*2001 a Space Odyssey on TCM now

[elleng]

[RockRaven]

1. That's one of those movies where

I wouldn't say it is my favorite...
I don't re-watch it all the time...
It is a little over-referenced in the same (tiresome) manner as The Godfather...
But if you haven't seen it, DO SO. Maybe not tonight, specifically, but do so.

Pick a night where you've got the free time and are in a mood to let an experience of someone else's creation wash over you without expecting anything in particular... And watch.

[lastlib]

2. Damn--the greatest movie of all time.....

(IMHO--YMMV)...and I don't get TCM.....: banghead:

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. I am going to offer the unpopular opinion

that the movie is vastly overrated.

Even though I'm old enough, I didn't watch it when it was first released, but several years later. So I wasn't quite as bedazzled by it as the original viewers.

The opening part with the men in monkey/gorilla suits (whatever they were) was totally unconvincing.

The middle part is a sad predictor of Pan Am going out of business. The nearly empty passenger craft, right?

And then the last part is simply ridiculous. "Hal, Hal?" I'm forgetting specifics, but it just did not work for me.

I will say that the original Arthur C. Clarke story "The Sentinel" is incredible. I'd read it long before the movie, and you should all read it. http://future-lives.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/TheSentinel.pdf

[AllaN01Bear]

4. also on tubi

[Jeebo]

5. Should have won Best Picture.

It is the best movie made that year, way better than the movie that won Best Picture that year, but it didn't even get nominated for that honor. It is one of the very few science fiction movies that does the no-sounds-in-outer-space thing right. One criticism I have heard is that all of that stuff that happens at the end is bewildering, confusing, incomprehensible, but I think that's the point of it. The idea is that we humans were encountering a much older, vastly more advanced intelligence, so much so that they were incomprehensible to us. How well do dogs and cats understand us? Probably much better than we would understand an alien intelligence as godlike as the ones in that film. During that montage of images at the end when David Bowman is being given the quick tour of the universe, the momentary glimpses of his face show a man whose mind is being seriously and completely blown. A great movie, one of the best science fiction films ever.

-- Ron