More films and experiences will be shared in this final part as regards the treasure trove from my FILMS AND LITERATURE CLASS of 2014-2015.
The quality of these timeless classics is faultless and you can imagine how overjoyed I was to watch works I had read or known so much about from annals of popular culture.
So without further ado, I share the next batch of titles with you.
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2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
The day I saw this one classic title has been etched in my mind. A previous class which had been opted by another one of my fast friends and I only dragged on, surpassing its time slot. I was dutifully sitting there and knew I had missed the first few minutes of the film. But thankfully not all was lost as ten minutes later, I was in the library hall and for the next two hours or so was entranced by the visionary barrage of futuristic images that flooded the screen.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was everything I had heard about it as a standalone piece. It had the foresight to anticipate space travel, artificial intelligence not only a year before the actual moon landing in 1969 but from the prism of a whole generation away in case of the latter. No wonder myths still circulate about Mr. Kubrick being roped in to stage the Moon Landing on a soundstage, given his uncompromising stance. The giant leap for the space age had indeed by accomplished by the filmmaker.
To me, this adaptation of an Arthur C. Clarke science fiction screenplay was the original pre-HD picture, shot with such realism, in the style that would eventually define 21st century's obsession with a world beyond our earthly realm. That is the eye for detail regarding lighting and other technicalities that allowed Stanley Kubrick to excel.
'Timeless' and 'way, way ahead of its time' fit its oeuvre perfectly then. As for that climactic inter -galactic odyssey through time and space for the protagonist ( Keir Dullea), well, all I can say is that it is the stuff that cosmic dreams are made of. From the solitary horror of the black monoliths to HAL 9000's beam like presence and vocal frigidity to the fluid and balletic shots inside the spaceship and out of its confines, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is hypnotic and realistically mounted at every turn, eschewing the lure of easy fantasy for factual representation.
There would be no GRAVITY, AD ASTRA or THE MARTIAN and INTERSTELLAR today without its original benchmark. It probed the very origins of mankind along with its larger scheme of things for the future more convincingly than any scholastic tome ever could.
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A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .
Non-FictionI have often wondered about the very curdled natures of our opinions so much so that the perch of imagination simply becomes a bystanding abstraction and real thoughts of genuine merit slip between the fingers. That is a human tendency, to beat arou...
