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Who are your great directors...here's mine

Norman Jewison - In The Heat Of The Night, A Soldiers Story, Moonstruck, ...And Justice For All (Al Pacino) and The Hurricane (Denzel Washington), Jewison is a story tellers director.

Clint Eastwood - Saw an interview with Eastwood and he stated that movies don't develop characters and stories anymore. It's mostly MTV style editing in which you see stuff but you don't have time to process it. Through the 90's and into the New Millennium, Eastwood is one of the better directors out there.

Francis Ford Coppola - The Godfather, Godfather II and Apocalypse Now. Great movies. This guy lost a little bit off of his fastball but is still one of the greatest directors of his era.

Stanley Kubrick - One of the greatest directors of the 20th century. Spartacus, Lolita, 2001 A Space Oddessey, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket. What has this guy NOT done? The great thing about Kubrick is that he doesn't insult the moviegoer and water things down. After 38 years, people are finally realizing what 2001 A Space Oddessey is all about. Kubrick was well ahead of the game.

Sergio Leone - Clint Eastwoods Spaghetti Westerns. This is how Eastwood became a mega star. "A Few Dollars More, A Fistful Of Dollars, The Man With No Name and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" are classics.

Rod Serling - Not only a great director but one of the best Screenplay and Television writers of the 20th Century. Serling was mastering special effects in Holywood long before CGI and inspired people like Stanley Kubrick and Steven Speilberg. Richard Donner, the director of the Lethal Weapon franchise got his start under Serling.

Billy Wilder - Some Like It Hot and One, Two Three with James Cagney. This guy made great satirical movies.

Cecil B. DeMille - The Ten Commandments. DeMille was the king of staging epic movies and bringing them to life on screen.

Gordon Parks - Parks started out as a photographer for Life magazine during the war. His photographs are famous around the world. He was the first African-American director for a big budget film ("The Learning Tree"). After the success of the Learning Tree, he was commissioned by MGM to direct a film from Ernest Tidymans' novel of a Black detective called John Shaft. the movie Shaft pulled MGM out of bankruptcy in 1971 and was famous for it's intro using Isaac Hayes score which one an Academy Award.

Ron Howard - Richie of Happy Days is a damn good director. Think "Cocoon", "Apollo 13", "Splash", and directing Russell Crowe in a Beautiful Mind. Excellent director.

Steve Sabol - Believe it or not, I saw this clip on NFL Films in which they do more than just football clips and stuff for the NFL. Warner Brothers, MGM and the major movie houses consult NFL Films on movies, certain shots and camera angles. Steve Sabol started off as a camera man while his father Ed. produced the segments. Some of their best direction and camera work is was in the 1970's when they hired John Facenda to narrate. Some of their work was nominated for Golden Globe and Academy Awards with of course, the awesome orchestrational work of Sam Spence is world famous. Steve Sabol is a great director.

Directors in this era cannot hold a candle to these guys. The only guy that comes close is James Cameron. Hollywood will probably never see another great era of writing and direction again.

scorsese!!



and i thought 2001 space odyssey was pretty much the worst move i've ever seen.

Possibly NFL Film's best work...(link) (http://www.nwfootball.net/raiders/images/theme.wav)

Great director! I forgot about him (Raging Bull and Goodfellas).

Kubricks movie "2001 A Space Oddessy" had only 45 minutes of dialog in it. You'd have to read Arthur C. Clarkes "The Sentinel" to try to understand it. Even Clarke said it himself..."I had no idea what Stanley Kubrick was trying to do".

<--putting on flamesuit....

What about Speilberg? I mean Jaws,ET,Saving Private Ryan..Didn't he do some of the indiana Jones movies?

John Houston
Sam Peckinpaw
Otto Preminger

Spielberg was good when he was younger, but something has changed in him.  A lot of that crowd (Spielberg, Lucas) found creative solutions to problems, like not showing the shark in Jaws.  Those artistic choices also built tension.  Now, they fall back on computer graphics.

I think he's kinda lost touch and the fire in his belly.

I like David Fincher.  Not all of his movies are great, but his directing is.  Alien^3 was a crap film, but beautifully shot.  Panic Room, again -- okay movie, great cinematography.  Fight Club is amazing, as is The Game and Se7en.  Even Zodiac, while it ran a little long, had some really great scenes.  Fincher  is usually good for creative credits, as well.  (Fight Club was a trip through the brain, The Game was puzzle pieces, Panic Room was letters suspended on a landscape, Zodiac was in the serial killer writing, as was the end of Se7en, where the credits rolled backwards.)

