What is Greatness--in movies, over time, from here?

Rating: 10/10 (14 June 2009)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
It seems foolish to write a review of such a widely, and probingly, reviewed film--there are whole books on it, including Arthur C. Clarke's own The Lost Worlds of 2001, and the movie is detailed beautifully on Wikipedia. In short, the movie is so unafraid to touch on the biggest of issues, and to do so without conventional religion, it's totally brave and gripping. It is also technically astonishing--the upside down stewardess, the music, the future and the past so compatible. If you can slow yourself down and just get absorbed, this is a true original, and a really beautiful one.
In a fun way, 2001 is a personality sorter. There are those who love to wallow in meaning of life enigmas, and others who want to enjoy life and laugh and cry. I oversimplify to make a point. For those who want to be whisked away on a mind trip without a drop of action- adventure, and end with an LSD-style interior apocalypse, this is the movie of choice. If you require an actual plot, with a conflict between actual humans (and not just a droning computer antagonist), then hesitate.
So, if it's a great movie for me, is it completely overrated to someone else? And can I get that? Well, yes, I can see how it might bore someone completely. Completely. So for my kind of personality, it must connect to something else that really matters. I saw it in the theater when I was ten, in 1968, and it gloriously shook me up, maybe even changed my life. I am sure I was already a good agnostic (a ten year old agnostic being what it is) and so the ambiguity about the meaning of the universe in 2001 was awfully disturbing. It both confirmed the impossibility of knowing anything beyond our own world, and it made me love the beauty of every moment that we have, now, while it's here. Whether it helped form an impressionable boy or just paralleled his inner nature, I can't say. So I loved it, and love it. The movie is elegant, dreamy, spacey (yeah), and trippy. It can't be watched indifferently, but unlike a shocking movie, this demands not a reaction but an immersion. That's me. I like to wallow.
A good friend who loves many of the movies I do hates 2001, along with Pauline Kael (who gets hung up on the evolution/reincarnation issue) and other smart, open-minded, movie-loving reviewers. Such is the status of 2001. But my friend, as deep as he is, is a social person, and he loves human interaction and plot much more than philosophical excess. Why would he like the simple nothingness of this movie, which is nearly a silent movie from start to finish?
What, beyond individual taste, in some broader, universal way, makes a great movie? The absence of a few terrible reactions. The presence of astonishing ones? Is greatness in art, music, literature--any creative work simultaneously held high as a shining example and held down for critical analysis--always relative? It doesn't seem like it. Some movies really are better, otherwise, what are we to make of 100 best film lists, or film studies programs devoted to Kane and Potemikin and The Godfather?
The brilliant, innovative, risk-taking minds and bodies who poured themselves into 2001 really did have some edge on the less brilliant, less innovate people involved in other films, whatever they are. I'm not talking money here, or even expected creativity--that weird quality of knowing what pretends to be creative and achieving the look, but not the essence of originality. There are qualities that can be circled in a great movie: 1) something never remotely seen before, 2) something taken to the far edge of beauty, and 3) something that has resolution, a term we use in art school for work that seems to know what it wants to do and achieves it, regardless of whether you like it or not.
A movie is great for me in more personal ways, but I'm asking universally--what makes a movie simply "great." I suppose this is stupid, and it's definitely long-winded.
And rules are bogus, but maybe these are starting points. It's certainly easy to see what is not successful in this movie, in ordinary terms--the acting is generally atrocious (except the apes, of course), though this might be on purpose. Even the casting is questionable. I've never liked Keir Dullea in his role as the protagonist. This might be Kubrick's little bit of intuitive genius here, because he's picked an actor who has less life than the computer, and he does not undermine the movie even as he is overwhelmed by it. His acting is stretched into the mechanical, underplayed zone as a counterpart to HAL's emotive cunning. As a creative director looking to push movies artistically, Kubrick goes two steps beyond his own epic and stiff Spartacus in a decade when the American movie scene was rediscovering a new humanism and realism through directors like Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) and Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1968), and actor/director Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider, 1969). It stands apart from these, an evolutionary dead end on its own terms, but hugely influential in terms of vision and technique.