Welcome Guest ( Log In | Register )

MJ Homepage MJ Forums MJ Blogs MJ Chatroom MJ Gallery MJ Search MJ Members MJ Help


       Online Users
There are 30 online users browsing:

0 members and 30 visitors






       "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY" sucks
Posted by Ron Stoppable - April 28, 2008, 7:15 pm - 7 comments
So I was watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" and found the experience painful, and yet, it has become something of a sacred cow, with people calling it "the best film ever made" and providing little objective justification for this remark. While reading its wikipedia page I stumbled across this old review by Stanley Kauffmann, film critic for the New Republic. As I was reading his critique I couldn't keep from saying "right on! right on!" at his observations: Full Review Here.

QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Part of the trouble is sheer distention. A short story by Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel," has been amplified and padded to make it bear the weight of this three-hour film. (Including intermission.)


The movie was 148 minutes long, this is because Kubrick is so proud of the pretty pictures he creates that he holds them on the screen until they get boring. Kubrick was naturally baised towards this sort of thing, he even said in a playboy interview:

QUOTE(Stanley Kubrick)
The momentum of a movie often prevents every stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time it's seen.


QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Kubrick had to fill in this lengthy trip with some sort of action, so he devised a conflict between the two men and the giant computer on the ship. It is not exactly fresh science fiction to endow a machine with a personality and voice, but Kubrick wrings the last drop out of this conflict because something has to happen during the voyage. None of this man-versus-machine rivalry has anything to do with the main story, but it goes on so long that by the time we return to the main story, the ending feels appended.


If anybody less prestigious than Kubrick had tacked on this ridiculous side plot to pad out a weak story he would have been gleefully ridiculed. But because he had demonstrated his "genius" in other good movies people couldn't accept the fact that it blew. It was just "above their heads" or "on a different level" and the reason it doesn't please like his other films isn't because Kubrick got greedy and said "to hell with the story" to focus on special effects and visuals, but because "the story is so wrapped in the visuals" that we can't find it, give me a break.

QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Take the very opening (embarrassingly labeled "The Dawn of Man"). Great Cinerama landscapes of desert are plunked down in front of us, each shot held too long, with no sense of rhythm or relation. Then we see an elaborate, extremely slow charade enacted by two groups of ape-men, fighting over a waterhole.


I think the phrase "elaborate, extremely slow charade" pretty much sums up this entire movie. It seemed like almost all of the shots were "held to long".

QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Kubrick has created the future with fantastic realism, we think, but he is not content with that, he is going to do something with it. Not so. Very quickly we see that the gadgets are there for themselves, not for use in an artwork. We sense this as the envoy makes an utterly inane phone call back to earth just to show off the mechanism. We sense it further through the poor dialogue and acting, which make the story only a trite setting for a series of exhibits from Expo '01. There is a scene between the envoy and some Russians that would disgrace late-night TV.


Right on! Right on! Right on! The inane phone call, the shameful acting, the trite plot! These were all things that stood out like a sore thumb. I often hear people telling me things like "it wasn't about the story" or "it wasn't about the actors". Well then why does this movie HAVE A STORY AND ACTORS IN IT?!! Why not just let Kubrick fool around with visuals and effects and then release it as an "art" film or reference material? If you take the excuses people make for Kubrick's visuals and throw them in reverse (i.e. a movie with an excellent plot but terrible visuals and camera work) they'd seem positively ridiculous. If The Lord of the Rings had been shot with a shoestring budget and crappy effects and camera work the magnificent story wouldn't have been worth beans and people would be hurling insults at it left and right. But when it's the story that blows (Aliens help monkeys evolve into man, computer attacks, aliens help man evolve again) and the visuals are terrific everybody calls it "genius". I don't mind if they call it "genius" just don't call it a film, it was a test reel for special effects and camera work.

I can already guess what people are going to say: "It was the way Kubrick told the story man,!" That's great, but if you're going to market me a FILM and not an experiment or a project, but an honest-t0-goodness FILM, then I expect a complete package, good visuals and a DECENT story, because with a shit story, even fantastic visuals fail to be fantastic:

QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
[Kubrick manages] To make a film that is so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull. He is so infatuated with technology -- of film and of the future -- that it has numbed his formerly keen feeling for attention-span. The first few moments that we watch an astronaut jogging around the capsule for exercise -- really around the tubular interior, up one side, across the top, and down the other side to the floor -- it's amusing. An earlier Kubrick would have stopped while it was still amusing.


I used to think that maybe because I lived in the "ADD" generation my attention span just wasn't suited for this movie, now I know that even in the 60's, before video games and the internet and digital cameras, people found 2001 too damn slow, and too damn boring.

In my opinion, Star Wars, episode 4, deserves the rung that 2001 now occupies on the list of the greatest films of all time. I think the only reason that 2001 has it and Star Wars does not is because of snobbishness on the part of the raters.

What Kubrick had to say about the film:

QUOTE(Stanley Kubrick)
It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness


Kubrick's movie did not penetrate. I felt no emotions save annoyance, I felt no philosophical content whatsoever. Kubrick later goes on to compare his work to a symphony, and that to explain the symphony would be to demean it. Fantastic, but symphonies were composed for the purposes of entertainment, people went to them because they were entertained, attaching a deeper significance to them is a lost cause, and I feel that if this "deeper significance" was not a factor 2001 would just be known as a really lame movie with innovative special effects.

