I've only see 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen, and I loved it!   A few years ago, I tried to watch it with someone else on TV, and they were so bored that we ended up switching it off.   I don't know if it's the screen size making a difference, or if it's just about whether you like Kubrick's style.  Personally, I think he's a genius, although he seems to have been difficult to work with.

Eyes Wide Shut is definitely worth a go.  I remember it wasn't terribly well reviewed when it came out, but I really enjoyed it. 

I was very impressed by 2001 even though I watched in on TV. But I needed a second start. After I got into it, I was fascinated and I can see how it has become such a groundbreaking film. 

I watched "A Clockwork Orange" years ago and read it at school but it is not one of my favourites. Not because of the film which is very close to the book but because I always felt that the book cannot decide on an attitude towards the problems it presents. As dystopian novels go, I much prefer "1984" or "Brave New World" or "Fahrenheit 451". 

I quite liked "Eyes Wide Shut" (not a fan of Cruise though). "The Shining" is quite stunning but not true to the book which made Stephen King quite angry.

To me "Lolita" remains one of Kubrick's masterpieces.  

I forgot about this topic, but I thought I'd add my two cents. There are spoilers.

I finally saw 2001 a couple weeks ago in 70mm in a cinema. I didn't know what I was going to think, but I ended up enjoying it.
I had spoken to a friend two months before who said she thought it was two slow. She said to me that you could leave for a while and come back and nothing would have happened. Contrary to her experience, I never found it dragged. It passed by very quickly. The presentation at the cinema had an intermission before the last hour of the film, and for me that last hour after the intermission felt like 20 minutes. I mumbled "that can't be it already." But it was, of course.
While on the big cinema screen I found the rotation of the space station at the beginning of the second section of the film kind of aggravating, I still got a lot of pleasure from watching the images of floating spacecraft and seeing the technology on display (there was even technology that we have now, like seatback TV screens on planes and portable screens - even HAL is like Siri and Google Home and I can't help but wonder if those have female voices by default so as not to sound like HAL). Sometimes it felt like watching a ballet, except the dancers are technology. The technical achievement of the film is really something and holds up well, I found, like when one character is shown jogging around the walls of a round room. I have an idea of how they would have done it, but it would not have been easy. It's like a more complicated version of Fred Astaire dancing on the walls and ceiling in that scene from Royal Wedding.
People have been puzzling over what the film might mean for 50 years, so I don't expect to have a solid answer for myself right away. I don't think there's just one meaning, even in my own interpretation.
One way that the monolith could be interpreted is that it is the catalyst for all of humanity's technological progress. There's evidence to support it in the film. But that doesn't sit right with me. To say that progress is all because of the intervention of some power beyond our control cheapens humanity's capability, in my opinion. Humans advance technology, and it's impressive. I don't understand why someone would want to believe that that's not the case, claim something else is responsible. Though I guess even the film is more complicated than that. The psychedelic sequence where the one character sees into the monolith could suggest that, instead, the monolith allows people to see the possibilities, but then they are able to create the future for themselves. But maybe that's more wishful thinking? A man couldn't become a giant glowing baby on his own, lol (though stuff like that can be more symbolic than literal).
Throughout a lot of the film, I was noticing the geometric shapes of things. Humans create a lot of things that rotate and are circular or round (there's a lot of rotating motion throughout the film), while the monolith is a rectangle. For a lot of the film I couldn't help but wonder if HAL was part monolith, part human creation, because HAL is a circle inside a rectangle. But not much ended up confirming that, not completely anyway.

Last edited by Yitzock (January 9, 2018 10:58 pm)

Thanks. I wasn't sure whether anyone would be interested, but I wanted to talk about it if I had the chance. I needed to let out my thoughts.
I get what you mean about the latter part of the film being cryptic. While I thought it was still interesting, visually, and I had stuff to think about while watching it, the first parts of the film were more interesting to me, too. But I suppose if we stuck with Dave for the rest of the film it wouldn't have been an "Odyssey" in the way it was constructed, not in the same way.

A museum exhibit about the film sounds interesting. I read somewhere that Kubrick had the plans for his designs for 2001 destroyed so that nobody would copy them in their own films, so everything had to be recreated from scratch in the 80s when they made the film 2010. So I wonder what they will actually be able to display. There must be stuff that survived or else they wouldn't be able to have an exhibit at all.
Years ago, there was a Kubrick exhibit and retrospective at the place where I saw 2001 this year. I never got the chance to go, though.

Well, it might not have been everything that was lost. Can't control every crew member. It sounds like it would be an interesting exhibit, either way.