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  1. - Top - End - #31
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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Unfortunately, it's supposed to be a horror film.
    It's still a horror film. It's just not that supernatural of a horror film. The Shining is a movie about the horrors of isolation, domestic abuse, and alcoholism. Mostly, anyway. There's also the supernatural horror element, cause the movie strongly implies that there totally are ghosts and such. But even without the ghosts, it's still horror. Maybe even more effective horror. I tend to think that the movie would have been stronger without confirmation that this ghost stuff is real, because that'd make it even scarier. Think about it. Our world likely doesn't have ghosts, and incredibly likely doesn't have ghosts that interact with our world, so we have less to fear from a story where ghosts manipulate the protagonists/antagonists into violence. Scarier is a story, like this one, where the horror comes from incredibly practical and normal stuff that could absolutely happen in real life.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Wait a second. You're actually suggesting that the movie The Shining, named after the supernatural ability of the main character's son, which is proven in multiple scenes, is not supernatural.

    I don't think you have the right read of that movie at all.
    . . .

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
    Wait a second. You're actually suggesting that the movie The Shining, named after the supernatural ability of the main character's son, which is proven in multiple scenes, is not supernatural.

    I don't think you have the right read of that movie at all.
    It's a pretty common read, at least, again, up to that scene where a ghost helps Jack escape a locked room. Even Kubrick himself has said so. I haven't read it, but the original book apparently makes the supernatural elements way more explicit, and more significantly, the seemingly primary cause of Jack's problems. Meanwhile, Jack from the film is mostly an abusive ass at the beginning of the movie, and was probably even crazy before the hotel. Again, consider the classic "All work and no play" scene. Jack is shown writing really early into coming to the hotel, and acts cruelly towards his wife about it. Said reveal means that, even in those early scenes, Jack wasn't writing anything of import at all, and was just whiling away his time in insanity. And that was before the ghostly stuff got really serious, as I recall.

    So, yes, some of the events in the movie are definitely supernatural and aren't reasonably explainable in any other fashion. But most of The Shining isn't so definitively supernatural, and said maybe supernatural elements are mostly important as an outgrowth of Jack's already present crazy. The supernatural is largely secondary to a more realistic story of a family torn apart by isolation and abuse in a creepy hotel.
    Last edited by eggynack; 2016-08-23 at 04:29 AM.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Unfortunately, it's supposed to be a horror film.

    EDIT:
    As kind of a wild tangent, speaking of things that are supposed to be horror movies but lose the thread, can anybody out there tell me what's supposed to be scary about the movie Frankenstein? As far as I can tell it seems to be straight science-fiction with no horror elements in it.
    It's a psychological horror film. Horror doesn't mean jump scares and monsters and blood. Just because you didn't find it scary doesn't mean it isn't Horror.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by eggynack View Post
    It's a pretty common read, at least, again, up to that scene where a ghost helps Jack escape a locked room. Even Kubrick himself has said so. I haven't read it, but the original book apparently makes the supernatural elements way more explicit, and more significantly, the seemingly primary cause of Jack's problems. Meanwhile, Jack from the film is mostly an abusive ass at the beginning of the movie, and was probably even crazy before the hotel. Again, consider the classic "All work and no play" scene. Jack is shown writing really early into coming to the hotel, and acts cruelly towards his wife about it. Said reveal means that, even in those early scenes, Jack wasn't writing anything of import at all, and was just whiling away his time in insanity. And that was before the ghostly stuff got really serious, as I recall.