I am not a huge fan of Kubrick or Ridley Scott.  I think they're talented, but often too long-winded in their storytelling.  Blasphemous, I know.

I'm going to throw Frank Capra into the mix. I don't believe that you can have a thread about great directors and not have the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at least mentioned.

nice attempt at starting a flame war, but no one is stupid enough to not like this film. you'd have to be borderline retarded.

2001 isn't for everyone.  It's got one of the biggest WTF endings in the history of film.  After I saw the movie, I had to go read about it to get what was going on.  That movie is very, very long, and it doesn't really wrap up.  I can't fault people for not taking to it.  I enjoyed aspects of the film, but I can totally understand why people don't.

Side note: I saw Lawrence of Arabia, and was completely disappointed.  I loved Bridge Over the River Kwai, and Lawrence was the next recommendation, but it just didn't do it for me.  It was entirely too long (upwards of 4 hours), and there was no payoff for me.

how am i trying to start a flame war?  i only commented on it because i saw it last week and it was fresh in my mind. 

way to be an intellectual snob, you pretentious asshole.  i'm not SMART enough to like the movie?  guess  being in the top 1% of intelligence just doesn't cut it these days,   :(   

that movie was really good until they shut HAL down, then it was all just WTF?  made NO sense.  it's kinda like metal gear solid 2 for the playstation:  awesome game, worst ending i've ever seen.

It was very philisophic/metaphysical movie, and just like with books of the same kind, either you get it or you do not, regardless of where your supposed I.Q. score lands.

Calm down buddy, I'm just taking the piss...

I'll explain why I loved 2001 so much, and why people who aren't film fanatics often hate it. Keep in mind, these are much the same reasons critics loved it as much as they did. (It was named by various film institutions as One of the "Top-15 films all time" (AFI), "Greatest Sci-Fi film of all time" (Online Film Critics Society) , "The world's most extraordinary film" (Boston Globe), One of the "10 Best" movies of all time (Sight & Sound magazine), and is #78 on the user-voted IMDB Top-250. (A list that is notorious for overlooking and underrating older films due to their age and the voting habits of younger voters).

For starters, and to get the parts out of the way that don't require much or any elaboration:

1) It's the most spectacular use of special effects ever put to film, considering it's age. Jurassic Park, Pearl Harbor, Titanic, and Star Wars films all obviously look more impressive, but this was 1968. This was 9 years before anyone had heard of Darth Vader and his Death Star. 1968 was a time when special effects were almost nonexistent, and certainly weren't used liberally to promote a story. Not anymore.

2) The soundtrack is perfect

3) The casting is excellent

4) The source material is fantastic to begin with

5) It requires some thought. I realize that may be a detriment for some people, but for those who seek reward for filmgoing other than a "cool ending," it is one of the more rewarding films ever made.

To get into specifics, I could ramble about this film all day, and wouldn't want to do so via a keyboard, so I'll just point out some of my favorite "highlights" (or cinema-firsts in some cases). (In as close to chronilogical order as I can remember...it's been about 6 months since I last watched it):

1) The raccord at the end of "The Dawn of Man." Cuts like this are obviously much more prevalent and easier to implement these days, but short of some of Hitchcock's and Godard's films, this is the greatest example. In fact, I'd say that to this day, the cut from scenes one and two of 2001 is still the most famous in movie history.

2) Silence. For the first half hour of the movie. No other film I've seen has come close to doing so much storytelling with so little dialogue, except perhaps for Cast Away or A Scene at the Sea.

3) The sheer quality of the makeup and costuming for "The Dawn of Man." They make the creatures from Planet of the Apes (which was released to theatres the same week in 1968) look downright silly...and that's saying alot, considering the quality of Apes' characters.

4) The two standout anti-gravity scenes. Imagine just for a moment, you are the director of a film in 2008, and you're trying to shoot zero-gravity. Now pretend it's 40 years earlier, and the term "computer generated imaging" has not been invented yet. The two scenes I'm referring to in particular are:

A) The shot of Poole jogging horizontally in the ship. How? Kubrick built a 40-foot centrifuge at a cost of $750,000 (Or 4 million dollars today). That's along the same scale as James Cameron building a full-size titanic replica to destroy for his film.

B) The shot of the waitress serving food, then walking sideways up the cylindrical wall of the hallway and into a doorway on the ceiling. How? (from http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/2001a/page3.html : "In one of the most difficult shots Gary Lockwood was strapped into his seat and had to hang upside-down pretending to eat glued-down food while Keir Dullea climbed down the ladder at an angle 180 degrees opposed to Gary. As Keir began to walk around the centrifuge toward Gary, the centrifuge was slowly rotated until Keir and Gary were together at the bottom. The camera, which was locked down to the centrifuge floor, was then at the top."

