REEL RETRO CINEMA | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

Jul26

The Powerful, Clashing Visions of KUBRICK’s and KIRBY’s ‘2001’

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Jul 26, 2025

The Powerful, Clashing Visions of KUBRICK’s and KIRBY’s ‘2001’

REEL RETRO CINEMA: A birthday tribute to Stanley Kubrick… — UPDATED 7/26/25: The late Stanley Kubrick was born 97 years ago. Perfect time to reprint this piece from Jack Kirby’s centennial celebration in 2017. Dig it. — Dan — Rob Kelly’s REEL RETRO CINEMA offers new looks at old flicks — and their comic-book adaptations. Here, he takes on 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of our 13 DAYS OF KIRBY 100 celebration of the King’s centennial. For other REEL RETRO CINEMA columns, click here. or the complete 13 DAYS OF KIRBY 100 Index of stories and features, including essays by the likes of Alex Ross, John Byrne, Marie Severin, Kelley Jones and many others, click here. By ROB KELLY In 1968, Stanley Kubrick decided to slow things down. As a new wave of directors and writers descended on Hollywood in the late 1960s, movies got faster and faster. Just a year earlier, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a new level of hyped-up screen violence, and the film became a massive, groundbreaking hit. But Stanley Kubrick was never one for rushing. It had been a full four years since his last film, Dr. Strangelove, and when he returned to movie theaters it was with a film of breathtaking visuals and challenging ideas. Loosely based on a short story of Arthur C. Clarke’s called The Sentinel, 2001: A Space Odyssey would open in our prehistoric past, focusing on a small tribe of hominids as they struggle to survive. Featuring no music and no dialogue, Kubrick was testing audiences’ patience and forcing them to accept the rhythms from the distant past he was trying to replicate. Eventually, however, something strange happens: A solid black monolith appears, which seems to guide the hominids into learning how to use bones as a weapon. One of them, in an orgiastic display of enlightenment, tosses a bone into the sky. We then make a flash cut to a space station orbiting Earth, a time jump of several hundred million years. In its slow, methodical way, 2001 reveals its story. Another monolith, similar to the one that appeared in our prehistoric past, has been discovered on the moon. When a team of astronauts investigates, it emits a powerful high-pitched signal. We then jump another 18 months ahead, and two astronauts, Drs. David Bowman (Keir...

Jul03

The 1985 RED SONJA MOVIE 40 Years Later — Such a Missed Opportunity

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Jul 3, 2025

The 1985 RED SONJA MOVIE 40 Years Later — Such a Missed Opportunity

REEL RETRO CINEMA: New looks at old flicks and their comics adaptations… By ROB KELLY Marking the first time a Marvel Comics creation got its own feature film, Red Sonja hit theaters July 3, 1985. Despite featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger at the peak of his powers, moviegoers flocked to a different sci-fi/fantasy movie that weekend — Back To The Future. Starring Brigitte Nielsen as the title character (her film debut), Red Sonja unfolds pretty much like you’d expect from a movie of this type — the evil Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman, Valeria in Conan The Barbarian) murders Sonja’s parents and brother after Sonja rejected her sexual advances, which sets our hero off on a quest for revenge. On the way, Sonja meets a female spirit who bestows upon her heightened sword-fighting skills — but only if she never sleeps with a man, unless that man defeats her in combat (an element from the comics they could have left behind). She befriends a warrior named Kalidor (Schwarzenegger), as well as an annoying boy prince (Ernie Reyes, Jr.) and his loyal manservant (Paul Smith, who played another comic-strip character, Bluto, in 1980’s Popeye). None of this is terribly original. Neither was the first Conan movie (whose plot beats this film copies), but that entry was told with such high style and energy that it didn’t really matter. Unfortunately, director Richard Fleischer, fresh off the very silly Conan The Destroyer, also helmed Red Sonja. Fleischer has some genuinely terrific films on his resume (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Narrow Margin, Compulsion, Fantastic Voyage, Soylent Green), but by the 1980s he had a string of turkeys that would test the mettle of any moviegoer (The Jazz Singer remake, Amityville 3-D, the aforementioned Conan The Destroyer). Whether those films were the result of Fleischer having lost his touch, or just bad luck, I don’t know, but Red Sonja is so dull and lifeless that he bears a lot of the blame. Part of that, of course, is the casting of Nielsen as Red Sonja. When I was a kid reading her comics, the main takeaway was how much of a take-no-prisoners ass-kicker Sonja was. A lot of that was undoubtedly due to the artwork by Frank Thorne, whose panels were filled to the edges with detail and bits of business, with the absurdly gorgeous...

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