    So, yes, some of the events in the movie are definitely supernatural and aren't reasonably explainable in any other fashion. But most of The Shining isn't so definitively supernatural, and said maybe supernatural elements are mostly important as an outgrowth of Jack's already present crazy. The supernatural is largely secondary to a more realistic story of a family torn apart by isolation and abuse in a creepy hotel.
    Wow. No, Even if Stanley Kubrick wants to pretend he reads the source material with that stance, it doesn't hold up. The entire movie is supernatural. You can't deny the ability to shine, because both **** Halloran and Danny have the ability and show that the ability works. There is more than one instance of Shining in the movie, and with the actual payoffs in place, the story unfolds that Danny shines, the Overlook shines and calls him to use his power. This is nothing to say that the movie and TV series actually gives Jack Torrance an actual arc as he descends into madness and attempts to redeem himself with a payoff about the boiler room job. That's the problem with your read, it actively dismisses the evidence within the script (which is more than what you cited) and drops all need for payoffs. You have the setup of the job. You have the setup of the Shining ability within Danny. You have the setup within the boy's split personality. You have the setup with Jack and **** being at the start of separate arcs. In your read, you just want do see a crazy person stay crazy and dismiss all of the supernatural elements of the film even when there's proof that it doesn't hold up to its own logic.

    That's because I'm pretty sure that Kubrick didn't actually read the book. As far as I understand what actually happened, Jan Harlan was the one who read it and gave him a synopsis. Kubrick himself never read it and never read King's adaptation. Instead, he was just looking for a vessel for what he would write anyway. And he made it disjointed and incomprehensible on purpose. Does that make it good? No. I would say if you try to make a story to confuse people, you aren't doing your job as a creator. I mean look at this:

    At the end we see a photograph of a ballroom in 1923, and there is [Jack Torrance] because he’s always been the caretaker. You explain to me why! There is no explanation. A famous Kubrick sentence is, “Never try to explain something that you don’t understand yourself.”

    Does that sound like the sane logic of someone making art? Because to me it sounds like a troll getting a laugh at being applauded for making high art when his only objective was to confuse. You can swallow his defense and clap when you have no idea what's going on and feel good about it, but as for me I'm going to make the bewildered face when I'm bewildered and ask for someone to show me something made with the intention of sane and logical entertainment. If I wanted to try to wrap my head around a script that served no internal purpose, I'd much rather check out David Lynch.

    EDIT: His name is Richard. I'm not swearing. Holy heck, text parser.
    Last edited by DeadpanSal; 2016-08-23 at 05:13 AM.
    . . .

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lethologica View Post
    Insofar as the ending is unclear, I think it's the part I bolded. The absence of any representation of the godlike entities who sent the stargate makes the events of the reconstructed room unmotivated and apparently random. But representing those godlike entities would have been a significant technical challenge for Kubrick, and would likely have aged poorly, so it's not surprising that he decided to forgo any explicit representation.
    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Now that I think of it, I think a well-executed version of the 2001 ending would very much resemble the ending 9f Contact
    One point I will give 2001 to its credit-- not seeing the aliens in any way other than through their monoliths is one of the best representations of creepy aliens I've ever "seen" in cinema. Every time one of those black blocks shows on screen, they play that eerie sound and I get the shivers. They're watching humanity through those things, and we cannot watch them back because we cannot comprehend them. Contact wasn't bad though. It's a more warm, friendly kind of alien that we see as it takes the shape of something we can understand. Because they want to be friends and are just waiting for humanity to mature.

    Aliens in 2001? Yeah, we're just a science experiment.
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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by DigoDragon View Post
    Aliens in 2001? Yeah, we're just a science experiment.
    Don't worry they went through the ethics board.

    Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
    Wow. No, Even if Stanley Kubrick wants to pretend he reads the source material with that stance, it doesn't hold up. The entire movie is supernatural. You can't deny the ability to shine, because both...
    The Shining did have payoff, just not "victory over the baddies" type of payoff that you seem to be waiting for. It pays off by feeding the audience dread and anticipation through the psychic eyes of the child. It pays off by accelerating events into motion. It pays off by twist-killing a character Game-Of-Thrones style.