5) The attention to detail. Most specifically the instructions for using the space toilet (which would take almost a minute to read entirely, but are only on camera for a few seconds, meaning moviegoers couldn't even read them until home video was available a decade later, unless they had the actual film reel). And even more impressively, notice in the pod, there are replacement copies of the instruction sheet for the pod's explosive bolts.

6) The astounding accuracy of some of the movie's space-faring predictions. The movie contains theories on how certain aspects of space travel would be accomplished in the future (keep in mind it takes place 33 years after it was made). Many of the films solutions to space-based problems were not even solved by NASA at the time of the films release, but now, 40 years later, many of the films ideas have become reality.

(Pasted from the Wiki page for the film):
    * Flat-screen computer monitors (simulated by rear projection in the film)
    * Small, portable, flat-screen television sets
    * Glass cockpits in spacecraft
    * The proliferation of TV stations (the BBC's channels numbering at least 12)
    * Telephone numbers with more digits than in the 1960s (to permit direct national and international dialing)
    * The endurance of corporations like IBM, Aeroflot, Howard Johnson's, and Hilton Hotels
    * The use of credit cards with data stripes (the card Heywood Floyd inserts into the telephone is American Express; a close-up photo of the prop shows that it has a barcode rather than a magnetic strip, as some present-day ID cards have PDF417 barcodes)
    * Biometric identification (voice-print identification on arrival at the space station)
    * The shape of the Pan Am Orbital Clipper was echoed in the X-34, a prototype craft that underwent towed flight tests from 1999 to 2001
    * Electronic darkening of a normally transparent surface (Bowman uses a helmet control to darken his visor during an EVA)
    * A computer that can defeat a human being at chess
    * Personal in-flight entertainment displays on the backs of seats in commercial aircraft
    * Voice recognition / voice controlled computing (although not as powerful as HAL) are seen today in things as simple as telephone systems and video games.

7) The ending. YES, the ENDING. Although I don't watch movies for "the payoff" as Dave mentioned earlier (movies like this, and Lawrence of Arabia, for example, are themselves the "payoff," for their duration), this is one film where the ending was absolutely perfect. How can you expect a film that accomplished so much in the way of technical innovation and storytelling quality to tack on a cookie-cutter happy ending that even a 5-year-old would understand on first viewing? The ending is as outstanding as the film itself, and when you've read either the Clarke novel of the same title, or simply read a synopsis/explanation of the film online (There are probably more interpretations of this film than any other in movie history), you'll see what I mean. The film is infinitely gratifying once you understand:

- why the aliens placed the monoliths where they did
- why the monoliths were significant to the evolution of man
- why you see so many different ages of the doctor in the final scene
- and why you see the "star child" version of him at the end

Sorry if you didn't pick up on my nudging comment earlier, but to watch this film, not understand it, and not make another attempt at learning more about it, is to miss out on one of the greatest works of art of all time.

Take a look at either the IMDB message boards, the Wikipedia page, or one of the thousands of online blog/interpretations of the film (a great one HERE (http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/1288/2001.html)), and watch it again. If you're still disappointed, then you are, as bsmooth said, one of those who just "doesn't get it."

As that last interpretation states: "2001 paid such attention to detail that it has been said a more realistic movie could only be made if it were filmed on location in outer space."

What you're describing are all wonderful technical achievements, but they don't make a movie enjoyable on their own.

What 2001 lacked for me was the ability to tell a story on film, alone.  Meaning, that having never read the book, nor read about the movie, it's a huge WTF.  From the apes at the beginning to when the old man is aging all crazy fast at the end, to when he shows up in the planet.  What...the...fuck....seriousl y.

Not that it makes it a bad movie, but I think it requires some outside work to truly get the movie, and to me, that's not great film-making.  I don't particularly like Kubrick for this reason.  Even his movies, like the Shining, as stand-alone movies feel overly confusing, where you have to further research.  It's just not my story-telling preference.

spielberg
george lucas
john ford
eastwood
ron howard
quentin tarantino
ridley scott
scorsese

I agree about 2001, it was pretty shitty. I've read a few explanation sites and I still think it's just not that entertaining. I'm impressed by the special FX being almost 10 years before star wars and other flixs like that. But like on any message board about it, if you say you just don't like it, there's always one or two people that come back and say "you just don't get it" w/o really giving an explanation of what there is to get. Anyways that movie blows.

