Hipolito Navarrete, Managing Editor/Publisher

So I took a ride to space at the wonderful American Cinematheque in the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, CA and at their Saturday presentation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey my mind was blown, again. Honestly, I had never seen the film in a theatre, and I can see the difference, let me rephrase that, I experienced the difference. Every time it would be on TV and now on one of the streaming channels, I never seemed to have the attention span or the time to finish the film two hours and twenty nine minutes was just too much for a small screen, especially a smaller one than a TV and unless you have surround sound on your computer, you will miss most of the sound shock. This film surpasses every expectation I had, I am sure cinephiles are rolling their eyes, but this is not for them, it is for those of you who wonder why some folks aspire to become filmmakers and go through the humiliation of working for little or no money. It is the thought and deep personal faith that if the get enough practical experience, they will leave the world their own Odyssey, like homer did and like Kubrick did.

Although its run in Hollywood is over at the American Cinematheque, we are lucky that it will be available at The Frida Cinema from December 13 – 16, 2017, so there is a chance for you to experience a unique work of cinematic art, that when you realize it was made in 1968, you realize why the films that we are viewing today fit more on a TV screen than in the palaces where we share emotional moments that create memories that are as unclear as they are inspiring…. And leave you asking, how? And although there is no answer, there is no need for one.

There is a tradition of filmmaking that we don’t understand because we are now looking for stories that make sense rather than stories that inspire us and blow our minds. We want suspense to be managed, we hope that we are not pushed too much out of our comfort, we mostly want films sticking to the point where we are constantly clear on the trajectory rather than on the opportunity for the senses to be manipulated. In Odyssey, trying to understand the story’s second part, after intermission, is as explicable as trying to figure out at the beginning of the film on why or how did he first decide to add the sequence of the monkey-men.

There are certainly many interpretations, probably in the thousands by folks that are well versed and initiated into the palate of cinema, and they are able to explain and expand on whatever vision Kubrick had, may be even better than he did, what I can say for sure is that this film is clearly a timeless achievement, even though it is time dated.