    Without the ability, there wouldn't be much ghosts in the movie at all, since then nobody would see them.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    In Kubrick's defense, Doctor Strangelove was pretty good.
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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
    Wow. No, Even if Stanley Kubrick wants to pretend he reads the source material with that stance, it doesn't hold up.
    Irrelevant. What matters is that this is the view of the book, the possibly flawed view of the book, that informed his film making. He thought the movie wasn't that

    The entire movie is supernatural. You can't deny the ability to shine, because both **** Halloran and Danny have the ability and show that the ability works.
    The shining does indeed become rather undeniable by certain points in the movie. The ghosts, however, are less definitely present. And even the shining isn't all that relevant. Again, it's not strictly that the movie isn't somewhat supernatural. It's that the movie tends to be way more about all these other things
    This is nothing to say that the movie and TV series actually gives Jack Torrance an actual arc as he descends into madness and attempts to redeem himself with a payoff about the boiler room job. That's the problem with your read, it actively dismisses the evidence within the script (which is more than what you cited) and drops all need for payoffs. You have the setup of the job. You have the setup of the Shining ability within Danny. You have the setup within the boy's split personality. You have the setup with Jack and **** being at the start of separate arcs. In your read, you just want do see a crazy person stay crazy and dismiss all of the supernatural elements of the film even when there's proof that it doesn't hold up to its own logic.
    The movie does have an arc and payoff. The arc is Jack growing more insane from his base level of insanity, and his wife and son gaining/having the courage to escape and defeat him, in spite of their terror. Consider, whether it's consistently unambiguously there or not, what does the presence of the supernatural do to actually disrupt my claims? I would contend that it doesn't do much of anything. The ghosts could all be actually there all the time, and the story would still be mostly about that perfectly ordinary stuff I said, just cause that's the primary focus of the movie. I mean, you're talking about how these supernatural elements don't have that much focus, and doesn't that say something to you? That maybe the movie isn't about those things?

    That's because I'm pretty sure that Kubrick didn't actually read the book. As far as I understand what actually happened, Jan Harlan was the one who read it and gave him a synopsis. Kubrick himself never read it and never read King's adaptation. Instead, he was just looking for a vessel for what he would write anyway. And he made it disjointed and incomprehensible on purpose. Does that make it good? No. I would say if you try to make a story to confuse people, you aren't doing your job as a creator. I mean look at this:
    I wouldn't be surprised by Kubrick not having read it. My understanding of the differences between works supports that claim well enough. However, your continued contention that the movie is incomprehensible seems crazy to me. It's really a pretty linear movie, outside of a couple of weird and ambiguous things that take up barely any space and that mostly serve to support the growing insanity in the hotel.
    At the end we see a photograph of a ballroom in 1923, and there is [Jack Torrance] because he’s always been the caretaker. You explain to me why! There is no explanation. A famous Kubrick sentence is, “Never try to explain something that you don’t understand yourself.”
    It is indeed a weird scene. Somewhat ambiguous in nature. But having ambiguities does not preclude something being art. Cause, one of the cool things about ambiguities is that there actually always a lack of explanation. Instead, sometimes you get a whole bunch of explanations, and the open nature of the thing gives you more potential meaning. So, that scene, for example. Explanations, you demand? Maybe it's meant to imply that the ghost's of Jack's past have fully consumed him. Maybe it's a message about cycles of abuse being passed down along generations. Maybe it's an even more general claim about Jack being something of an archetype rather than something separate from an archetype, something that has always existed and always will. A presence more than a man. Maybe it's literal. After all, that would match up with stuff said earlier in the film. Maybe it's almost literal, and Jack is a reincarnation and some such. And, because the movie was ambiguous, it gets to have all those meanings simultaneously. Such is the power of ambiguity. The risk, of course, is that an individual viewer may find none of those meanings, but Kubrick just tends to demand a lot of thought and attention, and another cool thing about ambiguity like that is that it rewards rewatches, to angle you towards a particular meaning, and rewards serious thinkery.