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen"
Read 188 times - last comment by Maniac   

       Recommend me some films?
Posted by dpc1192 - April 27, 2008, 8:22 pm - 0 comments
Alright, well I need some help finding some movies to rent!

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated...

Some of my favorite films are

Fight Club
Amelie
Taxi Driver
Pulp Fiction
Reservoir Dogs
Memento
The Elephant Man
City Of God
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
Requiem For a Dream
The 400 Blows
Amores Perros

I tend to enjoy more recent films more, but besides that I don't really have any other standards.
Thanks Alot!!

Read 104 times - make a comment   

       The Devil and Tom Walker
Posted by iluv2viddyfilms - April 8, 2008, 11:55 pm - 1 comments
Ah what a clever little story by Washington Irving. It is based on the story of Faust, the whole idea of selling your soul to the Devil. I have to teach it to class tommorrow. I like it quite a bit, and I dig the humor with the whole hen-pecked husband ordeal, common in his work.

Read 324 times - last comment by Jove   

       your favorite of games of 2007
Posted by albundy2 - April 8, 2008, 7:00 pm - 1 comments
What is some of your favorite games of last year.

I have an x-box 360


Mine are
1. Bioshock.- This was a great game in gameplay and the story. The graphics were great and the voice work was nicely done.

2. Halo 3-This was a fun game. It may not have the storytelling of Bioshock. The storytelling was still pretty good. The gameplay again is great. The graphics are great. I love the score to the Halo series. campane was too short.


3. Crackdown-This is game is fun.

This are the only games there in released 2007 I got. I'm still waiting for Call of Duty 4 to go down in price.




Read 292 times - last comment by Mastermind885   

       Charlton Heston passes away at age 84
Posted by iluv2viddyfilms - April 7, 2008, 9:22 pm - 7 comments
Here is the story from National Public Radio; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=89418327

Charlton Heston is an actor I liked quite a bit. He died on Saturday night actually, I guess I was hoping someone else would post the story, but that's fine.
Of course I enjoy Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and Planet of the Apes which are by far the movies he'll be most remembered for. I also love him in Touch of Evil, despite the fact that he plays a Mexican. He'll always be loved by me also as the violence prone, "manly" cowboy in The Big Country and Will Penny is another great western he was in.

Farewell Chuck and God bless.

Read 490 times - last comment by iluv2viddyfilms   

       Have any of you ever made a film?
Posted by dpc1192 - April 7, 2008, 7:06 pm - 20 comments
If so how did it turn out, and what was the topic?

I'm interested in creating a film over the summer, and entering it in the teen section of the Sarasota Film Festival for next year so I was curious to see how many film lovers have actually made a movie.

Thanks!
Read 880 times - last comment by Maniac   

       Killer Creature Films:
Posted by Destiny - April 5, 2008, 10:33 pm - 4 comments
Name some of your favorite, to least favorite killer creature flicks. I love this type of film, so suggest any that you know of.

















There aren't many that I hate. The first that comes to mind is . . .

Read 348 times - last comment by albundy2   

       The Ruins
Posted by Mastermind885 - April 5, 2008, 9:31 pm - 1 comments
So, initially I thought this looked like just another shitty teen horror film. However, I read a few reviews of it, and apparently it's a pretty solid horror film, not a cliched mess or "torture porn" like most of the horror that comes out these days. I'm planning on seeing it tomorrow afternoon, so I'll come back with a review then. Is anyone else thinking about giving this film a shot? I was surprised to find out that it has a pretty decent cast (since the trailers show next to nothing except generic jump cuts). It stars Jenna Malone, Shawn Ashmore and Johnathan Tucker, three young actors I really dig.
Read 228 times - last comment by Mastermind885   

       I do not want to touch Mariah Carey's body
Posted by iluv2viddyfilms - April 2, 2008, 8:24 pm - 4 comments
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/04/0...mariahcarey.ap/

Or listen to her ceasless screeching. I'm sure the record companies want to touch the $$$ because she's a slot machine that's been spittin' out dollars for the past two decades.
Read 481 times - last comment by albundy2   

       Who watches the Watchmen?
Posted by Mastermind885 - March 31, 2008, 8:27 pm - 0 comments


Is anyone else a fan of the graphic novel? I picked it up last summer when I heard about the movie and learned more about it. It's quite good. It's a very interesting take on superheros, and it's extremely character driven. The plot is a bit slow, but once the overall plot is revealed, it's HUGE. I dug the hell out of the graphic novel, obviously and I recommend it.

The movie is being directed by Zak Snyder, who did 300. While you can argue that 300 was style over substance, it definitely shows that Snyder has lover for the material he works with. So far, everything I've seen of the film suggests the same is true here, which is great considering it's a very tough story to adapt. The best thing I've seen so far is Snyder's cast. He went with relative unknowns who look their parts (except in one case) rather than casting big names just so he can sell the movie. I really hope he pulls this off. It could really redefine the superhero movie as something worth paying attention to, and not just a genre to turn your brain off to.

If you're interested in learning more, the official site is here and there's a really good fan site here.

Read 208 times - make a comment   



        Register on MJ

        MJ on Myspace

        MJ Blog RSS

        Subscribe by Email

Get the MJ Blog in your inbox.
Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner



Lo-Fi Version Time is now: 9th May 2008 - 09:46 AM