2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Part 1/2

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 British-American science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and was partially inspired by Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". Clarke concurrently wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey which was published soon after the film was released. The story deals with a series of encounters between humans and mysterious black monoliths that are apparently affecting human evolution, and a space voyage to Jupiter tracing a signal emitted by one such monolith found on the moon. Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood star as the two astronauts on this voyage, with Douglas Rain as the voice of the sentient computer HAL 9000 who has full control over their spaceship. The film is frequently described as an "epic film", both for its length and scope, and for its affinity with classical epics.

Produced and distributed by the American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film was made almost entirely in England, using both the studio facilities of MGM's subsidiary "MGM British" (among the last movies to be shot there before its closure in 1970) and those of Shepperton Studios, mostly because of the availability of much larger sound stages than in the United States. The film was also co-produced by Kubrick's own "Stanley Kubrick Productions". Kubrick, having already shot his previous two films in England, decided to settle there permanently during the filming of Space Odyssey. Though Space Odyssey was released in the United States over a month before its release in the United Kingdom, and Encyclopædia Britannica calls this an American film, other sources refer to it as an American, British, or American-British production.

Thematically, the film deals with elements of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life. It is notable for its scientific accuracy, pioneering special effects, ambiguous imagery, sound in place of traditional narrative techniques, and minimal use of dialogue.

The film's memorable soundtrack is the result of the association that Kubrick made between the spinning motion of the satellites and the dancers of waltzes, which led him to use The Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss II, and the symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, to portray the philosophical concept of the Übermensch in Nietzsche's work of the same name.

Despite initially receiving mixed reactions from critics and audiences alike, 2001: A Space Odyssey garnered a cult following and slowly became a box office hit. Some years after its initial release, it eventually became the highest grossing picture from 1968 in North America. Today it is near-universally recognized by critics, filmmakers, and audiences as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. The 2002 Sight & Sound poll of critics ranked it among the top ten films of all time, placing it #6 behind Tokyo Story. The film retained sixth place on the critics' list in 2012, and was named the second greatest film ever made by the directors' poll of the same magazine. Two years before that, it was ranked the greatest film of all time by The Moving Arts Film Journal.  It was nominated for four Academy Awards, and received one for its visual effects. In 1991, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

In 1984, a sequel directed by Peter Hyams was released, titled 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

The Future

"We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet."

~ Stephen Hawking

Psikologist Mengatakan:

1. Apabila seseorang itu terlalu ketawa terbahak-bahak biarpun hanya perkara kecil yang langsung tidak lucu dan kelihatan bodah, dia sebenarnya seorang yang mempunyai jiwa yang sunyi.

2. Sekirannya seseorang itu banyak tidur, dia orang yang kuat bersedih.

3. Apabila dia kurang bercakap tetapi pantas berbicara, bermakna dia menyimpan seribu rahsia. 

4. Sekiranya dia skar untuk mengeluarkan airmat, dia seorang yang lemah. 

5. Kalau senang menangis meskipun benda yang kecil sahaja, dia seorang yang lembut.

6. Dan sekiranya dia cepat marah biarpun perkara sekecil kuman, itu bermakna dia perlukan kasih sayang. Berusahalah untuk memahami orang lain, selepas kita memahami diri kita sendiri.

Beautiful story (A very poor man lived with his wife.)

One day, his wife, who had very long hair asked him to buy her a comb-for her hair to grow well and to be well-groomed.

The man felt very sorry and said no. He explained that he did not  even have enough money to fix the strap of his watch he had just broken.

She did not insist on her request.

The man went to work and passed by a watch shop, sold his damaged watch at a low price and went to buy a comb for his wife.

He came home in the evening with the comb in his hand ready to give to his wife.

He was surprised when he saw his wife with a very short hair cut.

She had sold her hair and was holding a new watch band.

Tears flowed simultaneously from their eyes, not for the futility of their actions, but for the reciprocity of their love.

MORAL : To love is nothing, to be loved is something but to love and to be loved by the one you love, that is EVERYTHING. Never take love for granted.