    Does that sound like the sane logic of someone making art? Because to me it sounds like a troll getting a laugh at being applauded for making high art when his only objective was to confuse. You can swallow his defense and clap when you have no idea what's going on and feel good about it, but as for me I'm going to make the bewildered face when I'm bewildered and ask for someone to show me something made with the intention of sane and logical entertainment. If I wanted to try to wrap my head around a script that served no internal purpose, I'd much rather check out David Lynch.
    Even assuming it is meaningless, even if it were a laugh at our expense, does that really magically eliminate all the other great stuff in this movie? It's not like the entire film is ambiguous. It's mostly straightforward, aside from the open question of whether any particular thing is supernatural or not. You keep coming back to this one scene, but that scene takes up a pretty small amount of time. A whole movie isn't made incomprehensible by a weird and open ending, especially one that doesn't have much impact on the core plot.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
    The entire answer isn't as simple as a dichotomy in the demographics. Part of the answer is that Bay is loud and hamfisted, yes. But we also are more likely to reject Bay out of hand just because we would never submit Transformers as high art. Things for kids can be (and more times than not are) incredibly beautiful and well crafted. But we do have a stigma in film criticism that says that there is art and then there is trash. Stuff for kids are mostly thrown in the trash without a thought. Look how well Kubo and the Two Strings is performing. Look how often someone will vote whatever's Disney for Animated Film of the Year. Yes, Michael Bay is seen as trash and Transformers and Pearl Harbor belong in the trash, but a part of why we'd kick him back into the trash before looking at his next movie is because he's associated himself with kids media. Nobody in the film industry watched Avatar and said "Man, I thought that'd be about airbenders and I was disappointed." They called it genius. Nobody watched The Last Airbender and said "The kids cartoon was better." No, they said, "This is why cartoons don't get adapted into movies." It goes further than the unfair dichotomy and stale biases, but I'm just going to suggest that somewhere when Michael Bay moved from Armageddon to TMNT, a film critic poured himself a brandy and said, "Rhododendron."
    Bay wasn't "pretty much the same" as Kubrick when they were both making films for adult audiences, and he isn't "pretty much the same" aside from his target audience now. Your decision to seize on the stigma of films for younger audiences as a primary or even relevant consideration doesn't reflect a serious consideration of their actual similarities and differences.
    Last edited by Lethologica; 2016-08-23 at 01:07 PM.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
    Does that sound like the sane logic of someone making art?
    Since when are artists known for their sanity and logic?
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    I'm going to be honest, "the Welsh became a Great Power and conquered Germany" is almost exactly the opposite of the explanation I was expecting

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Am I the only one here who actually liked 2001?
    I've seen it three times or so. Yes, it's slow-paced, and no, I don't always feel in the mood to see it (mostly I don't) but it's a beautiful piece of film and the pacing works great for the story.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Kitten Champion View Post
    It's a fantastically shot - meticulously composed with fanatical precision in its every aspect - epic that attempts to convey grandeur, terror, and possibility of the cosmos with dense imagery and a wonderful score. A vision realized beyond anything before it and much of what followed.
    Quote Originally Posted by Darth Ultron View Post
    2001, like most of Arthur C. Clarke's work, was more intellectual and less escapist. In order to properly appreciate it, you have to adjust your expectations accordingly. In other Sci-Fi movies the plot is spelled out for the lowest common denominator audience. The 2001 movie was largely non-verbal and slow-paced, which is a complaint of modern viewers who want a literal explanation of the plot and demand constant action to drive the story. Kubrick deliberately deleted narration in the final film’s cuts which gives the movie an extra-terrestrial observed quality. The movie relies more on its visual clues, classical music score, imagination, and mystery. Realistically, manned interplanetary space travel would involve long periods of waiting and anticipation, interrupted by brief flurries of intense activity.

