Beauty vs Beast: Monkeys to Monoliths
Monday, April 2, 2018 at 4:15PM Jason Adams from MNPP here on the surface of the Moon (aka lower Manhattan covered with farcical April snowflakes) and primed to toss a bone your way with this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" which is wishing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey a happy 50, which it turns today. The film premiered in Washington D.C. on April 2nd 1968 and in New York the following day, and it has probably been running on some stoner's projector every day since. The film was nominated for four Oscars and rightly won for Best Visual Effects - basically every movie that's gone to outer space ever since has been mercilessly ripping it off, just like every movie set in the future post-Blade Runner throws up a neon billboard or twenty. But for all its trippiness it's still at its heart just a "boy and his dog" movie. So what of the boy and his dog then?
PREVIOUSLY We faced down two of the greatest performances ever put on a movie screen last week with with A Streetcar Named Desire but y'all didn't have much trouble making your choice - Viven Leigh's Blanche DuBois roundhoused Marlon Brando's Stanley with 59% of strangers' kindnesses. Said adri:
"I always think of Tennessee Williams as expressing his soul through Blanche. So yes, my dearest Tennessee, I am with you on Blanche, no matter how messy, and a failure and a figure of ridicule she may be."
Reader Comments (6)
HAL is the most human character in the movie- he was obviously in love with Dave
I voted for HAL as well. If for no other reason than being at the center of one of the biggest WTF mind-blowing moments in film history. The reveal of the lip reading is a stunner.
HAL simply has more personality than Dave, so gotta go with him.
Love HAL’s slow, melancholy shutdown. ‘I’m...afraid...’ gives me chills.
Yes, HAL is an amazingly creepy villain, moving in his death, and utterly terrifying, but I love the chiding of Dave when he's trying to shut HAL down. Is it fair to call a line reading that affectless bitchy? Fuckin' lovely.
I am voting for Dave because I am a homosexual male.