Watching 2001 on my 18th wedding anniversary

It's been a challenging few months on the home front, with new business ventures, deaths in the family, and everything else that leaves a person's head spinning around like a top, all in one four-month period. I kind of sensed, therefore, that our 18th wedding anniversary on Sunday needn't be a big deal.

My wife and I kind of discussed it a few days beforehand, and I was relieved that she hadn't yet bought me a present. I was already mentally scrambling about how I was going to do that for her without making a panic buy that would be a swing and a miss. But she was equally game to go present free this year -- which, to be honest, we've been doing the past few years anyway. 

When I asked her if we were planning to do anything for our anniversary, she asked "What day is it?" Not what date we got married -- she knows that -- but what day of the week the anniversary fell on. This gives a good idea of how little fussed she was by having it be more or less a regular Sunday.

But I upped the ante, just a little bit, the day before. I bought her a beautiful $100 bouquet of flowers from the nice florist in our town center -- their quality is nice, their demeanor to customers is only sometimes nice. I made clear that this did not create any expectations for reciprocation, it was just a nice thing I wanted to do. And I think she did, indeed, think it was very nice. She commented several times on how beautiful they were and wore a grin for a while afterward. 

I thought of holding them back to present them on the actual anniversary, but then that meant I'd need to leave them propped up somewhere in hiding, overnight, when they need to be transferred to water. I'm capable of doing that part, of course, but my success with that is mixed, and besides, she likes to do it.

But presenting them on Saturday meant there was no actual thing to do on Sunday to honor the day. When I was returning from my walk, she texted me to suggest brunch, and we had a very nice one, discussing the kids and our upcoming trip to Japan. 

When she said she would walk home from the cafe, and confirmed there was nothing going on in the afternoon, I got a look in my eye -- that look that says I have an idea of something I want to do, but I've been too shy to mention it before now.

"You want to go to a movie?" she asked. "You can."

How cool is she?

"Well yes," I said, "they're playing 2001 at the Sun in Yarraville."

See this was something I'd had in my back pocket for a while. The Sun is good at advertising their upcoming special features, so as long as a couple months ago I saw that 2001 was coming back. I say "coming back" because it does play the Sun periodically in 70 mm, though I don't remember seeing it programmed since the last time I saw it at the Sun, in July of 2018 for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. I popped a reminder in my calendar just so I wouldn't forget.

My first impression was that it would play multiple times over a few weeks -- you know, maximize the time you have with the print. But when I checked on it earlier this week, I could only definitively see this Sunday -- which was, of course, our anniversary.

I didn't say anything to my wife, but I did check this morning to see if there were any seats left. There were about six. 

Fortunately, when I returned home from brunch, there were still seats remaining for the single 2 p.m. showing, and this was now about 1:25. But in a phenomenon I can't explain other than someone possibly cancelling their tickets, there were now two quite good seats in the middle of a mid-range row, one right in front of the walkway, meaning plenty of extra legroom. I only needed one of them. And though I usually get free tickets at the Sun on my critics card, the card is not meant for this scenario, so I happily paid the $30. 

And what did I get for a few extra bucks beyond the standard ticket price? How about this beautiful program I'm showing you above, with the H.A.L. eye peeking over its shoulder from the screen behind it?

It's gorgeous and I'm pretty sure I will add it to the cork board behind my desk, but obviously no pushpins through its lovely skin. 

The movie that went from utterly baffling (my first viewing in 1980) to still head-scratching but significant (my second viewing in 2001) to personal favorite (my third viewing in 2013) all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart (my fourth viewing in 2018) did not disappoint in this, my fifth viewing. If I can't move it up any more in my personal favorites, it's because there are only 11 films ahead of it now -- though let's just see how it does if it comes up for duels against those films. 

Some of the "new" observations I had on this viewing were actually things I talked about when I last wrote about the movie (here), so the takeaways from this viewing are going to seem a bit shallower by comparison. 

One thing I'll say is that I do like my astronaut in peril movies, and I'm on another small binge of them now. It started with Solaris for the Audient One-Timers series back in February, then carried on through to Project Hail Mary, Sunshine, and most recently, last year's The Astronaut, just seen last weekend. This makes five, and now I probably have it out of my system again for a little while. 

Speaking of large numbers, this now makes the fourth time I've seen this movie on the big screen. Only my 2013 viewing was on a small screen. I'd say that makes 2001 the most I've seen any movie on a big screen, except I also watched Pulp Fiction four times in the theater. It's definitely my largest number of repertory theatrical viewings of one movie. There may only be even one other I've seen twice (Donnie Darko, except one of those was the inferior director's cut). 

But the takeaway I want to finish with is that in this viewing, my one truly new takeaway that I'm certain of is that two of the movie's stars remind me of two icons from my childhood. See, I told you it would be shallower.

Here's the first pairing:

Yes that's William Shatner's Captain Kirk on the right, though that is certainly not the Captain Kirk from my childhood. I was having trouble finding a similar profile shot circa The Wrath of Khan. 

It's not just a similarity in the appearance of William Sylvester's Haywood Floyd, it's also something in the demeanor, in the slightly too confident means of presenting himself.

And here is the second:

Although the physical similarity is pretty striking, this is a bit of a demeanor thing too, though I can't really describe it. There are a few moments when Keir Dullea's voice gets a bit animated that remind me of Christopher Reeve's Superman in his moments of high stress.

Though of course we all know the real best appearance match for Dullea is Ed Harris.

Audient One-Timers: Solaris

This is the second in my 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once.

The second movie in this series, Andrei Tarkovksy's Solaris, a lot more closely conforms to what you'd think I mean by the term "one-timer" than the first movie, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals. Both films do have in common the fact that I saw them for the first time in 2013 -- and that comparative recency probably explains more than any other factor why I haven't yet seen them again.

Solaris, as you would know if you've seen it or if you know Tarkovsky, is long, ponderous and slow-paced, the sort of film you would definitely only watch once if you didn't care for it, and might take a while to get back to even if you did. In fact, given that the other two Tarkovsky films I've seen in the years since then -- Stalker and The Sacrifice -- have not worked for me as well as the #172 ranked Solaris obviously did, I was definitely concerned about the possibility of this just going over my head and seeming as ponderous as the other two, on a second viewing. 