    This is an awesome movie, and was an SF groundbreaker. This is mainly due to Kubrick's visual style. He did multiple things that no one had done before. For example, no sound in space. Most SF films previously had ignored the fact that sound doesn't propagate in a vacuum. Kubrick did things like playing the Blue Danube Waltz, and having you listen to the astronauts' breathing inside their helmets. His depiction of zero gravity was a first. Remember, this is pre-CGI, and making a guy walk through a doorway and turn upside down while he was doing it was non-trivial at the time. He added neat little touches like Pan Am (a major airline at the time) running the shuttle going up to the space station.

    The trick to enjoying and appreciating the movie 2001 is to read the book first, then watch the movie. If you do, it is one of the great SF movies of all time. And the last few pages of the book are awesome in a way that the movie can't be.
    I sort of want to agree with these. All I know is that when I watched it, once it was all over I thought "Man, that was awesome, and unlike anything else I've seen; at the same time."
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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by BWR View Post
    Am I the only one here who actually liked 2001?
    I've seen it about 6-7 times. I kind of like it as background sound when I'm doing art, since it's mostly just that-- sound. :3
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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    I think there are supernatural elements to the Shining, but that they aren't the horrifying element. Yes, Danny's Shining ability lets him see all manner of screwed up scenes, giving him the clear feeling that something's not right. Yes, the ghosts play the father like a piano, using his alcoholic tendencies, familial frustrations, and professional letdowns to wind him up like a toy soldier and send him off on everyone in a mile radius. There is a lot of supernatural elements at play.

    But the horror isn't supernatural. The Shining isn't meant to terrify, it's meant to unsettle. The horrifying thing is watching a clearly flawed but worryingly realistic father figure get twisted more and more until he hunts his own family down with a butcher knife and a fire ax, laughing and referencing late night television memes as he does it. And since you've spent the movie unsettled, it makes watching this truly mundane horror of a broken paternal figure turned implacable killer that much more brutal.

    Does it work? Probably not so much, anymore. People look at the Shining elements and brush them off as cheap scares, setting a stage of jaded disappointment instead of mounting discomfort. But I believe it did work at the time.
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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Calemyr View Post
    Does it work? Probably not so much, anymore. People look at the Shining elements and brush them off as cheap scares, setting a stage of jaded disappointment instead of mounting discomfort. But I believe it did work at the time.
    I watched it for the first time in the last few months or so. I thought it was pretty great.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    I think Kubrick was a great director, but that doesn't mean that everything he did was a great film. IMO, 2001 isn't a great movie, or even a good one. But as I said, it's not supposed to be a standalone work the way a traditional movie is.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by LaZodiac View Post
    Meanwhile Micheal Bay has a character justify his statutory rape of a character by having a lamented copy of the Texan law that say "naw it's cool".
    ... ... ...

    WTF?! Which movie was that?!
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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Metahuman1 View Post
    ... ... ...

    WTF?! Which movie was that?!
    Transformers: Age of Extinction. This is a really odd thing as way too many of Bay's movies have a pedophilia joke or comment...that it can't just be a random coincidence. .

    and the Transforms one makes no sense at all. They could have just said ''the girl is 19'' and dad could still be all upset and it would not have effected the movie at all......you know other then wasting time with dumb human drama when people want to see robots....

    Just like them two brothers, er, whatever their names are obsessed with putting ''the origin and explanation for vampires'' in all their movies...

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lethologica View Post
    Bay wasn't "pretty much the same" as Kubrick when they were both making films for adult audiences, and he isn't "pretty much the same" aside from his target audience now. Your decision to seize on the stigma of films for younger audiences as a primary or even relevant consideration doesn't reflect a serious consideration of their actual similarities and differences.
    I'm not trying to explain everything with that. But I do think a portion of our viewpoint comes from the bias that only adult material can be art. Even if Bay were to use the same techniques as Kubrick, we'd see it as lesser. Or if we actually gave him credit, we'd say it was wasted. I mean, he's responded to critics by saying "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime." You can say it's not the aspect of the argument you want to discuss, but you would have to lie to say it's completely irrelevant to the discussion.

