Synopsis:

Steven Soderbergh fanedits Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

Intentions:

Maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it's not around, and then you start wanting to touch it. I've been watching '2001: A Space Odyssey' regularly for four decades, but it wasn't until a few years ago I started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays I decided to make my move. Why now? I don't know. Maybe I wasn't old enough to touch it until now. Maybe I was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my, or anyone else's help, but if it's not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it's tied for first. Meaning if I was finally going to touch it, I'd better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring. Plus, it's technology's fault. Without technology, I wouldn't have been able to spend so much intimate and, ultimately, inappropriate time with the film. By the way, I've seen every conceivable kind of film print of '2001', from 16mm flat, to 35mm internegative, to a cherry camera negative 70mm in the screening room at Warner Bros, and I'm telling you, none of them look as good as a Blu-Ray played on a 'Pioneer Elite Plasma Kuro' monitor, and while you're cleaning up your spit, look over that sentence, let me also say I believe Stanley Kubrick would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: Absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilization. Regarding the former, the increased sensitivity without resolution loss allows us to really capture the world as it is, and regarding the latter, post-2001 SK generally shot matte perf. film (Normally reserved for effects shots, because of it's added steadiness) all day, every day, something which digital capture makes moot. Pile on things like, never being distracted by weaving, splices, dirt, scratches, bad lab matches during changeovers, changeovers themselves, bad framing and focus exacerbated by projector vibration, and you can see why I think he might dig digital. My one gigantic issue with this transfer... Is that you can see, in the 'dawn of man sequence', the cross-hatched patterns of the front projection screen in several shots. This is inexcusable. I never saw these patterns in any film prints, this would never have gotten past the polaroid-happy SK and any transfer in which these patterns are visible, no matter how your monitor/TV is set up, is technically fucked and completely wrong. I hate saying that about my good friends at WB, especially since the WB remaster of 'Citizen Kane' is literally a revelation, but on the other hand the 'All The President's Men' Blu-Ray is a disappointment, but on the other hand they did remaster and release a beautiful 'End Of The Road' disc, so...

Additional Notes:

Other Sources:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Blu-Ray).

Special Thanks: