![]() Despite the intentional ‘dehumanizing’ of its lead characters (save for the psychologically imbalanced super-computer HAL 9000) “2001” has a vivid, ‘you-are-there’ intimacy that is utterly lost on the home screen. There I was, sitting in the cool dark of the theater, alone with the images and intense sounds of breathing as the astronauts of the film seemed to be giving me a first-person tour of human spaceflight. ![]() At any rate, the movie itself was so good that I lost myself in the experience. The red-cast and grain weren’t too distracting, but even at age 16, they were certainly noticeable. If anyone reading this has ever seen an old first generation color photograph or 8mm film where skin tones and backgrounds look slightly ‘pinkish’? That’s what I’m talking about. The theatrical print I saw of “2001” 35 years ago wasn’t quite as extreme in its age & red-cast as the photograph in the Before example, but you get the idea… The film was projected from an older 35mm print that was slightly reddening (and somewhat grainy) with age. Clarke‘s novelization (based on his short story “The Sentinel”), I was desperately curious to see it. The theater was showing a revival screening of the film and, after reading Arthur C. Luckily, my very first viewing of the film was in a theater… albeit a rather small one, some 35 years ago (long before THX-Dolby color/sound optimization became the standard). Like “Star Wars”or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (both 1977), “2001: A Space Odyssey” is one of those seminal, ‘event’ science fiction epics that begs to be seen theatrically. For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to assume the reader has seen the film (or they can cheat, and check out the blue highlighted link above). Yes, it’s still just your house, but the change in perspective makes it a bit more interesting. Seeing the film in its native habitat changes its perspective as dramatically as seeing one’s house from the street versus seeing it from a plane at 20,000 feet. “2001” is one of the reasons why movie theaters exist. To those who might wonder what the big deal is about seeing “2001” in cinema, I can only assume that they’ve never seen the film on a big screen. Secondly, I know I wrote about “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and its 50th anniversary only last February, but there is a new spin to this story yesterday, for the first time in 35 years, I had another chance to see the movie theatrically. Between Halloween (a very big deal at my house) and most of an Election Day week spent nauseously nervous, things have been a bit crazy around here. First, I want to apologize to any regular readers for the lack of fresh content for the last couple weeks (feels like forever ago to me).
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