Recut of 2001

[pwhodges]

What on earth is the point of doing this?

[url]http://filmmakermagazine.com/92370-soderbergh-posts-his-110-minute-recut-and-rethink-of-kubricks-2001/#.VLv-LB-9KnO[/url]

[url]http://extension765.com/sdr/23-the-return-of-w-de-rijk[/url]

[Rosenakahara]

To piss off everyone with any sense of taste.

[UrsusArctos]

Seems like an attempt to make 2001 watchable by people with no sense of beauty or patience. If Soderbergh truly wanted to succeed in that, he should've remade the entire movie instead of wrecking Kubrick's work. (This is the same man who remade Solaris and seems to have done a decent job, nothing stopped him from trying the same with 2001)

[Oz]

There are movie buffs who do fan re-edits of movies all the time. The only difference in this case is that it's not just a movie buff but an established director who did it, but I don't think that really matters much. Soderbergh didn't get any money from this project and it seems like he was just doing something he likes in his spare time. I can still enjoy the original film (which is one of my all time favorites) just the same as before.

[brendansteere]

Yeah, I think it's probably more playful than people are assuming. Soderbergh has been a very meta and experimental artist in the past (see: Schizopolis, Bubble), and is someone with very little sense of sanctity in filmmaking (famously throwing away celluloid at the first chance he got and never looking back).

I think perhaps moreso than just re-editing the film to have fun doing it, he's trying to say something larger about how sacred people hold some films, and how that's... kinda silly when you really consider it. They're just pictures that move. You can shuffle 'em around with Final Cut.

Also, the run time is probably because he's pretty famously impatient. 2001 is a great film, but it does have a lot of what I would consider "dead space", and I get the metaphor, and that's cute and all, but I don't blame Soderbergh for trimming some of it out. Also, he's probably got two weeks of free time between seasons of The Knick. Heh, only so much time to tinker.

[UrsusArctos]

Apart from maybe a couple of minutes of the ape scenes, I've never found any of the "non-action" scenes superfluous or boring. They actually added to the strange, mesmeric beauty of this movie.

[Gendo'sPapa]

If I had Soderbergh's clout I'd do these fan edit exercises from time to time just to have a laugh too.

Some fun ideas:
Make a cut of 'Goodfellas' without the voiceover.
A cut of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' were the aliens aren't real.
A cut of 'Alien' without the birth scene - as it played in one theater in 1979 thanks to management.
And a cut of 'Magic Mike' without any stripping. In B&W.

:)

[FreakyFilmFan4ever]

Soderbergh's re-edits are little more than his version of AMVs, and should be viewed as harmless as an AMV exercise would be.

[brendansteere]

Apart from maybe a couple of minutes of the ape scenes, I've never found any of the "non-action" scenes superfluous or boring. They actually added to the strange, mesmeric beauty of this movie.

I can believe that. I think I was probably too young when I saw the movie to be honest, and I've since seen classics of "slow cinema" that I've totally adored. I've been meaning to give 2001 another shot and a fair shake for a while, so perhaps I'll change my mind when I check it out again.

And a cut of 'Magic Mike' without any stripping. In B&W

All of these are actually great reedit ideas, but this one's my favorite. Haha!

[Trajan]

Eh, even though I found some of the space ship scenes unnecessary and superfluous, something Kubrick is often guilty of IMO especially towards the end of his career, I find it hard to imagine chopping off a whole half hour from the movie without fundamentally changing its narrative structure. There aren't that many space ship shots.