'The New World Pope'

Political System

What created this large mysterious Siberian crater?

Having an official task to draw up a geological map of the region, a young geologist ended up running into something so unique, outstanding and mysterious that it would still puzzle scientists more than six decades later - the Patomskiy crater.

A host of theories have been put forward in the intervening years: that the crater was created by anancient civilisation, or by prisoners at a top secret Stalin labour camp, or by volcanic activity, or by a meteorite, or by an underground hydrogen explosion, or by a UFO. And even more tantalising: by two UFOs.

Stories have been handed down by native people - who knew about the 'cursed crater' long before Kolpakov revealed it to the outside world. Among these accounts, were warnings that this 'Devil's Place' was dangerous to humans.

Questions remain unanswered about a phenomenon that has been called 'The Most Mysterious Place in Russia'. For example, why don't trees grow on the side of the cone-like structure? Radiation levels are low now, but there is evidence they were once very high: why?

Despite a number of expeditions by eminent scientists, no-one has yet come up with an undisputed answer to what - or who - created this strange structure. A new mission to the remote crater is due in the coming months seeking to finally answer this question.

In August 1949, when Kolpakov reached the very north of Irkutsk region, local Yakut people told him a story about an 'evil' place, hidden in the woods.

They called it the Fire Eagle Nest, and according to them even the deer didn't dare to go close to it. Locals told a lot of legends about it, warning people would suddenly start feeling unwell or even disappear, some to be found dead later, some never to be found.

As recently as 2005, indeed, the head of a mission to the crater died suddenly within several kilometres of it.

Legends didn't scare Kolpakov back in 1949 but what he witnessed in a distance when he climbed up the hill was shocking.

'When I first saw the crater I thought that I'd gone crazy because of the heat,' he noted. 'And indeed a perfectly shaped mount of a size of a 25-storey building with a chopped off top sitting in the middle of the woods was quite an unexpected discovery.

'From a distance it looked like a mine-shaft slagheap, only whitish. I even thought, 'Where are the people?' There were no labour camps in the area. Unless a very, very secret one?

'My second thought was an archaeological artifact. But the local Evenks and Yakuts, with my respect for them, are not the ancient Egyptians. They could not build stone pyramids, and didn't have any human resources nor the necessary scientific knowledge."

He ventured gingerly towards the strange shape, like no other anywhere nearby.

'I got closer and realised that the mysterious hill was not the work of a human', said Kolpakov. 'It rather looked like a perfectly round mouth of a volcano with a height of 70 metres. But volcanoes have not appeared on the border of Yakutia and Irkutsk region for several million years. And the crater was pretty fresh. It is located on the slope of a hill overgrown with larch.

'The trees still did not grow on the slopes and in the crater, the winds had not brought the soil yet. I estimated the age of this anomaly at some 200 to 250 years. And another mystery - a semi-circular dome cavity with a diameter of 15 meters in the centre of a crater. In volcanoes, even extinct, such domes cannot exist.'

Since the discovery of this mysterious place, later named Patomskiy crater, scientists came up with widely differing theories of its origin: among them, an unknown underground explosion to the fall from space of a mysterious super dense substance unknown to man.

Or even the UFO.

But not a single one of these theories could fully explain the anomalies of the crater and the processes that still go on inside it.

The first and the most widespread explanation initially was, unsurprisingly, that ventured by Vadim Kolpakov, the Russian discoverer of the crater. After his expedition, in a scientific article he postulated that the crater was the trace of a meteorite.

Later, other scientists, namely the geologist Alexander Portnov, came to the same conclusion, arguing that it could easily be former by a piece of space rock that sliced off the famous Tunguska meteoroid that exploded over Krasnoyarsk region, to the west of Patomskiy Crater, in 1908.

Another early explanation was that the crater had volcanic origin. The shape superficially suggested this. Amateurs looking at it might see this as a probable theory. They may yet be right.

http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/a-volcano-or-a-meteor-impact-what-created-this-large-mysterious-siberian-crater/