Twisted Spinster

That scene in 2001: Space Odyssey as if it had been written by David Mamet. No, really. So wrong, and yet… so right.

Via Ace of Spades, of course. Oh yeah — because Arthur C. Clark is dead. I never read any of his stuff (too sciencey) but I did see 2001 finally a while back. Okay. Still, it was better than that freaking sequel, 2010: Space Criminey, or whatever the hell that was. You know how annoying and pretentious it is when a movie shows a scene of people shouting dialogue at each other that would normally (you know, in the real world, which science fiction and every other genre must reference for the rest of the nonsense to be believable) be simply stated in a regular tone of voice? Well, 2010 had several scenes like that. They were the high points of the movie, which also had that late-80s/early-90s cliché of the Cute Russian Character getting killed. Imagine if Star Trek had done that with Chekhov (for real, not for fake as in that one episode where aliens made the away team think they were fighting in the OK Corral), how that would have sucked. You know, because it was so hackneyed — “Aw, good-bye, cute Russian, we don’t really hate you, just your evil Commie government!” Anyway, 2001 was weird but at least made sense within its own goofy framework, whereas 2010 just sucked. Also it established — I’m sorry — that the late, great Roy Scheider’s main acting talent was a sort of prairie dog-like upright staring look, at least in movies where he didn’t have to keep up with gay jazz dancers.