I'm surprised that anyone would call George Lucas a great director.  He's been involved in some great movies, but he is by no means a great director.

It's kind of a pet-peeve of mine when people say "you just don't understand it" in terms of art.  I don't really get that much from movies, but I hear it about music all the time.  If someone asked you what you thought of a painting or sculpture, and you thought it was ugly, is "you just don't understand it" a viable response?  My friends like shitty death metal, and when they ask me what I think, I tell them it's shitty.  I just don't understand it, apparently.

It's a movie's job to make you understand it.  If it doesn't do a good enough job of that, then it's the fault of the movie for not connecting to the viewer.  Of course, it drives me nuts when someone watches Fight Club and sums it up as a movie about people fighting.  It's true that from my perspective, they didn't understand it, but I wouldn't say so...maybe the movie just didn't reach them.

The Cohen brothers

I think that Kubrick wanted people to THINK in another dimension and this is probably why it didn't click with most people. We're told that we must think but think on preconceived notions and stuff that already exist instead of the unknown.

I didn't like the follow-up that was made in 84 with Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren and John Lithgow. It was weird not having Keir Dullea in it and I don't think that HAL was in it either.

What I get from the film was that man cannot cross a certain threshold of spirit until he conquers the 3rd dimension of existence. This is why HAL kept warning the two astronauts. Actually, HAL could have read that only one person (Keir Dullea) had the ability to evolve into another dimension where there is no time but events. Then, Dullea finds out that there is "something wonderful" as this "Rainbow Bridge" is crossed.

Then if man crosses that threshold of time into the 4th and 5th dimension, there is a new way of life but also new challenges for that dimension.

It took a lot of guts for Kubrick to do this. He was still living when they made 2010 in 1984 and I would have loved to see how he would have expanded on the first film.

I don't think 2001 has an ending but it has possibilities and it was up for the viewers to seek answers on their own.

I disagree. A movie is to entertain, and sometimes carry forth a message. Not all movies are going to be easy on the eyes or the brain, but then again neither are books. If a movie has been adapted from a book you need to read the book, because the greatest writer/director teams can rarely equal the book in 2 hours or less of film, and a lot of times they are not even close ( i.e. I am Legend).
While I do enjoy a good fluff film filled with beautiful bodies and explosions,  I do enjoy movies that end like No COuntry For Old Men, and make you think a little.
I personally do not think that there is anything wrong with not "getting" a movie with philisophic underpinnings of some depth, or people misinterpreting the message. We are all different and therefore will take things away from a movie than the person watching the film with them.

i have to agree with dave about 2001.i had read the book when i saw it and still thought the ending was lame.actually,both endings were lame.

No love for Guy Ritchie?  Two of my favorite movies Snatch and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

I like Quentin Tarantino too...

I agree with Dave about "not getting it".  There are no wrong answers regarding subjective matters of taste.  Maybe there are elements to some artwork that are not as conspicuous to the novice senses that would make it more enjoyable or at least appreciated, but it still is kind of a wierd statement to make.

It is a normal statement to make with regards to philosopy, so why would it not be ok to use it on films that have significant philisopical statements? Just because the message is inside a vehicle for wider distribution?

^ In regards to philosophy isn't it appropriate to make that statement towards a rational opinion as opposed a simple matter of taste? 

There is a difference between taste and not grasping the underlying message. Some people do not get a movie and say it sucks. Is that a matter of taste or their rational opinion of how they grasped the message? Who knows in the long run. But for those who think it is elitest to say "you didn't get it", it is just as bad to judge others as snobs for "getting it".

I don't think people are judged as snobs for "getting 2001". But people who take pleasure in adding into the conversation that you are either "stupid" or "don't get it" because you did not enjoy the film are indeed snobs.

I personally didn't enjoy the movie myself either.

Interesting thoughts. However, HAL's intentions are quite clear, especially in the book that was written alongside the screenplay...he didn't have any notions about which crew members were "capable" of reaching a higher level of consciousness. He simply knew all along the true purpose of the mission (in the book), which Dave [Bowman] was not aware of, and in the movie he simply knew that he had made a calculation mistake and did whatever must be done to prevent it from being discovered (kill the human crew). The reason he did this is also quite clear: He believed himself to be an infallible entity and his number one priority was the mission. HAL did not believe the mission could survive without him, so he tried to eliminate those that would remove him from it.