    Let's go with that. Every read of The Shining doesn't explain more than 70% of the events in the script, so I would say Kubrick is Incomprehensibility Incarnate. It doesn't make him good. It just means that more people are going to defend him without foundation.
    . . .

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
    I'm not trying to explain everything with that. But I do think a portion of our viewpoint comes from the bias that only adult material can be art. Even if Bay were to use the same techniques as Kubrick, we'd see it as lesser. Or if we actually gave him credit, we'd say it was wasted. I mean, he's responded to critics by saying "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime." You can say it's not the aspect of the argument you want to discuss, but you would have to lie to say it's completely irrelevant to the discussion.
    I love kids stuff. Bay just kinda sucks, for the most part. Again, My Neighbor Totoro is sitting right there, utterly beautifully, beloved by just about everyone, mostly for children. Spirited Away too. Most of Miyazaki's movies, really. And lots of other movies too. I'd also add on Pixar stuff to the aforementioned Miyazaki and golden age disney (and rennaisance disney, to a lesser extent, cause those movies trade some aesthetic beauty for some faster pacing and arguably more interesting plotting). I don't think Pixar movies are that great in terms of looks, but it's more than valid to look to it as an example of broadly embraced stuff that's ostensibly for kids. I'ma add some Dreamworks stuff too. They've really had their moments.

    I don't need to point at that stuff to disprove your claims, however. I mean, kids stuff that's liked is good, but it's not like it's definitive. What's more definitive is just comparing Michael Bay to Michael Bay. Particularly, his more kid oriented content to his more adult oriented content. I'm not all that inclined to sit around actually mathing out his movies right now, though you can definitely do that if you want. I'ma just do a loose look. So, let's start at the top and bottom, basing the numbers on Rotton Tomatoes. I'll stick only to movies he directed, cause I'm not as sure that his style would pass through to produced movies. His highest rated movie is The Rock, with a pretty low 66%, and his lowest is Transformers: Age of Extinction, with a really 18%. This ostensibly supports your contention, as the spread looks as you claimed, but the rest of the movies don't exactly support it in the same fashion. After all, the first Transformers got a relatively high 57%, and, say, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II got mid-20's. Really, Michael Bay hasn't directed that many movies that are kinda kid oriented. Most of his movies are aimed at adults. Most of his movies are ranked really lowly. Pointing to this minor element seems like missing the point. That his movies suck. While Kubrick's movies are pretty great.

    Let's go with that. Every read of The Shining doesn't explain more than 70% of the events in the script, so I would say Kubrick is Incomprehensibility Incarnate. It doesn't make him good. It just means that more people are going to defend him without foundation.
    That description I gave, the one purely about domestic abuse, covers way more than 70% of the movie. The really crazy supernatural stuff only really happens towards the end, and most of that supernatural stuff isn't incomprehensible so much as weird. Like, ghost weird. You were talking about the tub scene, but, like many of the supernatural things in the movie, it's perfectly linear. Guy encounters some weird ghostly event, weird stuff happens with said ghost, and then the scene ends. Nothing more really needs to be said. More can be said, but it's not necessary for a cogent and coherent plot. I honestly don't see what about this movie is confusing you. It came across as really simple to me.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
    I'm not trying to explain everything with that.
    The reason I'm using quotation marks is because I'm using your words: you said that Kubrick and Bay were "pretty much the same" once you factored out the stigma of Bay working on films for youth audiences. This changed as soon as you were challenged on it, though.

    At any rate, I'll stipulate that Bay's choice of audience has a non-zero weight, but the use of that fact to disregard or marginalize the very real differences between Bay's use of effects and Kubrick's in your answer to Bohandas' question is the only deceptive thing in the discussion.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    I'm not a fan of this movie either.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Bay's Transformers movies aren't aimed at kids. They're aimed at +20 year old men with 80's nostalgia boners and, of course, China. The entire way they're written and shot -- the crude adult humour, the sexualization of their female characters regardless of age, the military pandering and expensive car masturbation, Sam Witwicky as the late-teen-come-20-something-douche-bro protagonist -- these are not indicative of a franchise aimed at children.