But I don't think "ponderous" always has to be a negative appraisal of something. Tarkovsky's film is ponderous, and I think that's the best thing about it. (And it made me want to revisit Stalker, which I didn't dislike but which definitely tried my patience more with fewer rewards, while actually bearing a lot of similarities to Solaris otherwise. Before I do that, it would probably be best to see the three Tarkovsky features I haven't seen: Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev and Mirror, the latter of which also has a good copy on YouTube, which is where I saw Solaris. Not even any ad breaks!)

My affection for Solaris was especially noteworthy given the baggage I brought in, which was seeing Steven Soderbergh's remake ten years earlier and not caring for it. I suppose that might have made me more receptive to a good version of Solaris, but it could have also made me wary about the possibility of any good version existing. Now that I've seen the original two times, and confirmed my affection for it with a rewatch, I'm wondering if I might be more open to what Soderbergh was doing, or just more critical of it. That's another rewatch to consider some day.

My first viewing of Solaris was around the same time that I decided I really loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Solaris owes a few very small debts. My two twenty teens viewings of 2001 were what elevated it all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart, the first of which was only two weeks after I watched Solaris (and no doubt inspired by the fact that I'd just seen Solaris). 

Tarkovksy's film does capture the eerie and unnerving qualities of unexplained occurrences in outer space that Kubrick gave us in such a memorable way four years earlier, but it doesn't really use space the way you imagine it would. Although the sense of being on a space station is clear, especially with our views of the ocean planet below, we get almost none of the traditional space backgrounds you'd think you'd get in a movie like this, with stars twinkling against a sea of infinite blackness. I recall exactly one, and it serves more as a transition between the scenes set on Earth (which run longer than a half-hour to start the film) and those set in space. Once the characters are in space, Tarkovsky is not that interested in continually reminding us of that fact through shots of space or footage of anyone doing a space walk. Everything we see can be, and obviously was, shot on Tarkovksy's very earthbound sets in Russia. (2001 was not shot in space, of course, but when I was younger, I believed it was.)

So it's a credit to Tarkovsky's movie magic that we never doubt our location. The sets themselves look like we imagine a space station would look, or rather, a space station that was inhabited entirely by Alzheimer's patients, as it's been left in disarray with various objects strewn about and loose wiring letting off sparks. Then the images of the swirling surface of the ocean planet, whose swirls ebb and flow and change according to the mysteries that are unfolding for the characters, are chilling in their otherworldliness.

Though I think if there's one single key to why Solaris gets under our skin, it may be the sound design. Every sound is chosen for its maximum pscyhological impact on us, as it mirrors the mental dissolution the characters are experiencing as they walk this space station and see the physical embodiment of some person from their past, inexplicably walking the corridors next to them. I don't find the moment-to-moment experiences with these characters, one in particular (the dead wife of Chris Kelvin), always chilling, though individual moments are quite so. The scene where she's banging on the door to get out of it -- and then bursts through the metal as though it were wet cardboard, leaving jagged edges -- is quite effective in that regard.

Because of its length (2:42) and the practical necessities of my Sunday schedule, I split Solaris in half the way the movie itself splits itself in half after about 1:19. Although you'd think you'd be under the movie's spell more as it reaches its climax, I found myself more gripped during the first half, which include those establishing scenes on Earth and all the shots of nature around Chris Kelvin's home. This film definitely relies on anticipation of what's to come in creating its mood.

I really get a lot out of the portion of the film that you wouldn't think would really be eerie, which is the character Burton explaining his experiences while on a previous rescue mission to the surface of the planet to try to find two lost crewmen. We see an older version of Burton, alongside Kelvin and a few others, watching a hearing of a younger version in which Burton explains what he saw. A hearing does not seem like the sort of place we'd become entranced by the film introducing its concepts to us.

But here is where Burton talks about seeing a massive infant four meters long on the surface of the planet's oceans, and later reveals that the infant had the appearance of the orphaned son of one of the lost crew members, something Burton only realized later when he met that son. Even twice removed from the actual events -- a character watching his own verbal account of this experience -- it sets our imaginations alive. 

And here I think is part of the film's very small debt to 2001, only because the ending of 2001 also involves the image of an infant, the Star Child. It's such a small debt that I hesitate to even mention it, because Tarkovsky is clearly doing his own thing here and not ripping off Kubrick in any way. Maybe both of them realized that seeing images of small children in outer space, where they certainly should not be, is pretty eerie.

Okay I've used enough synonyms for "eerie" and "unnerving" and "chilling" for one day. 

Queen Jeanne

Ten years ago, I was so interested in the release of Sight & Sound's new critics' poll on the greatest movies of all time, which comes out every ten years on the 2's, that I devoted three different posts to it, including the one where a friend and I both revealed our own ten votes, which you can find here. 

This time, I guess I've got more going on, as I considered not even mentioning it on my blog at all.

Then I thought, If I can't give at least a passing mention to something that occurs only once a decade, what kind of film blogger am I?

I considered updating the list linked above. I'm pretty sure 2001: A Space Odyssey, which topped the directors' poll this year, would make it on my personal list now. I've also soured a little bit on Rear Window since last time, though I need another viewing to see if my last viewing in 2015 just caught me on a bad night.

But even when you've been writing a film blog for nearly 14 years, it can be boring to write the same post twice, so I'm going to skip over that idea and instead register my shock at this year's new poll topper.

I had not even seen Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when the last list was released. I rectified that in 2018, but only after sitting through its arduous and intentionally monotonous 201 minutes over the course of two nights. I considered myself better for having seen it but I cannot say I actually liked it in the traditional sense. In some respects it is one of the most uncinematic films I have ever seen. 

And now it has been voted by critics as only the fourth film ever to top the list.

The Bicycle Thief (still refusing the plural over here) was the first ever list-topper in 1952, before Citizen Kane launched a (justified) reign of terror that ran the next half century, until just before the 2012 list was released. Even when the list was separated into two lists in 1992, divided between critics and directors, neither group moved off of Kane until 2012, when both dropped it in favor of Vertigo (critics) and Tokyo Story (directors). 

I was incensed enough when my beloved Kane was overthrown by the overrated Vertigo, but this ... this is something else.

"Incensed" is not the right word this time. "Puzzled" is probably better.

