated films ever done in American cinema -
by Stanley Kubrick in particular; all of his other movies were
masterpieces that are worth watching time and time again ....or at least
worth watching once (I imagine I've seen "Dr. Strangleove" around 50
times, and immediately go to it or "Jaws" by the flip of a coin every
time I see it running on TV because those are two of _The Great
Movies_ ever done by great American director's in the past century.
Any of Kubrick's other films makes "2001" looking pretty mediocre by
comparison, when viewed with the space-fan blinders off.

I would somewhat disagree with that conclusion, but I do come to 2001
with the SF fan " sensawonda " view. I'm quite pleased to own the 2
DVD copy.

I want to see the monkeys getting violent, then wake me up when HAL goes
crazy. I'll happily sleep through all the rest.

David Lesher wrote:
ACC and Kubrick could not have asked for a better legacy.

Kubrick's best-remembered film won't be that; Kubrick's perfect legacy
will be "Dr. Strangelove"... one of the most brilliantly funny movies
ever made.

It's been said that the major problem with filming it was that the
entire cast and crew (Kubrick included) found it almost impossible not
to start laughing out loud when Peter Sellers was doing one of his
multiple roles, and a lot of film stock was wasted due to laughter
showing up on the soundtrack. Kubrick was reported to have laughed so
hard at some points while filming Sellers that he was actually crying
and almost falling out of his director's chair.

Many people who saw 2001 left the theater confused or bored, and didn't
feel they had gotten their money's worth...that was certainly not the
case with Dr. Strangelove... the audience knew they had gotten every
penny of ticket price paid back in full, and then some.

One thing that did come up in interviews with audiences that saw 2001
was that they thought Heywood Floyd had gone to some place called
"Clavius" rather than the Moon, as it's not specifically mentioned that
Clavius crater is the site of the US base on the Moon.

It might have helped if the had put the base on the Moon at someplace
where people had heard of, such as Copernicus crater.

This isn't exactly helped by the fact that the people on the Moon in the
movie walk and move as if they are at full Earth gravity, rather than
1/6 G, so you might think they are on the surface of some other planet
that has near Earth strength gravity.

ACC and Kubrick could not have asked for a better legacy.

Saw the whole thing twice in 70 mm  film and Cinerama
As  far as movies go, it's the cinematographic form of the "The
Emperor's New Clothes".

Pat

There were, after all, limits to 1968 SPFX technology. Plus, don't
forget, as of 1968, no member of the public had yet seen humans walking
on the Moon, so there was nothing immediate to visually compare to.

The aliens in 2001, we got nothing. I wonder if that non depiction in
2001 inspired Carl Sagan, both in his Cosmos sensawunda and in
not showing the aliens in Contact - we only saw one human form
manifestation of them.

Andre Lieven wrote:
I've heard that Chloris Leachman said similar things about some of her
best work on Blazing Saddles.

I kind of hate to tell you this, but that was Madeline Kahn in Blazing
Saddles....Cloris Leachman was in Young Frankenstein, and did do a
slam-dunk job in that part, although just about everyone else was out
shown by Gene Hackman's cameo as the blind man.

How he ended up in that movie is that he and Gene Wilder used to play
tennis together, and Hackman said he wanted to play some small part in
the movie. Wilder was amazed that he wanted anything to do with
something like that.
I love how they leave the Espresso scene to the viewer's imagination...
if he can wreak that much havoc with soup, just imagine him with live
steam.

This isn't exactly helped by the fact that the people on the Moon in the
movie walk and move as if they are at full Earth gravity, rather than
1/6 G, so you might think they are on the surface of some other planet
that has near Earth strength gravity.

There were, after all, limits to 1968 SPFX technology. Plus, don't
forget,
as of 1968, no member of the public had yet seen humans walking on
the Moon, so there was nothing immediate to visually compare to.

Except other science fiction movies, and a lot of times they had people
jumping around in the low lunar gravity as a staple.
I think the Disney "Man In Space" series of programs made most people
realize that the gravity on the Moon was far lower, and you could leap
around.
Considering all the trouble Kubrick went to to simulate weightlessness,
leaving the low Gs out of the few lunar scenes was a little odd.

Andre Lieven <andrelie...@yahoo.ca> writes:
There were, after all, limits to 1968 SPFX technology. Plus, don't
forget, as of 1968, no member of the public had yet seen humans walking
on the Moon, so there was nothing immediate to visually compare to.

And they spent liberally when needed. The jogging around Discovery
scene was only possible by what they did: building the whole set
as an enormous hamster wheel and rotating at the speed he jogged.

One issue was they found that the Kleig lights tended to explode
when inverted while hot. So as a result, glass would rain down
during a take...

I've heard that Chloris Leachman said similar things about some of her
best work on Blazing Saddles.

This isn't exactly helped by the fact that the people on the Moon in the
movie walk and move as if they are at full Earth gravity, rather than
1/6 G, so you might think they are on the surface of some other planet
that has near Earth strength gravity.


There were, after all, limits to 1968 SPFX technology. Plus, don't
forget,
as of 1968, no member of the public had yet seen humans walking on
the Moon, so there was nothing immediate to visually compare to.

Andre Lieven wrote:
The aliens in 2001, we got nothing. I wonder if that non depiction in
2001 inspired Carl Sagan, both in his Cosmos sensawunda and in
not showing the aliens in Contact - we only saw one human form
manifestation of them.

They did think about putting them in the movie, but couldn't decide what
they should look like.
There's one scene during the "big trip" at the end where the space pod
is being escorted by flying tetrahedral things; I always wondered if
those were the aliens.

On Apr 5, 9:46 pm, Pat Flannery <flan...@daktel.com> wrote:
David Lesher wrote:
Kubrick's best-remembered film won't be that; Kubrick's perfect legacy
will be "Dr. Strangelove"... one of the most brilliantly funny movies
ever made.

Sure. More to the point, its a satire of a topic that most people
would
have previously bet was unsatirisable, nuclear war. I would call The
Mouse That Roared more of a farce, in the strict sense.

BTW...who paid for the station's construction?
It doesn't look cheap by any stretch of the imagination to build, and
seems to support both private and government-controlled space operations
from all around the world.
Who put forward the capital outlay for its construction?

Saw the whole thing twice in 70 mm film and Cinerama

Kubrick's best-remembered film won't be that; Kubrick's perfect legacy
will be "Dr. Strangelove"... one of the most brilliantly funny movies
ever made.

In article <GcednVMikdrigGXanZ2dnUVZ_vyinZ2d@northdakotatelephone>,
flanner@daktel.com says...
Kubrick's best-remembered film won't be that; Kubrick's perfect legacy
will be "Dr. Strangelove"... one of the most brilliantly funny movies
ever made.

Also one of the most pornographic. I've been long amazed that Lolita was
nearly sexless, but just the opening credits of Strangelove is arguably
the most explicit sexual scene of any major motion picture, ever. The
long cylindrical forms of the airframes, the flying probe and drogue.
And, at the moment of completion, that little visible spurt of the
fluids from the one on top with the probe to the one underneath who was
accepting the fluids of life...

(Yes, even more more explicit than the famous orgy sequence of Eyes Wide
Shut.)