Movie of the Day: January 1, 2001

IMDb Movie of the Day
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is an extraordinarily strange movie, unbelievably pretentious, enormous in scope, philosophically profound, glacially paced, utterly beautiful. Spanning from the "dawn of man" to "the infinite and beyond" (titled segments, these), it ponders the very nature and course of human development and intelligence. It seems that a mysterious black monolith has been spurring humankind's evolution at crucial junctures. The first takes place on the prehistoric African savannah, where it prompts the apes' discovery of tools. The film then moves (in what is perhaps the greatest jump-cut in cinematic history) to the year 2001, when the same monolith has been discovered below the surface of the moon. The third chapter follows the ship Discovery to Jupiter, where the monolith has been beaming signals. The fourth and final chapter follows an astronaut into a psychedelic birth canal, where events of surpassing weirdness occur, incapable of being adequately described. Bizarre, yes, but incredibly powerful. On this, the dawn of 2001, take a moment to remember the days when films of towering ambition and self-conscious artistry survived Hollywood's homogenizing, money-soaked embrace. (more)

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