A geek odyssey

Yesterday, a group of us went on a sojourn to the Astor Theatre to watch a fillum. The film in question was 2001: A space odyssey and was presented on a 70mm awesome print, and was accompanied by an introduction and Q & A session following the film by its stars, Kier Dullea and Gary Lockwood. All in all, one might think, a delightful expedition.

Well, most of it was.

The introduction was great, the film itself was great (and I'd never seen it on the big screen so doubly great), the discussion after was great. Until we got to the Q & A. The problem with these kind of sessions is while you know there are generally intelligent people sitting in the audience somewhere, they're not the ones to leap up to the microphone and then refuse to let it go. The questions ranged from "what did you eat in the final sequence of the film?" to "do you believe in aliens?" to "did you like the film?". Bloody hell. Is that the best we can do? This is probably one of the few times (if not the only time) these people are going to be in Melbourne, and these are the best questions we can come up with. I was quite embarrassed. The stars even gave hints before the movie, talking about which were their favourite scenes and saying maybe we could talk about that afterwards. Nobody asked them about the scenes they mentioned. Some of the questioners seemed to have trouble distinguishing the actors from their characters and I'm pretty sure some others thought that the entire film was fact.

I've never been to a sci-fi convention but this is the sort of behaviour I expect at them. I'm just sorry that the Q & A got hijacked by geeks.