The Po Show

Space Oddity

Ross was flipping channels the other night, and came upon 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've seen it many times before, and always found it visually interesting, but kind of tedious (I'm sure it's better on the big screen, and probably much more entertaining while stoned). (Speaking of the movie on the big screen, one of my favorite stories was told by a friend who saw it in the theater when it first came out. In the middle of the movie, someone threw a shoe at the screen, tearing a big hole in it. Immediately the lights came up and they locked all the exits. The audience had to file out one by one, after it had been determined that each person did indeed possess two shoes. And they never caught the person, which begs the question: did the culprit come prepared with an extra shoe? In any case, our friend was just annoyed that he never got to see the rest of the movie!)

Anyway, I've been saying for years that I need to read the book, because there's too much in the movie I don't fully get (as Rock Hudson said as he stormed out of the premiere, "Can someone tell me what the hell that was all about?" :D). I think part of it is the ways in which images from the movie have become so iconic (the episode of the Simpsons in which Homer's movements exactly parallel those of the man-ape from the beginning of 2001 is a classic). Certain themes have become iconic too, particularly the idea of a computer becoming aware and turning against its users. But that wasn't what the movie was all about, and I kind of wanted to see what it was all about.

So I went ahead and read it yesterday :). And boy, talk about a whole different experience. It's not that the storylines were all that different (though in the book the ship goes on to Saturn after swinging by Jupiter), but the level of explanation was just exponentially greater. Not that is necessarily a fault with the movie, because it was more about visual expansiveness than storyline, but I'm a word person more than an image person. I also find some of the visuals in the movie distracting, since they are so dated (space stewardesses looking like Pan Am stewardesses of the 60s always bugs me).

Next year will be 2010, the year of the first sequel. 2010 was the first movie Ross and I ever saw together (before we were a couple) and the thing I always remembered most from the film was the fact that the main character had a pool in his living room with a dolphin in it. I have often said, "It's almost 2010. Where's my dolphin??"

I like themes of humankind's place in the universe. It's so easy to get mired down in the mundane, since ultimately that is what is important to each person in his/her daily life. But every once in a while we can look up at the night sky and say, "It's full of stars."