One day, while I was in film school at USC, my dad casually asked who my favorite director was. I said, “Stanley Kubrick.” Christmas morning that year, I unwrapped present after present from my dad. Over a dozen. Every book ever published about Kubrick. On opening the last one, he muttered, “I think that’s the last one.” I will always remember that.
That was the year I spent editing Super-8 films for CNTV-190 all night in my room listening to the soundtracks to Schindler’s List and 2001 on infinite repeat. Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane ballet suite (later alluded to in James Horner’s score for Aliens) being the perfect, haunting music for bleak Russian steppes. Or lonely camera original editing. Or expatriation to China.
A friend at work had bought tickets to 2001: A Space Odyssey at the New Hengshan Cinema she couldn’t use, so I bought them off of her. (If memory serves, my parents saw it on their first date. And yet, I was still conceived five years later. Miraculous.) I forgot how well I know the film, frame by frame.
Even so, I couldn’t help but experience frisson at the starchild crescendo at the end.