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Watching 2001 with my nephew yesterday was all kinds of awesome. He is a big Star Wars fan and loves space movies, so I brought over this Mother Of All Space Movies, telling him that of all such films made, this one is still the most realistic and scientifically accurate one ever made. (Amazing, isn't it? 1967, and it still hasn't been beat.)

So we started with a little pep talk. I told Diego that he mustn't expect anything like SW, that the movie would be slow and careful and full of details, and that he would have to think while watching it. To my satisfaction, none of this put him off. On the contrary, he was eager to begin! I also told Pumpkin, my 5-year-old niece, that she would probably get very bored very soon, and if she wanted to leave, it would be perfectly okay. (She stayed for a little, but it was funny how fast she took off.)

We began and he was very quickly captivated. After the first fanfare - Also Sprach Zarathustra, of course - I told Diego that he should listen as well as watch, because the music was also very important, and would tell him things itself. We did a lot of pausing to ask questions and explain things, as scenes like the conference on the moon were completely impenetrable to him. But I was both satisfied and impressed with how quickly and easily he understood things when I spelled them out for him, and how he grasped the underlying Big Issues in the movie.

He's a pretty damn smart kid. For instance, he piped up right away about the mistake that Frank and Dave make in letting HAL watch them talk about him in the pod. "He's reading their lips!" he said excitedly the moment I answered his question about whether HAL's "eye" could see into the pod. We laughed and rolled our eyes together over such an incredibly elementary fumble on the supposedly genius astronauts' parts. (It was interesting and frustrating to hear Keir Dullea say in the commentary that this idea had come about because Kubrick was stuffing the story with too much crap to justify HAL's paranoia, and Dullea suggested they give HAL something concrete to obsess over instead of just suspicions. Thus the conversation, and thus the error so juvenile that I've never met anyone who'd seen the film who didn't spot it instantly.)

Diego was especially fascinated with the idea of the "carousel set", the huge doughnut-shaped upended rotating set that simulated the artificial gravity portion of the ship. I had to explain it in detail, even making a quick sketch on a piece of paper so he could visualize what I meant. In fact, all the FX fascinated him. He's grown up with idea that all such things are done with computers, so whenever I screen an FX-heavy film from before the era of CGI, he's full of questions about how things were done.

Side note: The first time I blew his mind with such an explanation was when we watched the Keanu film Speed, and I explained to him that the credit sequence - a long, long descending shot of the inside of a bank of elevators - was really done with a 30-foot miniature lying on a massive table, with the cameras moving along the table, and then flipping the image so it seemed to be going vertically instead of horizontally. He was AMAZED at that - it was his first introduction to the concept that nothing on the screen is what you think it is. "You can never depend on the existence of anything that isn't inside that rectangular square, and what's in there probably isn't what you think, either," I said. Then I leaned over and whispered, "It's magic."

He also is interested in the language of film, how using this or that shot or bit of music or lighting adds to the storytelling. I pointed out to him how the long, long, long takes of the African veldt and the lives of the apemen get the viewer completely into their world, and how it sets you up to react and feel the reactions of the apemen to the appearance of the Monolith. All that slow, natural time makes it a complete shock to the system - by the time it appears, you understand just how completely WEIRD that thing really is. I pointed out that at the time this is happening, there is nothing on the planet that looks like that. Nothing artificial exists, so the Monolith breaks every rule of existence to these creatures. That blew his mind, too, heehee!

When we got the part where Dave is disconnecting HAL, we were deep into philosophical questions of what intelligence is, and whether HAL could really feel what was happening. It was intense. Right about that time, I offered to explain the whole thing ahead of time, but Diego immediately refused the offer. He was enjoying the difficulty of the film! (* Kermit YAY flail here *) When the light show portion started, I told him, "Okay, I'm not going to explain anything else. You just watch, and when it's over, we can talk about what you think happened." We did, and he loved all of it - the weird FX, and the hotel room, and the Starchild. We danced to the Blue Danube at the end, and then sat down and talked about the meaning of the ending. I had told him that the story had tandem versions, movie and book, and that if he wanted to know Arthur's details of the how and why of what happened, he should read the book. But if he wanted to know Kubrick's explanation, he was out of luck, because Stanley never explained anything to anybody. "If you don't get it, too bad," I said. "You have to figure it out yourself." Another thing he loved and that intrigued him - the idea that the audience had to write the ending!

So 2001 was like catnip for him. It's also another volley in the arsenal I'm using to make sure he goes into filmmaking. Ever since he started to make little noises about wanting to make movies, I've been encouraging him. I have him over for movies and bring them over to his house (next door). We've watched some of the LOTR special features, though they are pretty technical at times. And we talk about movies and moviemaking in general conversations whenever it comes up. The middle school he's going to has a filmmaking prep course, and I've talked to him about the LA Film School, a great place here in Hollywood that offers a 2-year intensive education in film. (One of the best things about it is that it's immersive and cuts across disciplines - you're not only learning by doing, you learn everything, from stem to stern, so you're fully prepared.) He's really into it. I just keep calmly feeding him, while continuing to tell him that he has no need to wait for school. With the gadgets we have now, he can just start making a movie whenever he wants, after all.

* sigh * It's so great watching young lives unfold.

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