In ’2001′, I was blown away by the length of some of the sequences. In fact, the entire movie felt exceptionally long. It’s probably the longest 2 hours and 20 minutes I’ve ever experienced.  I suppose it’s possible that when I watched it previously it was edited “for television” but I can’t honestly remember.  I actually laughed out loud when the “INTERMISSION” card popped up with a bit of Strauss playing in the background.  Then I got up and took a break… but the thing that really surprised me was the score. I simply don’t remember that much vocal ensemble work being in the film. Again, this could go back to the edit I might have seen when I was a kid, but damn, that is some seriously smeared chorus! The last 20 minutes or so seemed like an experimental college film. I can imagine the impression it might have left with audiences when it originally screened. It’s also easy to see where Lucas, Spielberg, Scott, and Cameron got a large part of their inspiration in how to portray spaceship environments in film.

’2010′ was a more linear and more in-control film (at just over the standard two hours). Again, most of the things that surprised me were pleasant. Helen Mirren is even hotter with a Russian (Soviet) accent, and John Lithgow is totally believable as a non-wierdo/psycho character – color me surprised. The biggest disappointment of the second film was the antithesis of the first – the score. I am simply flummoxed. There are so many other things about that film that are either true to the original or thoughtfully new – and the original score for 2010 was neither. Again, I suppose it was a sign of the times to use a digital synthesizer – it was the mid-80′s after all. But the absolute lack of variety or craft in the production was disheartening. Get Don Davis to update the score, and it would probably play as well or better than any sci-fi movie of the past 25 years. As it is, the score is ten times more clunky and dated than the politics that are threaded through the dialog and story line.

After the second film was done, my friend and I ruminated on the two. They were both very enjoyable in their own right, and both had elements of timelessness while also being somewhat hopelessly dated (and not just from the titles). Seeing them back-to-back accentuated their differences from one another, and that also heightened the quaintness of seeing what filmmakers from that time thought would be believable in “looking ahead” to years that are nearly in our rear-view mirror. I consider myself a sci-fi buff, and I’m sure there are hundreds of projects whose technology completely outstrips anything I saw over the weekend – but I wonder if they’ll capture the imagination in the way that Stanley Kubrick (and ostensibly Arthur C. Clarke) did back in 1968.

There’s also a lot of options for collaboration and secure backups online – it seems they’ve really thought through the ways to leverage current technologies to make this approach really work. The creative and the geek in me are summarily impressed. I wish that I would have made this discovery *before* I started the industrial video project in my studio. This beats the HELL out of doing everything with an Excel spreadsheet.

http://www.celtx.com

I’ve got to give props to my friend Luis Sinibaldi for recommending this on his blog. Thanks, Luis!

And of course visually it’s an amazing film. Since the film was set in the year 2019, which is the not-too-distant future these days – it’s a definite challenge to create a recognizable-yet-foreign atmosphere. But you have to admire the layer-upon-layered-ness of that world. Philip K. Dick got to see 20 minutes of test footage before he passed away (he didn’t live to see the full release) and told Ridley Scott that the imagery was exactly as he imagined it. It is the kind of artistic achievement that can restore your belief in the artistic power of true film making. In today’s world of traipsing in front of a green screen, Blade Runner has a palpable 3D quality to it.

If Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t have a word wasted – for Blade Runner it’s the complete and utter lack of unused visual space in each frame. LoA was expansive – Blade Runner showed us a dark and convoluted interior of human experience in a way that was much more personal than Ridley Scott’s “Alien” from a few years before. And getting to see and hear all of that richness in high definition on a large screen is a real treat for the eyes and ears. I might just have to go out and buy the Blu-Ray box set… Blade Runner is certainly worthy of the additional viewings.

I was, in a word, gobsmacked. Aside from the fact that I was stunned at the incredible visuals, there’s so much more to this classic film than meets the eye. Even though there were some extraordinarily long sequences of dialog-free footage, the places where there was some form of discourse, there was hardly a word wasted. While not exactly Shakespearean blank verse, there was sometimes a poetic quality to it – simultaneously high-minded and yet seemingly realistic. Though I can’t imagine how they would have spoken to each other, the eloquence matched the way I hope they might have spoken to each other.

“With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me it is merely good manners. You may judge which is more reliable.”
– Prince Feisal (played by Sir Alec Guinness)

And I was somewhat surprised that it felt like a four-hour movie. In most cases films that stretch things out is seen as not such a good thing. When I’m working on a film there’s usually a concerted effort to do things that make a long segment seem shorter (I use the Schillinger phrase “compressing psychological time”). But in this case, it almost seems like they tried to make it seem longer than the actual run time – an epic that was not shying away from being, well – epic. I really, really liked the seemingly conscientious effort at patient story telling – not something we see in film that often today.

The thing that was a disappointment to me was the music mix – which seemed like it had not been updated along with the quality of the visuals. It’s a gorgeous score – excerpts of which I’ve performed live many times throughout my previous life as a concert musician. So I was a bit disheartened when the swell of music came up in parts that forced me to dive for the remote to turn the volume down. The tinniness of the music struck me as not unlike the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. Yikes. If they re-mastered the music when they restored the film, they must have used a mis-calibrated dub stage or someone with burned-out ears,  or both.

One last thing – I was amazed at how many quoted scenes I saw in this film. I suppose that I shouldn’t be so surprised, since it’s such a classic. But there were several times where I was sucked out of the scene because I was saying to myself, “Hey, I’ve seen that shot in ‘The English Patient’” and what-have-you. It’s obvious that a lot of directors have “tipped their hat” to this film over the years, I just hadn’t realized the extent of it (and it’s worthiness for the accolades) until now.

After the credits started to roll, I told Julie that this was the first time I’ve ever been humbled by a movie. I’ve walked away from classic films happy, angry, dissapointed, amazed, saddened, and sometimes fully buzzed. But this was a singlar experience. It’s hard enough for me to truly enjoy any film, but now I think Julie’s going to be giving up on trying to get me to sit through the current tide of two-hour blab-fests, especially now that I’ve been fully spoiled by “Lawrence of Arabia”.