On the one hand I applaud that Sight & Sound's attempt to diversify its voting body has yielded what would appear to be immediate results. It seems impossible not to draw a correlation between the invitation to more female critics, and the existence of more female critics in general, and the rapid ascension of a film that they obviously believe speaks to the essential experience of women. 

On the other hand, in a list designed as intentionally slow-moving, where one film was king for 50 years, should we really be seeing such a rapid ascension? Jeanne Dielman was a mere #36 in 2012, and the only event that occurred in the ten years since then to raise its profile was the suicide of its director, Chantal Akerman -- which could indeed be used as a lens to add intensity to the film's themes.

Then again this list is fundamentally an expression of passion inspired in its voters at the time of their vote, not some stodgy adherence to the status quo. One of the 2022 list's great surprises on the positive side is the #30 debut of Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my #2 of 2019 that still makes me swoon any time I think about it. It may be that this film will never get any closer to #1, and probably that it should not, but the fact that it has this moment to commit to permanence its impact on critics is really terrific. And of course it's likely we have female critics to thank for this as well.

And it's not like they've cleared the deck of the old standard bearers. Vertigo is still #2, Citizen Kane is still #3. I hate to think of Kane as "only" the third best movie of all time, but Kane doesn't need Sight & Sound to continue delivering accolades to it. It is thoroughly and utterly chalk at this point.

I want to pause to acknowledge a slight grammatical deviation in the listing of the full title of Jeanne Dielman, now that the film is getting such attention. I'm seeing it listed primarily with an additional comma than the one I'd been using, as Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles rather than Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. (The poster above has yet a third punctuation, with only one comma after 23.) 

I'm going to keep the punctuation I've used over the years whenever I've mentioned it -- this used to be my go-to joke for a long and ungainly title, even before I saw it -- for a couple reasons. One is that having the 23 offset by commas makes it seem like it is Jeanne's age, which we know is not correct because the character has a grown son. Furthermore, its points would be considerably hollower if we were talking about a woman just five years out of high school -- the whole idea is that her life has settled into a drudgery of household chores and tricks with johns. Another reason is that Wikipedia, which I trust implicitly whether I should or not, continues to use the punctuation I've been using, though notably, IMDB uses the one I've been seeing passed around since the Sight & Sound list was revealed. It could be that IMDB scrambled to fix it up just within the last few days, I don't know.

In 2012 it seems like the top 250 vote getters were readily available to find, but this year's articles about the poll seem to focus on the top 100, so I'll make some isolated comments about those top 100 for the remainder of this piece.

#4 - Tokyo Story - This is my preferred example of how to make a slow-moving film that lulls us into a total understanding of its themes by the end. I wrote a long piece on this movie in college and I'm really due for another viewing.

#6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey - As mentioned, this topped the directors' poll and rightly so, as this film has shot up majorly in my estimation as a result of two viewings (one on the big screen in 70 mm) since the 2012 poll. This is now in my personal top 20 on Flickchart and I couldn't be happier to see all the voters continue to shower it with praise. (And yes, it makes sense that this would top the directors' poll as it is a very "directy" film, as I wrote to a friend yesterday.)

#7 - Beau Travail - Okay ladies, you need to calm down now. This is the highest ranked film I haven't seen, and it was another film directed by a woman, Claire Denis. In its way, the ascension of this film could be considered even more shocking than Jeanne Dielman, as it was only at #74 in 2012. Guess I will prioritize a viewing now.

#9 - Man With a Movie Camera - Another film I had not seen in 2012, this one truly earns its spot. I awarded this five stars on Letterboxd when I finally watched it in 2020. 

#14 - Cleo from 5 to 7 - This makes three female directors in the top 15, which really, is a good thing, whatever shock I may be registering. I had meant to watch this when I acquainted myself with the films of Agnes Varda a few years ago but for some reason couldn't find it. Second movie in the top 100 I haven't seen.

#16 - Meshes in the Afternoon - Female co-directed (Maya Deren). Third unseen.

#17 - Close Up - I had only just seen Abbas Kiarostami's film when the last list was revealed. Really deserving. 

#27 - Shoah - This movie is like nine hours long and it still breaks my notion of what a film is, so I still have not seen it. Fourth unseen.

#28 - Daisies - Another female director. Fifth unseen.

#31 - Mirror - Tarkovsky. Sixth unseen.

#43 - Killer of Sheep - Another film newly seen by me in the last decade. Wasn't quite this impressed with it but like that it's on the list.

#48 - Wanda - Directed by Barbara Loden, another woman. First film on this list whose title is not actually familiar to me at all. Seventh unseen. 

#52 - News from Home - Chantal Akerman's second film on the list. I wasn't aware of this, apparently, when I watched two movies by Akerman for my Audient Auteurs series in 2018, watching the similarly titled No Home Movie to go along with Jeanne Dielman. Eighth unseen. 

#52 - Fear Eats the Soul - I actually wanted to watch Rainer Werner Fassbinder films for the above-mentioned Audient Auteurs series, but I think there was an availability issue with his films. (Incidentally, I always heard this referred to as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but I guess Ali has gone away.) Ninth unseen. 

#54 - Sherlock Jr. - This was a first-time viewing for me in 2016, and I really wish it were in the top ten. 

#54 - Le Mepris (Contempt) - Godard. Tenth unseen. 

#59 - Sans Soleil + #60 - Daughters of the Dust - Two more movies that I've watched for the first time since last list. I wasn't using that list as an official watchlist but it looks like I did some good work in the past ten years.

#60 - Moonlight - Second film that could not have made a previous list. 

#66 - Touki Bouki - Eleventh unseen. 

#67 - The Gleaners and I - This is what I watched when I watched Varda films for Audient Auteurs and couldn't get my hands on Cleo. Another first-time viewing in the past ten. Really good film.

#67 - Andrei Rublev - Another Tarkovsky I haven't seen, though ten years ago I hadn't seen any, and now I've seen three, so I guess that's something. Twelfth unseen. 

#72 - My Neighbor Totoro - It seems hard to believe that in 2012 I had only seen one Miyazaka film, that being Spirited Away, and now I have seen all but his first and his most recent. Did I mention I've been doing good work in the past ten years? Totoro is my favorite.

#72 - Journey to Italy - Thirteenth unseen.

