2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

November sees in the release of the highly anticipated film The Master. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who has brought us such films as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, The Master is set to be one of the films of the year. What’s so special about it? Probably the most exciting thing is that it has been shot on 70mm film and will be shown in this format, which means that the resolution will be higher, clearer and much crisper. To put it simply, it has been shot on a much larger piece of film within the camera than most other films, so its double the size and double the quality. For those of you who thought IMAX was the best picture quality you were going to see, think again!

This swiftly brings me on to today’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was famously, shot on 70mm, just like The Master, but way back in 1968. This didn’t stop it being a spectacular looking film which earned the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, an Oscar for visual effects. What perhaps is most remarkable about 2001, is that audiences marvelled at what it was creating as a future world, showing huge space ships spinning through space, high tech gadgets, special anti-gravity shoes and futuristic furniture that no one had really seen before, as science fiction films were not particularly well established at the time. The visual effects were so breath takingly realistic and Stanley Kubrick created them without even using a computer. He used models and manipulation of the film cells to create his effects, an art which has long since bitten the dust. Before Man had even landed on the moon, Kubrick had made a convincing and technologically accurate film about space travel.

2001 starts off on Earth in prehistoric times where we watch a family of Apes or ‘hominids’ as they would rather be known, with the help of a tall, black oblong, learn how to use rocks and sticks as weapons to kill other animals for food, kick starting our rapid evolution into Man. We then hop forward a few thousand years to Dr Heywood Floyd who is travelling through space in a large, rotating vessel travelling to the moon. We learn that something has been discovered on the moon which is remarkably similar to the object that appeared before the hominids. A great amount of mystery surrounds this object – the monolith - which is assumed to be extra-terrestrial intelligence which is millions of years old and Dr Floyd and his team are sent to the moon to examine it, only to be deafened by a high pitched noise omitting from it. 18 months later Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, two young astronauts, are travelling on board the ‘Discovery’ – a spaceship bound for Jupiter sending them on a so called ‘training mission’. Little do they know, they are following up the discovery on the moon 18 months previous.  Their space ship is controlled by super computer HAL-9000 who has been programmed to behave and speak like a human, and to act as a friend to Bowman and Poole.  HAL suddenly starts behaving strangely and reporting that communication devices are broken when they are not. Things rapidly go from bad to worse when HAL completely turns on Bowman and Poole and tries to kill them. Bowman escapes in a small pod and travels through a psychedelic tunnel of lights and flies over strange foreign lands in a spiralling, trippy sequence that is quite un-nerving to watch. Eventually he is spat out of this vortex of light and he finds himself orbiting Jupiter, along with our old friend the Monolith. It’s about to get very strange now as Bowman lands in a baroque, French style bedroom. There are no windows, no doors and the floor is made out of light. Bowman goes through a series of stages in the room, when he lands he has aged slightly and when he is outside of his pod he has aged even more.

He hears a noise and investigates where he sees himself as an old man, eating dinner. He turns into his aged self and then sees himself on the verge of death lying in his bed. He then becomes this man and the monolith appears before him. He is transported through the monolith as a foetal baby where he is reborn as a master of the universe. I know this may sound like I am making it up, but I promise you this is what happens.

Kubrick and Clarke had a vision to create the ultimate science fiction movie and this one has it all. Its meaning is hard to decipher, especially of the end, but Kubrick didn’t want everyone to been spoon-fed meanings and philosophies. He left the whole thing completely open to interpretation and when asked about the meaning of 2001 he would skirt around the question without really giving an answer. It was a well known fact that Kubrick and Clarke had serious reservations about the possibility of man creating artificial intelligence, like HAL, and that we would never be able to fully understand what we create. So what do they do? They turn HAL completely evil for seemingly no reason at all, thus making their point.  

2001 is essentially a depiction of the evolution of Man from our most primitive form to our most intelligent, predicting what Man could be capable of doing in the year 2001. Throw in a murderous computer, a few reprises of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra and a horse painted like a zebra and you’ve got yourself something really quite special.

Paving the way for great science fiction movies of the future like Bladerunner, The Alien Trilogy and even Prometheus, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a ground-breaking piece of cinema that is replicated time and time again in modern culture. If I had a penny for every time I saw an inter-textual reference of 2001 in The Simpsons, I’d have enough to buy myself a Freddo bar.  Unfortunately, it’s not for everyone. It was poorly received when it was released and gained its fame from a cult following of 60’s youths who found it ‘trippy’ and has been splitting audiences for the past 44 years. I highly recommend it to science fiction fans, Kubrick fans and those of you who enjoy something a little bit different.

The nights are drawing in and the weekends are predominantly rainy, so why not give it a try? Snuggle up in the warm and prepare yourself for the ultimate Stanley Kubrick experience…

Breaking the Chain

Following on from my last post, here is a rather good movie poster, courtesy of Minimal Movie Posters, who have quite a vast back catalogue of simple and clever movie posters.

 

 

The Shining (1980)

If any of my wonderful, devoted readers know me in person you will no doubt be aware of my fondness for the work of Stanley Kubrick.  Having written my undergraduate dissertation on 2001: A Space Odyssey I opened up the monolithic door to the mysterious world of Kubrick, leading me to plunge myself into the depths of the Stanley Kubrick Archives in London and the secretive scribbling’s of Mr Kubrick himself. It’s definitely worth booking yourself in to visit, but I highly recommend knowing what you are looking for as it would appear Kubrick never EVER threw anything away…

Anyway, seeing as its Halloween, I thought what better opportunity to discuss a Kubrick classic – The Shining. Appropriately, I went to see the newly released extra-long version, which had an added twenty-four minutes that have never been seen by a UK audience. Even more exciting is the documentary Room 237 which hit our art-house cinema’s this week, an apparently exposing feature uncovering never before discussed secrets of The Shining. Exciting no? Undoubtedly, it’s a great horror movie and despite pissing Stephen King off, Kubrick has most definitely pleased audiences worldwide for the last 30 years with this sinister little tale.

Starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall as Jack and Wendy Torrance, the film is about a family of three who are hired to be the winter care-takers of The Overlook Hotel, a secluded retreat that is closed off in the winter due to the dangerous conditions on the road leading up to it. What better setting for a horror movie; a secluded, massive old mansion house where someone once went nuts and murdered their family. Quite. Jack, Wendy and their 5 year old son Danny, who has an imaginary friend called Tony who ‘lives in his mouth’ drive to the house to begin their seven month stint in the hotel. Not long after the Torrance family arrive do strange and spooky things start happening in the hotel, especially to Jack as the house starts taking a sinister turn on him. He starts to see apparitions of people who used to live and work in the hotel, including the previous caretaker, Delbert Grady, who murdered his family. Danny also experiences some strange things and becomes aware of his telepathy, dubbed ‘Shining’ by head-chef Dick Hallorann who shares Danny’s gift. An unfortunate event in the hallway leads Danny to see the twins of the previous caretaker who appear to him both in full form, and as a bloody heap, all they want to do is play, what’s so horrible about that? Watch and see my friends. An even more unfortunate event takes Danny to Room 237, to which we do not bear witness to but he manages to land himself some fairly sinister bruises around his neck. Jack’s mind begins to warp and seeing Danny’s bruises, he too ventures to Room 237 and becomes exposed to the horrors within. I shall say no more. He denies to Wendy that there’s anything in Room 237 and he becomes increasingly nuts, remember: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.  Eventually he completely turns on his wife and son and tries to kill them, after a few bumps on the head, a few hours in the larder and an axe through a door, we come to the films iconic finale in the hedge maze.

Even though the extra scenes I watched last night didn’t add anything new to the story, I still felt quite privileged to be watching them and you can’t help but wonder why he cut them out. There weren’t many scenes, but enough to make the film feel fresh. The anticipation of being shown something I’d never seen before in something I’d seen hundreds of times almost completely distracted my from the heavy nose breather sitting next to me. Cinema’s eh? Some scenes certainly did open a few doors to the sub-plots that were more prominent in King’s novel, especially Jack’s alcohol dependency and the abusive nature of his personality before he quit drinking. My favourite cut scene however was definitely when Wendy is weepily staggering around the hotel with a kitchen knife looking for Danny. She stumbles across a room filled with skeletons, some at a table, some sitting on sofas and one of them was even strangely standing up. It didn’t add much, story-wise, but its gave it this ghostly element that it didn’t have before. All the ghosts we have seen up to this point have looked like real people, as if stuck in the time when they died. This scene was spooky and made the sense of death in the hotel smell sweeter. However, it did feel quite out of place for this very reason, and perhaps Kubrick wanted to keep the ‘ghosts’ as apparitions of real people so as not to disjoint Jack too much from his past life.

The Shining took almost a year to film and Kubrick certainly put his actors through their paces, Jack Nicholson was physically exhausted and Shelley Duvall emotionally drained. Kubrick and Nicholson would often fall out, but it was Duvall that Kubrick made life hell for. He would push her to her limits physically and psychologically to the point where she would often break down in tears on set. Kubrick is seen in the ‘Making Of’ documentary telling the production crew not to give her any sympathy,  Duvall says that he treated her this way to help her become her character of Wendy, an unappreciated and bullied housewife, even though it was a horrible experience, she has no regrets for doing it. Be that as it may, it was hard work for everyone and Kubrick’s relentless need for perfection resulted in 148 takes of the scene where Hallorann is explaining to Danny what ‘shining’ is. A world record. He wouldn’t stop at anything, even Stephen Spielberg breathing down his neck didn’t stop him and Spielberg was forced to put off filming Raiders of the Lost Ark until Kubrick was finished.

But was it all worth it? Stephen King would probably say no, as he has a serious distaste Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel, he didn’t like the casting, the script, the sets or Stanley Kubrick himself. This lead the film to be officially released as “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining” as it was so far removed from what King had envisioned for his adaptation, even the ending and body count was different to the novel…I think I prefer Kubrick’s ending though, sorry Stephen.

Nevertheless, it’s a blood curdling tale and houses some of the most iconic moments in horror cinema including its most famous and mimicked line ‘Heeere’s Jonny!’ A questionable source for this would be Jonny Cash, as he famously axed the door between his hotel room and that of his band mates, however there are many ideas for where Nicholson sprung this from. Lets not forget the brilliant exchange between Jack and Wendy on the stairs as she feebily swings a baseball bat at him as he tells her ‘I’m not gonna hurt ya, I’m just gonna bash your brains in. I’m gonna bash them right the fuck in’, I can’t help but laugh at the genius of Nicholson in this film, he encapsulates Dad gone mad brilliantly and even though terrifying in places, his facial expressions are undeniably humourous.

Impeccable writing, unrelenting direction and perfect acting, The Shining is Kubrick’s horror masterpiece, and a thoroughly entertaining watch. It has earned itself some of horrors most memorable moments and it will be cherished for ever.

And ever.

And ever…