    TMNT was, presumably, but Bay didn't direct that, it was left to a hack who apes his style under his production company.

    Maybe Transformers should have been kids movies, ya'know, like Iron Giant but with a Vietnam allegory at its heart, but they ain't.
    Last edited by Kitten Champion; 2016-08-23 at 09:32 PM.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Kitten Champion View Post
    Maybe Transformers should have been kids movies, ya'know, like Iron Giant but with a Vietnam allegory at its heart, but they ain't.
    Oh yeah, The Iron Giant. Really pretty movie, I think, and broadly loved. Also, gotta say, I found Transformers way more incomprehensible than The Shining. What was even going on half the time in that movie? It was just like one giant explosion sometimes.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    I haven't seen The Shining since I was a kid, but I thought it was pretty clear at the time that everyone involved was going crazy and the supernatural stuff was hallucinations. Like the old The Haunting (which the remake ruined by making it actually about ghosts instead of psychology).
    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Vibranium: If it was on the periodic table, its chemical symbol would be "Bs".

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by eggynack View Post
    That description I gave, the one purely about domestic abuse, covers way more than 70% of the movie. The really crazy supernatural stuff only really happens towards the end, and most of that supernatural stuff isn't incomprehensible so much as weird. Like, ghost weird. You were talking about the tub scene, but, like many of the supernatural things in the movie, it's perfectly linear. Guy encounters some weird ghostly event, weird stuff happens with said ghost, and then the scene ends. Nothing more really needs to be said. More can be said, but it's not necessary for a cogent and coherent plot. I honestly don't see what about this movie is confusing you. It came across as really simple to me.
    Come on, seriously? I have to give you a blow by blow and take apart your read of the movie to show that it definitely explains less than 70%? It doesn't hold up to your analysis because the movie is not totally shown from Jack Torrance's point of view. If it were, as was the case in Vanilla Sky or Jacob's Ladder, I would totally buy your anaylsis. Instead, we are constantly taken out of the character's eyes and shown things that exist outside of his psychotic standpoint. This being scenes that clearly define the paranormal, such as - after setting up so much of Danny's ability to shine - we hear Badword Halloran using his own ability to Shine to speak in Danny's head. And then they sit outside together and both give credibility to the idea that Shining exists. That is one clear example that supernatural forces are at play, and cannot be explained as being the work of Jack's madness. Later, Danny is haunted by several apparitions, the twins, the woman in a corpse suit. These exist only in his eyes. That means that Danny sees real ghosts on his own. He isn't told about ghosts by his father and then pretends they are there. These are separate points of view that don't intersect with your analysis. This also leads into the question of whether Danny's bruise was caused by the ghosts, or the film is properly lying to us about how it happened. Since it doesn't get addressed in any way, I leave the point with the supernatural as any writer worth an asterisk would have implied both possibilities more strongly.

    Later, when Danny is scared, he uses his abilities to contact Cursecurse Halloran and forces him to come to his rescue. This has no possible explanation that takes place in Jack's head. When Jack is locked in the room by the actions of a sane person, the door is unlocked. By your own and Kubrick's admittance, this cannot be explained by anything less than supernatural forces. In the end, everyone is able to see the ghosts, even the mother, which means that they are more than Jack's delusions. And when the movie ends on a picture of Jack Torrance in the past, there is absolutely no way to interpret it aside from reincarnation (a supernatural event), a time loop (also supernatural), or that the movie is so completely in Jack's head that nothing we have ever had on screen exists and the movie is pointless because there is no truth to any of it. Being that Kubrick can't himself explain what he did, I would go with that as the most plausible explanation. Jack Torrance wasn't crazy, Kubrick was. There you have definitively more than 30% of the movie that has no suitable explanation with the premise that Jack is crazy. I would say that the supernatural aspect of the movie is at a set 50%. The only straightforward parts of it are Shelly Duvall's character and Jack's rampage as a non-superpowered murderer. The rest of the film can only exist because it has a definite magical endoskeleton which holds up the more blatant story of a man who just wants to bash in his wife's head.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lethologica View Post
    The reason I'm using quotation marks is because I'm using your words: you said that Kubrick and Bay were "pretty much the same" once you factored out the stigma of Bay working on films for youth audiences. This changed as soon as you were challenged on it, though.

