2001 and the evolution of modern cinema

Yep, I finally got around to watching it. If you haven't seen it, here's a recap.

It was on SBS last night as part of Kubrick week, which means that A Clockwork Orange is on Friday so I hope to see that as well, my droogs. Not sure if I want to see The Shining, though.

Well, the film was everything I expected. A certain sketch of Robot Chicken described it as 'Stuff floating around in space to classical music.' That's basically what it was, and very relaxing too. HAL's voice creeps me the fuck out, and upon returning to my computer after hanging out the washing to remember what I'd set my screensaver to...it was chilling to say the least. I guess now when my laptop-HAL yells at me I can relate to him a bit more (I set all my system sounds to HAL's voice clips some months ago). Some of the scenes dragged on for way too long, however. In some cases this was a good thing: at first I was annoyed at the spacesuit breathing all the time during the scene where Frank goes to fix the AE-35, for example, but once I became used to it, I realised it really added to the atmosphere of the scene. Another example is towards the end of the film during the false colour montage. I was originally like 'what the fuck is this shit'. Then I got used to it and it was really quite relaxing.

Anyway, the ending of 2001 is what I want to talk about. I actually didn't see it. It was late at night, and I got up to the bit where Dave wakes up inside the house and sees himself. Maybe it was the time, or the eerie silence, or boredom (I swear the flashy lights went for about half an hour. YouTube confirms this. What the fuck.), but I turned off the TV and went to bed. I didn't miss much, anyway. (I missed the first five-ten minutes of the film, too, since my parents were palying Wii Fit and I was watching. I had no idea the film was on until I returned to my computer and Jeno and his best friend GIR, a fellow Kubrick fan, were yelling at me on MSN that 2001 IS ON SBS TONIGHT MAYBE YOU SHOULD WATCH IT SINCE YOU WANTED TO. So in essence, I missed BOTH Also Sprach Zarathustras, which is a shame since it's the best song in the movie.)

Anyway, I also turned it off because it creeped me out a bit. Any kids watching this movie would either have fallen asleep already or been tramatised by the 30 minutes of flashing lights, really eerie noise music accompanied by opera singers for half an hour and Dave looking horrified while his eye appears in various false colour tones. But I get creeped out by pretty much nothing. It's not what happens, but what I expect to happen. I expected gross mutilation and distorted faces. This obviously doesn't happen, but I've seen enough dastardly horror movies where it does, after a buildup of silence, weird eerie music, and lots of closeups. A similar thing happened while I was watching 1408. There's a scene where the main character is trapped in the titular hotel room and the TV cuts to a home video being filmed by the character some years ago and his 4-5 year old daughter is covering her face since she's embarrassed. Yeah, I've seen enough horror movies where she's going to show the camera her face and it's some fucked up thing and oh god the trauma. Well that doesn't happen in 1408, because this is a Stephen King movie and Stephen King doesn't do that shit. The girl takes her hands off her face and grins and laughs at the camera and the main character smiles. I was not expecting this. In fact I left after that fiasco and did not watch the rest of the movie because I was scared shitless by that thought which didn't happen.

The thing about horror movies nowadays is, they are shit. Like survival horror video games, it's less about horror and more about shock and gore. A mutilated corpse will fall out of a locker or something and you get a nice closeup of its face. Teenagers will be torn apart in front of the camera by the Monster of the Week. And the scariest thing in the movie/game will only last a few seconds and leave you going 'oh god what the fuck was that'. I have seen all the Alien and Predator movies. I actually found them really fucking boring (although Alien 3 was enjoyable. Alien Resurrection was shit and a reason why you shouldn't make new sequels to timeless classic series just to pinch a few bucks because they turn out god awful. Wink wink nudge nudge). Maybe because it didn't have someone dying horribly every five minutes.

Anyway to make a long post short, movies are getting worse.

Except for WALL-E. That gave me hope in humanity.