#72 - L'avventura - Another first-time watch in the past ten.

#75 - Imitation of Life and Sansho the Bailiff - Two more first-time watches since the 2012 list, though I really didn't like Sansho the Bailiff. 

#78 - A Brighter Summer Day, Satanango and Celine and Julie Go Boating - Fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth unseen. 

#78 - A Matter of Life and Death - I really need to stop listing the films I've watched for the first time in the past ten years. I get it, I've been a good doobie. This is one of my favorites of those.

#84 - Pierrot le Fou, Histoire du Cinema and Spirit of the Beehive - Seventeenth through nineteenth unseen.

#88 - Chungking Express - I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find this. I can't. Twentieth unseen. 

#90 - Parasite - That's two 2019 films to debut on this list, though I would have liked to see my #1 from that year higher.

#90 - Yi Yi - I have also tried to find this without success. Twenty-first unseen.

#97 - Get Out - Final film debuting in the top 100 that did not yet exist in 2012. It's interesting to note that the debuts are from two Black male directors, one Korean male director and one French female director. That's some good diversity right there.

#95 - Black Girl and Tropical Malady. And we end with a total of 23 unseen movies.

I'll have you know that I skipped mentioning five more films that I had seen since 2012 after vowing to stop that. I also missed a few earlier (sorry Battle of Algiers, I love you) but I'm not going to go back and correct that now. 

So having seen 77% of the top 100 is pretty good, certainly a lot better than I did last time. And now I've got a good list to work from for next time, though with the way this list tends to randomly unearth movies that aren't household names for cinephiles, I don't suspect I'll have any chance of hitting the full top 100 in 2032. 

Sounds like a long time from now, but I guess 2022 sounded like a long time from 2012. I'll be 59. Perish the thought.

I should probably give an additional shout out to the directors' list, which, as in 2012, seems like more a reflection of the films they actually like than the films they think they should like. In my 2012 post linked above, I said that the critics seemed to try to out-impress each other while the directors were more likely to geek out on a perceived peer that they admired, tending for (slightly) more mainstream fare. Many of the titles are of course the same, but a handful I'll shout out that I'm happy to see are Taste of Cherry, The Conformist, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Wild Strawberries, A Separation, The Seventh Seal, Jaws, Eraserhead, Don't Look Now and Dr. Strangelove. They only had room for two of the first-time eligible movies, Parasite and Moonlight. Minus points for including Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom on their list -- also an unfortunate first-time viewing in the past decade. Blecch. 

I guess once I got writing about Sight & Sound I had a fair amount to say after all.

See you back here in ten years.

Stanley Kubrick's first, best and last

I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for its 50^th anniversary re-release last Wednesday night, and I’ve been dying to tell you about it. But I’ve held off until today for reasons I’ll explain presently.

See, I’ve ended up focusing on the films of another auteur in the month of July, in addition to Agnes Varda, who I wrote up here as part of my Audient Auteurs series. It was totally unplanned, but once it started to take on momentum I decided to make a thing of it.

That’s right, I’ve just watched my third Stanley Kubrick film of July, and as it happens, I’ve got differing levels of familiarity with all three. The first I had never seen. The second I had seen three times before. The third, once before.

I don’t think I’m going to try to tell you how they all relate to each other or to Kubrick’s career, but let’s see how we go. At the very least, they make a logical series to discuss, as they happened to have been his first film, his last film, and the one I now believe is his best.

I watched them chronologically, so let’s take them in that order here as well.

Fear and Desire (1953)

If I said I wouldn’t explore Kubrickian themes and how these movies relate to his body of work on the whole, well, I lied a little bit. It’s almost impossible not to see Fear and Desire as a rough draft for Paths of Glory (only four years later), and it wrestles with a subject that was still with him even 34 years later for Full Metal Jacket (1987). But I didn’t know that going in. I only knew the title, and was familiar with it only as one of the early works of Stanley Kubrick that I hadn’t seen (which also include The Killing and Killer’s Kiss, now his only remaining feature-length films I haven’t seen).

I say “feature length,” but in fact the running time was what made it stand out from literally about 30 movies I had out from the library. It’s only 62 minutes long, so short that it almost made me wonder whether I should disqualify it from the various lists I keep of feature films I’ve seen. Informally I think of a modern feature as running at least 70 minutes. I make exceptions for silent movie greats, some of which are only 45 minutes (such as Sherlock Jr.). But Kubrick’s feature debut was long into the sound era, so I did hem and haw about it a bit. Ultimately I allowed it, and besides, it let me watch a movie on a night when I was otherwise too tired.

I liked the movie fine, I guess, but I was glad enough to only be in its presence for 60 minutes. Its action is purposely symbolic, as a narrator at the beginning advises us:

"There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind."

Linguistically elegant stuff, but it did put me on warning that it would seem more like an exercise in philosophy than a movie. That's kind of the case. The soldiers grapple with various ethical and logistical dilemmas related to being downed behind enemy lines, which include how and whether to attack the enemy (they do) and how to handle the civilians (not very well). Some of it is probably better than I give it credit for, but it's fairly raw, and I was distracted by the really noticeable ADR. I did find it interesting that the film features a very young Paul Mazursky, but he is the most bizarre character in that he kind of goes crazy (without any real antecedent to that insanity) and takes it out via perverse behavior directed toward a local girl they capture. 

I gave it three stars, but more on the strength of its historical significance as the place Kubrick got his start than any real affection I feel for the movie.

Affection was not a problem with my second movie though ...

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

I've recounted previously my history with this movie, which dates back to when I was a young child and saw it in the theater on a re-release (and hated it). So I won't go into that here. I will say that while most people greeted this 50th anniversary re-release as an opportunity to "finally" see 2001 on a big screen, for me, it was my third such viewing.

But it was my first on the big screen since I started to love the movie. Ironically, my love for the movie started to click on my first small-screen viewing. My increasing maturity likely had a lot more to do with my feelings toward it than the size of the screen. In 2013, two days after my 40th birthday, I finally "got" 2001, and came around to the consensus that it's a masterpiece.

It took this viewing for me to decide it's one of my top 20 of all time.

