"It's a piece of art."

Welcome back to the Content Maw! Once a month, Cast Iron Brains peers into the endless, gaping mouth of available consumable content and picks a piece to talk about. This month, it’s Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or, maybe it’s Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 pretentious ego-trip, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Enjoy our friendly bickering below, or on the preferred podcast-catching service of your inner Star Child’s wildest imagination.

Not much to the show note this week. It’s possible I’ll blog about this movie more in the future, in which case I’ll add that to this. This is a movie that asks a great deal of the viewer. I think it’s up to the viewer to decide how much they want to extract from it.

As of today, you can stream 2001: A Space Odyssey on HBO MAX, or rent it from any of a number of other services, or probably find it at your local library. And when the pandemic is over, you can usually find it playing at a decent artsy-fartsy theater once a year or so.

Here’s the Atlantic article from a few years back we mentioned in the show. “Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous.”

Here’s a rundown from a couple years back on the impact the film has had on the last 50 years of popular culture. https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/how-2001-a-space-odyssey-has-influenced-pop-culture.html

And here’s a very short video of Stanley Kubrick giving an interview to a Japanese media outlet, trying to very briefly explain human transcendence through art, both in the specific and the general—never a good idea.