No-one can hear you yawn

It's no good. I saw 2001 for the first time a couple of weeks ago as part of the BFI's Kubrick season and at the end I couldn't help thinking it was basically a load of pretentious bollocks, not to mention stultifyingly dull. I put off blogging about it straightaway because the film is regarded as a masterpiece and I thought it may need time for its merits to sink in. The end was even met with a round of applause at the BFI screening, and not in a "thank Christ that was over" fashion.

But sadly, my opinion of Kubrick's sci-fi opus hasn't really changed. If you've not seen it, imagine several very long sequences of monkeys jumping about, ships docking and weird psychedelic hyperspace-type dimensions with intermittent appearances by a big black monolith, some of which are soundtracked by famous classical pieces, and you've got a fair idea of what it's like. There are some characters and dialogue, but you get the feeling Kubrick could happily have gone without. This is very much moviemaking as visual artwork. Oh, and the monolith emits seriously loud blasts of white noise, so there is an element of endurance contest to the whole experience too.

2001's influence is clearly huge, purely from the amount of loving homages (ripoffs) and references you see in other films and TV shows. Even if you've never seen it, there's a good chance you've heard of HAL the crazy robot. So a lot of people clearly adore this film. Although I don't consider myself geeky enough to add my review on IMDB every time I see a film, I do feel compelled to view the IMDB comments whenever I can't quite get my head around one. 2001 currently sits in the top 250 (at #87, 8.4 out of 10 average score) and a significant number of users call it a masterpiece, a work of art up there with the best canvasses or symphonies. On the other hand, there were plenty of people decrying it as the most boring thing they'd ever seen, but as ever with the internets, these angrier people seemed, shall we say, a fuck sight less intelligent than the positive commenters.

So where does this leave me? When people clapped at the BFI, I felt like an uncultured philistine. This is a film I should like. It's beautifully shot and clearly has something profound to say about the human condition. The BFI helpfully provided their own handout, which contained a whole raft of Big Questions which an American student wrote to Kubrick about in 1968 when it was released. There is clearly a lot to discuss, my problem is I just could not engage with 2001 on any meaningful level that would make me even care about those questions. It left me feeling utterly cold and uninvolved in the same way that most modern art does, the difference being that I suspect the latter is intended to make me feel that way.

Maybe we should be grateful for any film that sparks such debate. I guess I just have an old-fashioned desire to see films with proper dialogue and characters I can engage with, rather than merely great visuals and oblique metaphor. I really, really wanted to get through this post without using the term "Emperor's New Clothes", but that's exactly the way I feel.

Still, Full Metal Jacket was great.