The book does a great job expanding on the movie, and includes some things that were changed or removed for the film. But it certainly explains the overall concept, for those who may not get it by watching the movie. Obviously, I disagree with Dave [Gray] on this one...I don't know anyone who truly "gets" 2001 and still calls it a shitty movie. On the contrary, everyone I've ever discussed the movie with who has stated that it "sucks" or "is shitty" has backtracked and bullshitted when I challenged them to tell me what it was actually about. Quite simply, in my experience (which is extensive, as I've worked in the movie business for over a decade), the only ones I've encountered who don't like 2001 have all been unable to show that they actually understood it. And that trend has repeated here, as the ones who said they didn't like it went on to state that they didn't understand it. (Dave's confusion about the ending, in particular, and the comment "the thing with the apes at the beginning"...What is there to not understand about the first act....it isn't vague at all). I actually had a guy who used to work for me that said 2010 was a better movie because he understood the ending. It's like trying to enjoy a book written in a language you don't speak...if you can't "read" it, of course it's going to be boring shit. If saying you "don't get it" comes off as snobby or offensive, that's not my problem...it's not meant to be offensive.

Unfortunately the movie, being limited by a time constraint, was forced to remove some of the story's best ideas and quotes. I highly recommend reading the book, if you don't understand the movie, but contrarily, if you loved the movie. It contains most of the story's best ideas and most awe-inspiring quotes.

Just to clarify, I wasn't speaking specifically about you, Cyan.  I also wasn't speaking specifically about me.  I didn't have too much trouble understanding 2001, because I researched the WTF parts afterwards.

I do disagree with you about the role of a film.  I think that a film has 2 hours to tell a story.  Additional reading shouldn't have to be required.  Although, some movies become much better because of it on subsequent watchings.  For example, I liked Adaptation much more after I read a little bit about Charlie Kaufman.  ...the same for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

I've never seen 2001.  I'm curious now and will be checking it out. 

Make sure if you do watch it, that you watch the Blu-ray disc (if you have that capability), as it was the best blu-ray released all of last year...it really looks unbelievable, honestly. Hard to believe the film on that disc is 40 years old.

If you can't play blu-rays, make sure you watch the new 2-disc DVD version, and not the old one disc, white-cover, dvd version. The new 2-disc used the same master as the blu-ray, and it looks much better. The old 1-disc 1998 DVD version is closer to VHS quality than DVD.

Here are DVDtalk.com's reviews of the re-releases, which echo that sentiment (and one of them touches on the discussion of "grasping" the films concept, discussed in this thread):
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=31297&___rd=1
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=31328&___rd=1

The only reason I had anything on the contrary to respond to your post with, was because of this statement:

No offense, I mean this 100% literally, but to state that "2001: A Space Odyssey" is lacking in it's storytelling ability is ignorance on a massive scale. That's akin to saying that 'Chinatown' has a poor screenplay, 'Star Wars' has poor special effects, 'Seven Samurai' wasn't inventive with cinematography, or 'Titanic' failed miserably at the box office. 2001 is quite possibly the most-recognized achievement in pure film storytelling ever. That, aside from the special effects, is the film's main draw, as it told the story in a way that had never been done so well before.

really...it's entirely ok to hate the movie, but of all things to critique in that film, storytelling is certainly the one that has been critiqued the least over the years...and it's the one thing that those few outspoken critics of the film in 1968 chose to attack...and their reviews are now looked back on as some of the most laughably outrageous of all time....akin to GameSpot's review of Mario Kart 64, or, more recently, Kane & Lynch.  ;D

You're re-stating my words and leaving out some important ones -- "on film, alone".

It seems to me, that to truly get WTF is going on at the end of 2001, you had to have read the book (or gotten the scoop from someone who had.)  To me, that movie hasn't done it's job.  I see books and movies as separate mediums, and you shouldn't have to know a story in one to enjoy it in another.  That's all.

I have a PS3 but no hd cable or whatever it is that makes it look nicer on the good t.v.'s.  I have my PS3 in my room on a crappy t.v. But I can take it to the living room on the nice one...anyways, is there a cable I need for blu-rays to be better?

Get an HDMI cable.   There's a site called mycablemart.com that had short HDMI cables for 3-6 dollars.  Of course, you can buy higher quality if you want, but that will get you by.

Yep, cheap HDMI cable or a little more expensive component cable. Either will get you the HD picture.

With the HDMI cable, buy the cheapest one you can find...its digital, so quality is the same regardless of cost. If you go with component, look to spend $30-60 for a good cable, as they are analog and quality is somewhat price-dependent.