Well, it's been a while hasn't it? It's my own fault. Made myself and my schedule pretty busy this semester. And although I am enjoying it immensely (since I have been unemployed/unanything in the past), I really do miss this place. I feel like I am straying away from my goal of becoming a journalist. The proof for that is the fact that I applied for the PhD program in our own department, though I never had it in my future plans. But I had a couple of reasons for that. One might have been the fact that I am a coward...in taking risks. The other being that I don't feel like I am ready to be a "grown-up" and take responsibility. The third is the fact that the chance of getting an assistantship or an scholarship for the journalism program is really slim and neither do I have the money myself or want to put the load on my parents. The last and the most important one is that since my parents spent a lot of money to send me here and put themselves through trouble and many emotional strains (since they were sending their little kid to a far away land) so that I can have a better future, I felt like I owed them and that would make them happy. And I believe I was right. Because although they kept telling me do whatever makes you happy but when I told them that I had decided to continue my studies, I could see their faces light up!
Anyway...I wanted to give a little update on myself and where I am standing right now in life. But the fact is that I was too busy to even watch a movie for the past month or so. The lovely Amherst cinema had a Kubrick festival for September and their Lynch festival has started since last week. So I got to see Kubrick's Space Odyssey and Lolita a couple of weeks back and I took notes for the first one but as you can see hadn't gotten a chance to write it here. I hope my memory serves me well in transcribing my emotions and thoughts from those movies.
Let me start with this, me and my friend went to see this movie and our jaws were literally dropped! And the main reason for that (other than the fact that it was an amazing, thought-provoking movie), was when you brought into consideration the time of the making of the film. How could anyone come up with such an idea 45 years ago?! When you compare this movie to the movies that were made in Iran back then, or even in Hollywood...I think I can rest my case now! Of course, it's a shame that it is more than 10 years past the year 2001 and we still don't have the technology to send people to Jupiter (or maybe we do but don't have the reason yet! I'm not sure).
I loved how Kubrick played with the sound to play with your mind. The shots he got from the very beginning...oh man! The scenery itself seemed to be an important character in the movie.
Let me tell you right off the bat what my take on this movie was, because my view was completely different from my friend's and it might save you some time on not reading the rest of this post. What she thought was that it was something like "War of the Worlds" where aliens had planted something on earth way before there was life on earth and all of a sudden it had unraveled. And that was what gave them the power to overcome their enemies and to drive them out. While my take was that it was a sign of how we are connected to after life and what there is and where we go when we die. And what happened with the competition was I thought just the evolution. Since I hadn't looked it up to see what others have had to say about this, so I put it up to debate. And since I don't have any comment-ors yet, I think it will continue to be an inner-debate with myself!
Speaking of War of the Worlds, I realized where the idea of how machines and computer can take over us has come from, which is pretty amazing. How it has influenced many movies and books to come...the after life, the computer/human conflicts,...from Star Wars to Contact...he had (and still has) opened a new chapter into the life in cinema.
This movie would shake you to the very core. Stimulate every living cell that there is left in your brain! (Of course, in my case, the beer that I had while watching it at the theater might have helped! I mean in stimulating, not killing the cells!) The end was predictable (probably due to many adaptations from this movie that I have seen since this one was released) but you will gasp and be engaged in the story from the very beginning. It also involves some issues that are pertinent to that era, like the cold war. But it doesn't defy the fact that you will find it interesting.
Here's a summary: the movie starts by showing images of the earth, back when there was almost no life and there were apes living in colonies and trying to survive and who had competition with other groups of apes. Then a group comes across a giant black thing that's stuck out of the ground. It radiates a noise.
Then the movie cuts into the future. It's the year 2001. There are stations in the moon and people can travel as if they were traveling on earth. But there is a top secret mission. They have found a new thing on the moon. The same giant black thing. But this time they have the technology to detect where the radiation comes from. It is from somewhere near Jupiter. So they start a plan to send a few scientists over there to check what is going on. And they have this computer, an intelligent machine, built into the spaceship who is in charge of the technical support of the scientists. But he is not in on the secret. He tries to find out and take over since he thinks humans are stupid and might mess it up. But things go wrong...
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