My Flickchart rankings don't reflect that yet, so don't scan my top 20 to the right of this page. I'm not in the habit of re-ranking movies after my most recent viewing. (Recency bias and all that.) But when 2001 comes up naturally, it stands a very good chance of defeating movies that are very, very high on my chart.

What changed this time?

I don't necessarily think it was the "blacker blacks" of Christopher Nolan's restored 70 mm print, nor the great venue (the Sun in Yarraville), which included a welcome from the projectionist, and a pre-movie featurette on how the theater outfitted itself for 70 mm to play The Hateful Eight (a movie it still plays on the 8th of every month at 8 p.m.). Those things helped. But actually, my first impression of the restored print was that I didn't get what the fuss was about. I suppose I'd need a side-by-side comparison with my other viewings to really see the difference, which of course is impossible. But one of those was on a massive screen in Champaign, IL for the 2001 Ebertfest, so this might not even been my most glorious exposure to the film.

What I did get was, well, everything else. What amazed me was how much I'd forgotten about the film in only five years since I last saw it. I forgot, for example, that David Bowman makes a trip out in space to pick up the corpse of Frank Poole, in the ultimate sign of the irrational humanity that separates man from a machine like H.A.L., and that Bowman has to blow himself through the airlock to get back inside the ship. I figured blowing through airlocks was strictly the stuff of Alien movies.

But my really miraculous revelation on this viewing was how tight the movie is, in terms of its actual plotting. Sure, the film is sprinkled with five- to seven-minute essays on things like the spinning of spaceships, the ins and outs of eating and customer service in space, monkeys learning how to murder and men losing their minds while caught in colorful wormholes. But the actual story moves very fast when the screen time is actually devoted to plot. For example, you barely have time to get to know Frank, Dave and H.A.L. before their relationship reaches a crisis point, and it pretty much bowls forward at a breakneck pace from there.

And what I got big time in this viewing was how much this movie puts you in the shoes of its characters. It's not just Heywood Floyd as a rookie space traveler or Frank and Dave trapped by a psychopathic computer. One of the film's most visceral moments was the literally deafening shriek of the signal sent out from the monolith on the moon toward Jupiter that ends Floyd's sequence. It was physically uncomfortable to listen to it for those 15 or 20 seconds, which felt like an eternity. I can't imagine the sound didn't disturb patrons in adjoining theaters.

Anyway, I sat there, shivering with exaltation as I watched it. I have more to say, but I may be discussing this in a podcast next week and will leave it until then.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Kubrick didn't make it to 2001 himself -- he died in 1999, just after Eyes Wide Shut was completed. In fact, the final project he was working on -- A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which I am also due to rewatch -- did make it to 2001, in the hands of Steven Spielberg. But Shut was Kubrick's last official gig as director, so it's kind of a shame it wasn't better.

That's what 1999 me thought, anyway. I remember seeing it at the theater that was a block from my apartment in New York, which is also where the film is set. And there was a lot of shrugging and "so what?"ing going on. It was supposed to be this scandalous movie about infidelity and bizarre sexual rituals enacted by rich men, but I found the sex kind of the opposite of titillating (which was probably Kubrick's point).

The movie I rented from the library this time, and watched Sunday night, seemed to have been without one of the things that left mouths flapping at the time the movie was released. In order to tone it down and get an R rating, additional cloaked figures were digitally inserted over the people as they were having sex, to prevent us from seeing quite so much thrusting and convulsing. It doesn't surprise me that a BluRay release would not have those, as no one cares about ratings anymore once a movie is on video. But instead of feeling like I got to look behind a curtain that had not previously been accessible to me, I kind of shrugged and ho-hummed again.

I was not distracted by another criticism I heard at the time that stuck with me, unaccountably, which was that you couldn't believe that these were real New York City streets because of how sparsely populated they were. In fact, I was struck by what a dumb observation that was by whichever critic groused about it. If this was a set, which I seem to remember it might have been, all the better. If Stanley Kubrick wants to stylize New York City for his own thematic reasons, that's well within his rights, and more power to him.

It's just that the thematic reasons didn't strike me as much. I didn't feel the paranoia you're supposed to feel in this movie, nor did I feel that Tom Cruise's character was guilty of some big betrayal of his wife that causes him to break down in tears at the end. When he goes to the Fidelio party, it's not to have sex with someone, as far as I can tell -- it's just perverse curiosity. And sure he also does have an unconsummated dalliance with a prostitute, but again, it's unconsummated. I almost feel like she's more guilty for practically fucking that guy on the dance floor (that scene was charged with erotic tension like no other scene in the film, and kind of reminded me of Naomi Watts' audition in Mulholland Drive, though that would not come for two more years). She admits thinking about having sex with that sailor as well. I don't want you to think I'm taking the man's side, but I just don't understand what all the fuss is about as neither of them is really guilty of anything.

Eyes Wide Shut shares an approximate running time and languid pacing with 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the similarities end there. While the latter has excellent justification for all its, shall we say, flights of fancy, Eyes Wide Shut is legitimately slow, and it expends whole chunks of its narrative on diversions that are useless. For example, the whole bit involving Bill Harford's rental of his costume from the costume shop could lift right out and nothing would be lost. There are two scenes, in fact, involving Rade Serbedzija and Leelee Sobieski, and I am at a loss to explain the value or significance of either of them. Slowing things down significantly is the weird speed of Nicole Kidman's line deliveries, which bothered me then and still does now.

I did notice, perhaps for the first time, an interesting detail about this period of Tom Cruise's career. In the space of two years he starred in both the movie Eyes Wide Shut, and a remake of the movie Abre Los Ojos, which translates to Open Your Eyes. That of course is Vanilla Sky, a personal favorite.

As I said before, I don't have an overarching theory about these movies or their relationships to Kubrick's career -- as far as I can tell, his interest in space and his interest in sexual perversion both do not have a corollary elsewhere in his career. And while I enjoyed two of these movies less than I was hoping to, well, 2001 has now eclipsed A Clockwork Orange as my favorite Kubrick film. I think when I rewatch Paths of Glory one of these days it may jump up there too.

A Star Trek mission with Star Wars robots

Hollywood has always operated on the core principle of finding a successful formula and trying to repeat it, and rarely has that seemed more evident than in The Black Hole.

In fact, I'm sure the reason my parents took me to see it back in 1979 -- making it one of the first five to ten movies I'd ever seen -- was because it had that kind of Star Wars, Star Trek feel to it.

