Re: CULTURE/SPACE: Tom Hanks on "2001"

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jan 14 2001 - 18:53:21 MST


At 01:21 PM 14/01/01 EST, Greg wrote:

> http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/hanks_2001_yearender.html

>It seems Mr. Hanks definitely Gets It.

Absolutely! And yet, and yet--

< And yet I was able to comprehend what was going on somehow. Like the
rival ape factions fighting over that water hole. And my God,
when that bone gets thrown up in the air and you make that
transformation into an orbiting bomb – the greatest time-cut in the history
of cinema – and the "Blue Danube" started up, I mean, I was
in heaven. I felt as though the universe were expanding before my
    very eyes. >

The horribly sad thing is that in 2001 you need to tell people about the
existence of the damned movie. At the guest lecture I gave the other day it
was kinda discouraging, given that this was the new IT generation in the
making. A fragment of *2001* was due to shown, so at the very start, before
we speakers had been introduced but were sitting at the front, the
Zarathustra theme was played. Naturally I leaped up and seized the wireless
mike, which was long and bulbous like a thigh bone, and in slo-mo mimed
beating Mark Angeli about the head with it, before pretending to hurl it
into the air. People a year or two out of high school looked baffled. Mark
muttered from the corner of his mouth that very likely none of them would
have seen the movie... Fark. What a memory-denuded media world.

Damien Broderick



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