2001 in 2010: a film review

Saw “2001:a space odyssey” at the TIFF Lightbox last night . The print is near pristine and this really is a “must see” item. Some thoughts;
1- Helvetica is a beautiful font and should be revived whenever possible.
2-Hal 9000 or Richard III; who is is the biggest jerk?
3-Hal 9000 or Norman Bates; who is the sickest puppy?
4-I can see (hear) why György Ligeti sued Kubrick for the way he had “Atmospheres” mixed in the soundtrack- that’s a lot of reverb there Stanley. I’m suprised that you didn’t just shove to whole piece into a phase shifter.
5-My son Reid thought that the humans were very rude to Hal,”They only say please if he doesn’t do something the first time.” No wonder he’s got issues with Frank and Dave.
6-Long range space travel might may be hazardous to your humanity.
7-The aliens in Vonnegut’s “Slaughter House Five” were way kinder to Billy Pilgrim than the ones that Dave Bowman fell in with. Sticking a guy for the rest of his life in a swank  hotel room like that with room service but no escort service…that’s very small minded. There are things about us that the aliens just don’t get.
8-Kubrick did not direct the faked Apollo moon landings…NASA got one look at his budget and schedule and realised that it would be cheaper and faster to actually do it “for real” even if it would never look as cool.
9- The physics of Bowman’s attempt to rescue Poole has me wondering if you could do that- i.e. take off at an angle to your forward momentum, retrieve something and then head back without boosting your thrust to match a very fast  interplanetary spacecraft. Damn! Those “pods” must be capable of short thrusts that would beat an Imperial TIE Fighter and even make an X-Wing sweat. Cool, I want one.
10-Why didn’t Aurora Plastics release a model kit of the monolith? There was just enough irony in the late Sixties to have made it a hit. There’s even more irony now. It could still be a hit.

Addendum: My favourite Kubrick film is actually “Lolita” (and not for the salacious stuff- it’s a great movie about guilt plus Peter Sellers  and Shelly Winters are amazing). He was still interested in humans back them. The scene in 2001, where Bowman is sketching the inside of the ship’s “habitation ring” reminded me of how Nabokov wrote that “the initial shiver of inspiration” for Lolita “was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage”.

Kubrick’s work can still “bug” people, years later, and that is a very real kind of greatness.