Boy does it ever.

I watched the movie for the first time since then on Friday night, having still retained some images from it all these years later, but having no real idea what to expect. I knew it was fairly cheesy and nowhere in the same category as either of the sci-fi enterprises whose coattails it was trying to ride, but I also remembered that there were some things that had disturbed the six-year-old me. I wanted to see how objectively disturbing they actually were.

Answer: somewhat objectively disturbing.

But first, about the comparisons to the two Stars.

The most obvious influence is probably Star Wars, a huge hit from only two years earlier, and mostly in terms of the design of the robots. Yeah, there are laser battles, but as they look so much worse than those in Star Wars, it hardly feels worth dwelling on them. No, it's really the robots in particular -- and one robot in even more particular -- that feel like trying to recreate the Star Wars formula.

I'm thinking specifically of this robot, called Vincent:

There's more than a little R2-D2 in this little guy.

You wouldn't call him an R2-D2 clone, of course. They've taken pains to differentiate him. Vincent speaks English and he can fly, which is something R2-D2 did later but definitely could not do at the time. But R2-D2 was certainly an inspiration. Then again, George Lucas stole the basic design of R2-D2 from Silent Running, so it's not like there's every anything new under the sun.

Then there's this guy on the left:

He's called S.T.A.R. (oh yeah, Vincent is really called V.I.N.C.E.N.T.) and he's kind of a cross between a stormtrooper and those guys who control the Death Star's giant laser. If he reminds you a little of Darth Vader, it's probably not a coincidence.

But the real Darth Vader character in this movie is probably this guy:

He doesn't actually remind me of anyone in the Star Wars universe directly, though funnily enough, his character design is a bit mirrored in the emperor's royal guards from Return of the Jedi, which wouldn't come along for another four years. If anything he probably resembles the Silon Raiders from Battlestar Galactica (one year earlier), the Daleks from Dr. Who (more than 15 years earlier) or even that robot from Lost in Space (from around the same time as Dr. Who). If I'm going down this road I might as well also compare him to Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). And again we get into that everything-influences-everything-else territory. Sinister robots are frequently sinister in similar ways. (And all the robots I've listed here are not sinister, but I digress.)

The funny thing about Maximilian is that he shares a name with the actor who plays his master, Maximilian Schell. That's a chicken-or-the-egg scenario right there, if ever there was one.

I had at least V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and probably also Maximilian as toys when I was a kid. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that The Black Hole would have been popular enough for a toy line, but again, that's following in the Star Wars mold of merchandising. The way these toys moved was pretty cool, as I recall. Vincent (it's easier to just type his name that way) had a head that popped in an out of his body, turtle style, and I believe also had legs that could extend or not. I don't think Maximilian came equipped with whirring propeller blades, but I could be wrong.

So that's the Star Wars part. The Star Trek part comes entirely in terms of the plot.

Stop me if this sounds like an episode of Star Trek, or a Star Trek movie, or a half-dozen of each you've seen before: A seemingly deserted ship floats on the edge of some sort of space singularity, and to approach it may endanger our intrepid crew. But there could be survivors on board, and they have to figure out the mystery of what happened on that ship. When they do board the ship, they indeed find that it is occupied, most likely with a one-time alley who is no longer quite what he seems. And other ... sinister stuff. Before long, our intrepid crew is involved in an adventure with possibly cataclysmic repercussions.

Yeah, that's a Star Trek mission if ever there was one. In fact, even the most recent Star Trek movie from just this year has basically this same setup.

Of course, Star Trek *movies* were not a particular source of inspiration for The Black Hole. Only one of them existed at the time, and it had come out only months earlier. But the TV show had of course been in existence for some time, and it surely helped inspire this story.

But wait, we're not done.

The most unlikely influence on this film is 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's not unlikely because that movie is not good -- it's incredible, of course -- but because it's not commercial. Or not what we thought of as commercial in the post-Star Wars era.

The thing those two movies have in common are their endings. The entry into the black hole (spoiler!) is very similar to the Star Gate sequence that ends 2001, in that both are trying to visualize some interstellar phenomenon that is fundamentally unknowable ... and do that by producing visuals that almost certainly would not accompany such an event. 2001 of course has the whole surreal part about the old man in the bed, and The Black Hole's equivalent thereof is a cathedral-like crystal tunnel and a garish vision of hell in which Maximilian gets fused with his master while hooded figures look on. Both films end on what looks like the rise of a new planet, or could be interpreted that way anyway.

Okay, so on to what might or might not have disturbed me.

I was definitely disturbed at the time by the death of the character I now know was played by Anthony Perkins. Maximilian drills into him with his propeller blades (bloodlessly) and he falls down into a chasm in the ship and dies. I'm quite sure I found that too intense at the time. What I don't specifically remember, but probably horrified me, was the unmasking of one of the drones that are being passed off as robots, but are actually hypnotized/lobotomized humans. That was some pretty scary shit.

Overall, though, this is a pretty silly movie that has a lot more talk than action, and the action there is -- especially the laser shootouts -- is pretty cornball. Also, Neil deGrasse Tyson was right to criticize it as "the least scientifically accurate film of all time." There are parts where human beings are just floating in space without space suits and not dying. Yeah, it makes no sense.

Glad to have watched it again, though. There are few films I can say I haven't seen since the 1970s; now there is one fewer.

Highly irregular

A friend and I came to the conclusion a couple years ago that although Airplane! is probably a better movie than Airplane II: The Sequel, we actually quote more jokes from Airplane II.

Maybe it's not such a surprise, then, that my most quoted line from 2001: A Space Odyssey is also from Airplane II.

One of the benefits of not yet being eligible for Australian employment is that when I make promises on this blog, I'm actually in the position to sort of keep them. Last week I told you that I was due for another viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The very next day I found a copy at the library, and yesterday, I watched that copy. I mightn't have done so if it had been a nice day, but it was cold and rainy. That seemed like perfect 2001 viewing weather.

I should get this right out of the way at the start: It blew me away. This was my third viewing of the movie, but apparently only at this age of my maturity have I been able to fully appreciate it. The deliberate pacing had finally become nothing but a joy to me, and all the pieces finally fit together. This was the first time I don't think that I secretly thought it was just a disconnected montage of pretentious images -- a brilliant disconnected montage of pretentious images, but a disconnected montage of pretentious images nonetheless.