    At any rate, I'll stipulate that Bay's choice of audience has a non-zero weight, but the use of that fact to disregard or marginalize the very real differences between Bay's use of effects and Kubrick's in your answer to Bohandas' question is the only deceptive thing in the discussion.
    I'm being slanderous when I say that Kubrick and Bay are the same. I know they're different. I just think they hold equal weight as d-bag auteurs. Which of them would I say is empirically better? Well, at least Kubrick had a good tone in the first half of Full Metal Jacket. I wouldn't think Bay is capable of restraint.
    . . .

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    It falls short in so many ways. It moves at a tedious pace. All the sets and props are drab and dull to match. And most importantly of all, it doesn't make a bit of sense; the plot starts out incomplete and by the end of the film is abandoned altogether in favor of what appears to be the director's hamfisted attempt to reproduce an LSD trip on film (apparently this is supposed to represent the protagonist being transported to an alien world and having his brain uploaded, but I only know that because I read the book. There's no way that you could get this just from watching the film).

    What gives!?
    First, the book is too literal and not a good guide to the nature of the film.

    Second, if we have a sense of perspective there's no sense being disparaging about the production values. Our favourite films are going to look just as pathetic in fifty years.

    Third, the film is a mood picture with the theme of human development. It starts out with the mysterious (monolith) miracle of the development of man's mind which leads him to create the first machine (the bone club). Fast forward two million years and, after we're treated to an interlude of the most delightful combination of Romantic music and spacecraft ballet, man finds a mysterious clue to his origin on Luna (monolith). Spurred by that to travel to Jupiter, we find that man is at risk of becoming enslaved by his machines which he has by now created in the image of his own mind (HAL 9000). He must struggle and overcome his machines and achieve a new level of sentience in communion with the mystery (monolith) from the dawn of man. This overcoming and the dawning of a new age of man is symbolised by the living fetus with its eyes open.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Quote Originally Posted by Kitten Champion View Post
    Bay's Transformers movies aren't aimed at kids. They're aimed at +20 year old men with 80's nostalgia boners and, of course, China. The entire way they're written and shot -- the crude adult humour, the sexualization of their female characters regardless of age, the military pandering and expensive car masturbation, Sam Witwicky as the late-teen-come-20-something-douche-bro protagonist -- these are not indicative of a franchise aimed at children.

    TMNT was, presumably, but Bay didn't direct that, it was left to a hack who apes his style under his production company.

    Maybe Transformers should have been kids movies, ya'know, like Iron Giant but with a Vietnam allegory at its heart, but they ain't.
    Master of Aeons is probably thinking of teens. Transformers' target audience is 12-38 according to advertising--the old end is '80s nostalgia, and the young 'uns are frankly no strangers to crudeness, sexualization, drooling over cars, brotagonists, etc.

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    Default Re: Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

    Plus what edgy bit of superviolence aimed at 25-30s isn't more aggressively snatched up than by teenage boys? Just look at Deadpool's actual viewership. 12-35 is a pretty big range. Call them kids or call them teens. Either way, they're the ones that pay for Bay's next movie.

    And holy heck, I'd love to have seen Brad Bird make the Transformers movies!
    Last edited by DeadpanSal; 2016-08-23 at 10:06 PM.
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