Schwing!
Voilà, alors j’ai décidé d’écrire certains de mes articles en anglais.
Un parce que j’ai envie et deux parce que j’aimerais avoir plus de fans 
Ah oui, mon stupide clavier est en QWERTY, donc relou pour tapper en français.
Non, en fait tout ce que j’écris en français sont des choses dont je discute avec mes amis ici en anglais. Du coup je le partage avec vous en français of course!
En particulier j’aimerais partager mes revues de films dans la langue de Shakespeare.
Et donc voici le premier article! Avanti!
So here it is, my first movie review.
As you can see it in the title, that’s the movie I saw recently. I know, it’s a classic. I know, as a movie maniac how did I not watch this movie until last week. Well, to tell you the truth I did “try” to watch it several times. But I couldn’t get through it. I would fall asleep within minutes. Probably because of its beautiful soothing music (Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II, conducted by the great Herbert von Karajan) or maybe because of its slow pace. Believe me, in any case I truly tried to power through it but it was always stronger than me. My eyes would shut and I would sleep like a baby until morning.
There are several “great” (according to the rest of humanity) movies that I can’t finish. I should be ashamed… Among others there is Close Encounter Of The Third Kind by Steven Spielberg, Blade Runner by Ridley Scott (all 4 or 5 versions including the latest 2007 final cut) , The Shining another Stanley Kubrick flick and Ghost In The Shell a japanese animation by Mamoru Ishii. Oh I fell asleep through Titanic too but certainly for other reasons. After hearing it’s such a great movie so many times and Tom Hanks saying he saw it more than 30 times in theaters and discovers something new each time, I had to see it.
Anyway, at last, I was able to finish 2001: a space odyssey. First, I was amazed by the special effects. As a reminder, it was first released in 1968! Almost 10 years before Star Wars! Even before Lucas created ILM which is now the biggest company of SFX. In 2001: a space odyssey you can see a pen floating in space inside a spaceship. No strings, no green screens. But it seems to be gracefully dancing on Johann Stauss’ waltz. A flight attendant picks it up in mid space. She actually literally “picks it up”. Kubrick struggled for a long time to get the right effect. He finally came up with the idea of sticking the pen on a big piece of glass and moving the whole thing around. It’s so simple and yet so smart. I love it. It might cost 2 dollars to do that now. As one my favorite director Robert Rodriguez says: “too much money creates a limitation in creativity”. The less money you have the more you push yourself to be creative to come up with a great idea. Nowadays, it’s all CG effects everywhere. I don’t mind if it’s greatly done with mad skills and for a purpose such as in Michael Bay’s Transformers. But when it comes to things that can be avoided such as raw hand to hand combat action scenes, no CG is required. That’s why movies like the Bourne series are so great. CG actually strips all the thrill and danger away because you KNOW it’s not real. Another director said “to CG” is not a verb. You hear stuff like “let’s CG it” too often these days.
Back to 2001.
Well, it was intriguing, hypnotic, creepy, scary and finally strange and completely incomprehensible. It takes you through time and space. The journey takes you to the historical, the science-fictional, the technological, the philosophical, the metaphysical, the insane and back. I think it was meant to be that way. Perhaps it was Kubrick’s demonstration of his mad genious and technique as a director, or perhaps he did have a clear idea in mind and had a message to deliver us. Whatever the reason, it was an interesting experience, not movie, experience. Because that’s what it is. You can’t sum up the movie. It’s impossible. If anyone attempts to, it will end up becoming a boring, grotesque caricature. Unless you’ve seen it, you can’t talk about it. You can certainly talk about pieces of it. It’s like Picasso’s Guernica. If you look at the whole painting, you see chaos and disorder. But if you look closely, it was constructed carefully (or was Picasso really schizophrenic and saw the world as distorted as his paintings?). So I could tell you about HAL the super A.I. that controls the spaceship and how the crew tries to shut “him” down because of “his” malfunction or about the terrible human sacrifice that a member of the crew has to make in order to survive and shut down HAL (just like in War Of The Worlds by Steven Spielberg, where Tom Cruise’s character has to kill a man in order to protect his daughter’s innocence), but all of this would be a futile attempt to explain this movie. So, I won’t try to convince anyone who hasn’t seen it or try to start a debate about it. Just take the movie the way it is and watch it over and over again and see whatever your eyes let you see and your mind lets you “understand”. You have to see it for yourself. I’m interested in what people thought about it. I think now I’m ready to watch the other movies I mentioned above.
“For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.” ~ Anonymous
Oh, by the way, the name HAL incremented becomes IBM but that’s only pure coincidence. Arthur C. Clark never intended it that way. If he had known he would have changed it in a blink. It’s like an urban legend basically.