The thing that surprised me the most, however, was that I realized that the line I most commonly use when doing my HAL 9000 impression was never actually spoken by HAL. It's the following:

"What are you doing, Dave? This is highly irregular."

To me, this was, is, and has always been HAL's quintessential line of dialogue. Except, he doesn't say it. The closest he comes is:

"Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?"

He never speaks about whether anything is regular, irregular or otherwise.

So who does talk about the relative regularity of Dave's actions?

Why it's ROK, the evil computer that takes over the shuttle in Airplane II, of course.

Here he is:

If I'd stopped to think about it, I might have realized the line of dialogue seemed so familiar not from the two times I had seen 2001, one of which was when I was only seven years old, but from the 12-14 times I saw Airplane II, which we owned on VHS when I was young because we'd copied it off The Movie Channel.

Even if I had realized that, though, I probably would still have thought that the phrasing "This is highly irregular" was lifted straight from 2001. It had come to seem like such an iconic part of HAL's mental and emotional breakdown that I would never have thought that its originators were the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams.

Yet that appears to be the case. I kept waiting and waiting for HAL to say it, but he never did. Okay, I didn't have to wait too long. HAL's pretty darn quick, and he knows almost immediately that a) Dave Bowman means to disconnect him, and b) the only way he can stop Dave is to persuade him he's feeling better, or simply to get Dave to take pity on him. HAL doesn't waste any time trying to accuse Dave of incorrectly following protocol. It'd probably be a bit hypocritical anyway.

It's kind of like that quote from Casablanca, "Play it again, Sam." You know, the quote that is never actually spoken in the film. It's kind of like that quote from On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando complains that "I coulda been somebody." When in reality he actually complains that "I coulda been somebody."

You'll have to forgive me if I persist in my misquoting of HAL. I've just been doing it for too long.

You could say that at this point, it's part of my circuitry.

"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, are the monkeys real?"

I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater as a child. It was a re-release, obviously -- turning 40 this weekend is hard enough. Don't put me at 50 just yet.

My parents were no doubt trying to capitalize on my love of Star Wars. They obviously hadn't seen it, and probably hadn't read anything about it, if they thought it would scratch that itch. Saying Star Wars and 2001 are like each other is kind of like saying that The Godfather and The Black Stallion are alike because they both feature horses.

Needless to say, I didn't get it. In fact, I was bored silly.

Only yesterday, when listening to the Filmspotting podcast featuring a "sacred cow" discussion of 2001, did I finally understand why:

I think I thought it was a documentary.

When I saw it for what must have been the 1980 re-release, I wouldn't have known what a documentary was. However, I would have had some idea about the kind of movie you see in science class, or during the educational portions of a show like The Electric Company. I probably thought 2001 was something like that. 

What's striking about this is two things:

1) A significant portion of this film features monkeys interacting with each other;

2) The rest of this film takes place in outer space.

See, I thought both things were real.

A lot more recently than you might think, actually.

When I last saw 2001, it was the year 2001. I was driving across the country to live in Los Angeles, and spending about five days in Champaign, IL, to visit my friend Don Handsome and attend Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival (since retitled, simply, "Ebertfest"). Ebert keenly recognized that 2001 would make a great opening night film, especially as this is a film that demands to be seen on a large screen. Plus it was a restoration of the 70 mm version, making the experience all the more impressive.

Even as a 27-year-old, I probably still didn't really get it, but at least I had a much greater appreciation for its place in film history and its objective greatness as a cinematic achievement.

As a special treat, the screening was followed by a satellite phone conversation with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, co-screenwriter (with Stanley Kubrick) and author of the concurrently written novel. I think Clarke was supposed to be there, but weather or some such inconvenience left him stranded in Sri Lanka, where he spent the later years of his life (ultimately dying there in 2008).

After asking the man a number of questions himself, Ebert opened it up so that members of the audience could directly address the science fiction legend. A young girl was one of those people. I don't remember what she actually asked, but I do remember how she addressed the man: She called him Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a very funny mistake for a child her age to make, because she had to know who Arthur Conan Doyle was in order to make it in the first place.

As these things tend to go, in the re-telling of this experience, Don and I quote her as follows: "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were the monkeys real?" Except the bit about the monkeys was our question, not hers.

That's right, Don and I both admitted to each other that we weren't quite sure whether the monkeys in the famous opening of 2001 were real monkeys, or human beings dressed in monkey costumes.

This is, of course, absurd. Of course they were human beings in monkey costumes. Or really, to be more accurate, in early hominid costumes. The scene goes on for minutes and minutes and involves complex interactions between the creatures and each other, as well as between them and a monolith that appears in their environment, causing them to learn how to murder each other. (Over-simplification.) There's no way even the cleverest monkey trainer in the world could get them to do a quarter of that stuff.

Yet the verisimilitude was such that even at nearly 30 years old, we couldn't be sure sure. Not 100%. Even though we knew better.

We laughed and laughed at ourselves, but a profound indication of the power of this movie also washed over us.

The epiphany I had about 2001 this week was when, during this podcast, Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune talks about the awe of first seeing the zero gravity jogging scene on the space station.

It occurred to me yesterday that the reason I'd never specifically been interested in this scene was that I thought this, too, was real. Definitely as a child, but I hadn't shrugged off the impression enough by 2001 to specifically find it awe-inspiring when I watched it then -- or at least to realize that I once considered it to be real.

If you unpack that, that means I thought that Stanley Kubrick, his actors and his crew went to outer space to film their movie.

I know Kubrick was bad at sticking to his budget, but that's ridiculous.

So yeah, when I was six or seven years old, this kind of thing was boring to me. I guess I thought people made movies in outer space all the time. For all I knew, Star Wars was a "documentary" as well -- it just had the advantage of also having laser guns and light sabers.

All this tells me that it may be time for another screening of 2001. Now is probably the time to do it -- I've got whole days of the week home alone without much else to do except to try not to spend money. (I'm still about a month away from being eligible to work here, and in the meantime, am just trying not to increase my own financial burden on the world.) It would be especially useful, now that I've just seen Gravity, to marvel at the first movie that amazed its audiences -- those who weren't bored, that is -- by the possibilities of making space seem realistic on film. (Not to mention just seeing Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, which addresses the abstractions that Gravity doesn't address.)

