Back to the future

Trying fecklessly to keep to a schedule with 2/3 of the boys down with the ague, laboring under the foolish assumption that a Nice Night of Family Television would be just the ticket, what should we discover but a TCM offering of 2001, uncut and remastered just like it was on the premiere roadshow engagement of spring 1968? Well, here's a teaching moment to show at least budding cineaste Andrew th' source of more movie cliches in the last forty years than I don't know what. We decided to play the "They ripped that off from (insert more contemporary pop reference here)", although I'm not entirely sure that the notion of backwards-compatible ery was chronologically sound ("I think the point is to establish that the earlier image shows who came first." "I saw my image first, so it came first." "No, it came second." "I'm not talking about who came second." "Who came first." "I dunno." "He came third, we're not talking about him.")

On the one hand, the opening images of the moon-earth-sunrise szygny, with the Zarathrusta theme, still carry the weight of seeing the Real Moon on the gajillion-foot Cinerama screen, as did the Blue Danube approach and docking effects setpieces. And the shots are gorgously composed and lit, especially with the color remastering. And the pacing for the Dawn of Man sequence seems about right. And maybe we'll concede that the teeth-grinding banality of the dialogue once it gets started makes the point that we waste our highly developed sophistication and technology by taking it for granted.

On the other hand, I can't help but thinking as we watch: What a 60s poser. Here a bunch of the boys have rallied through the phlegm to whoop it up over the vision of swinging London haute design carried forward in a triumph of the Bauhaus will to rule the future. And Our Andrew and The Michael are catching on, "Oh, it's like flying to Grandma's." "Yeah, pretty much. Pan Am was the world's biggest and most ous airline back then. Of course it doesn't exist anymore." "But we've got videoconferencing through webcams." "Yeah, Bell Telephone was working on that in the 60s." "What's Bell Telephone?" "It was the phone company, it doesn't exist anymore." "Like Sprint." "Well, yeah since Sprint doesn't exist anymore either, but there was only one phone company." "Like Vonage." "No, we have one phone company for our landline, one phone company for our personal cell phones, another phone company for our long-distance calls, one phone company for our work landline, one phone company for our business cell phones. Back then there was one. phone. company. Period." "Well, why didn't he use his cell phone from the moon?" "They probably were out of the area." "No, nobody could imagine carrying your phone around with you and calling anybody whenever you felt like it. Phones were attached to wires that came out of the wall where the phone company ran them. You couldn't put a phone where you wanted it, the phone was put where it was easy for the installer to put it." "That's stupid. Why didn't you just tell him to put it where you wanted it?" "Because it was the phone company. You didn't tell the phone company what to do. They did what they wanted. That's why the government broke up the phone company." "Well, what kind of dumb movie about the future only has one phone company?" "Well, when you imagine the future you're really imagining your present and trying to make it better, kinda sorta. You can't imagine what you can't imagine." "George Lucas did." "But he did because he saw this movie when he was a kid, and realized that he could imagine the future just like this guy did." "Well, this guy got it wrong. I remember 2001. No space station, no colonies on the moon, and I didn't get what I wanted for my birthday. That's all that happened." "Well, some mopes drove some planes into buildings." "He missed that, too."

Well, yeah. We watch for a while in silence, interrupted by the occasional snort of "That's a computer? Computers don't look anything like that." "I don't even think the Apple guys were out of grade school by then, much less building their little boxes in their garages. Computers were still big racks in sealed rooms, and if you wanted to use the computer you had to get the computer guy to run it for you." "Well, what about games?" "They're playing chess, that's a game." "Chess is boring. This movie is boring. George Lucas made a better future." And I think again: What a 60s poser, rubbing our noses in his smug cold egotistical misanthropy. And we, including my own personal self, fell for it.

Outta th' mouth o' s. George Lucas did make a better future. And I want fries with that.