I just made a very stupid decision. I watched, back to back, with no interuptions, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I now feel as though my mind has melted. Both these films have insanely trippy visuals and completely incomprehensible stories that will leave you feeling as though you were run over by a car moments after ingesting hard narcotics of some kind. I actually quite enjoyed The Fountain; Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz were both excellent. But now I'm going to say something that if ever read by anyone other than myself will completely destroy my movie nerd credibility.
I hate 2001. I first saw it two or three years ago and couldn't stand it; 22 minutes before the first word is spoken...a full hour before the main narrative is introduced. It was my first introduction to the works of Stanley Kubrick, and I was not impressed. Since then, I have seen many of his movies, and he has since become one of my favourite film-makers, with The Shining and Full Metal Jacket both in my top 10 of all time list. So I though that after all this time, I should give the film generally considered to be his greatest work another shot.
I'm sorry, but I just can't get into it. I can appreciate the special effects, which still hold up today, and I certainly acknowledge the incredible influence it had on almost all works of science fiction since then. Some of the more famous sequences - such as the bone/satellite jump cut, the Blue Danube space waltz and 'open the pod bay doors HAL' - I can enjoy, but mainly because I've seen them parodied in The Simpsons or Futurama. But overall, the film is just soooooooo boring. Nothing really interesting story wise happens in the first hour; the Jupiter mission section picks up a little, but even so, the last 15 minutes is just confusing to the point of pretentiousness. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just not meant for these symbolic artsy films (I hate David Lynch too, although to be fair I have only seen Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive) I really want to like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I can never make it through without either falling asleep or wanting to punch my TV.
I also rented a couple of other movies: American History X, which I still like. I saw for the first time The Maltese Falcon, which I loved, and I'm about halfway through Fletch with Chevy Chase, which is pretty damn hilarious.