Oh, and it also made huge strides forward in the field of monkey acting.

Twentiers vs. thousandaires

In recent days I've had a number of lively discussions with friends about their preference for what to call the year 2010.

There are two obvious choices: "two thousand ten" and "twenty ten." Then there's the slightly less popular choice that's very similar to the first: "two thousand and ten," though I think that's said mostly by people who say "September the 11th."

I've got my own preference, and I contend that we had the decision collectively made for us by a movie that came out 26 years ago.

When a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released 16 years later in 1984 -- and, in many minds, quite superfluously -- it was called 2010: The Year We Make Contact. You didn't hear anyone call it "Twenty Ten: The Year We Make Contact," and the reason was obvious: As a sequel to 2001, it should clearly bear the same naming properties. Even if, in a vacuum, you would have called that year "twenty ten," its very status as a follow-up to "two thousand one" meant it would be named "two thousand ten."

And since we had no other reason to make mention of that year before that point -- no more so than we would randomly talk about 2016, 2049 or 2742 -- it settled in our consciousness and stuck. 2010 would be "two thousand ten" when it actually arrived on the calendar.

Except now, there's been a serious "twenty movement." A lot of people I've talked to would really prefer "twenty ten." They think it sounds buoyant and whimsical and snappy. I'm inclined to agree, but I don't think that alone is a reason to determine how a year is referenced in speech.

They cite the precedent of the 1900s, when things were called "nineteen" and not "one thousand nine hundred." The statement "Well duh" should cover that pretty well. In that case it's clearly just a syllables issue. Not to mention the precedent set by the previous five or six hundred years of spoken language.

But rolling over to 2000 changed the rules, and gave us a new precedent that we've been using for ten years. Ten years is, I believe, long enough for a precedent, even when the previous precedent lasted the better part of a millennium. Clearly we weren't going to call those years "twenty one" or "twenty seven," for the obvious reason that those numbers already exist and mean something quite different. Never mind the fact that people would never know you were actually referring to a year unless you prefaced it with "the year." We could have, I suppose, called those years "twenty oh one" and "twenty oh seven," but that just sounds stupid.

I understand those people who want to restore the "twenty" naming structure, but I think our collective memory of a movie not very many of us saw should win out in this case. I have not even seen all of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, which is quite strange because I had it on VHS at one point and watched the opening ten minutes several times. If you've never seen 2010, it's worth a rental just for those eerie opening minutes, some of the eeriest I've ever seen. It's basically just a recap of some of the final events of 2001, but it's handled in the form of still images and a computer report typewriting over them, plus some damn scary music. And if you've never heard Keir Dullea's line "My God, it's full of stars" all twisted and warped by computer distortion, it'll give you nightmares. I'm getting chills right now -- maybe I need to add this movie to my queue and finally watch the whole thing.

And because of 2010, I think it was all the easier for me to call Roland Emmerich's recent disaster epic "two thousand twelve." The fact that it's a different year, however, could make a difference in how other people named the movie. Some people are now telling me they did call 2012 "twenty twelve," and I don't want to accuse them of lying. After all, 2012 is both an Olympic year and a presidential election year, so we'd been referring to it long before the movie was even a glint in Emmerich's eye. (Plus, 2012 has always been the end of the Mayan calendar, so a lot of us knew it in that context before the movie anyway). I guess it's quite possible that the International Olympic Committee has been calling them "twenty twelve" and "twenty sixteen" for years now. I can't rightly say that I remember. Or, it could be that just as in society at large, different members of the IOC have been saying it differently. It hardly makes sense to set an institutional policy, right?

And here's where I may shock you -- I agree with the twentiers once we reach 2020. Rather arbitrary, right? Perhaps I'm the worst offender out there, because I advocate different methods depending on where we are in the century. Then again, so do all the twentiers, who certainly didn't complain about saying "two thousand one." But at least their transition date makes some amount of sense. They say we should start using "twenty" as soon as it is semantically viable, in 2010.

Why 2020 for me? Again it has to do with the precedent set by a movie.

In 2004 I saw a Chinese language film called 2046, directed by Wong Kar Wai. (It actually says Kar Wai Wong on IMDB -- I must admit I am still flummoxed about how to correctly say Chinese names, which is another issue altogether, but I heard it as Wong Kar Wai at the time, which dovetails quite nicely with this discussion.)

When referencing this film to other people, it felt natural to me to call it "twenty forty-six." And that's how I alphabetized it in my movie list. Instead of taking all the numbered titles and putting them together, as they do at some video stores, I alphabetize as they would appear if you spelled the numbers out in words. So 2046 would actually appear before 2001 and 2010, as "twenty" comes before "two" in the alphabet.

So even though I was not consciously aware of it at the time, I was having this naming debate with myself as long as six years ago. I didn't acknowledge anything strange about the fact that I had automatically called this movie "twenty forty-six," even though the others began with "two thousand." It did not seem to require an intellectual explanation.

But obviously I don't advocate starting to call the years "twenty whatever" only in time for 2046. That would be ludicrous indeed.

So when, logically, should that start? Here's where the twentiers probably have a point. They think we should start it now. I think we should wait until 2020, when, paradoxically, everyone will confuse everyone else by having to explain whether they are talking about a year, or the name of a popular TV snow.

And I guess the only reason I really think that is because of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, which has already claimed this entire decade for itself.

Strange but somehow sturdy reasoning, don't you think?

Or, what you could do is say that 2010 will be the final year we use "two thousand," instead of 2009. That could satisfy both camps: those who want to respect the precedent set by the movie, and those who want to switch over to "twenty" pretty damn soon. Because as I'm thinking about it, although "two thousand ten" doesn't sound unwieldy to me, "two thousand eleven" sort of does. Plus there's something appropriate about making the switch in 2011, as that is the actual beginning of the next decade, as we all know from the whole "when is it really the new millennium" debate that was regularly discussed in 1999, 2000 and 2001.

Who knows if a consensus will ever be reached. We're only on day five of this new frontier.

But me, I plan to pay pretty close attention to see which wins out.

Check back here in January of 2020 for my follow-up post.