OFF: Misc. ranting...

[Nick Medford]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:12:45 +0100, M Holmes <fofp at HOLYROOD.ED.AC.UK> wrote:

>Nick Medford writes:
>
>> Solaris was made by Andrei Tarkovsky, a truly great director IMHO, but I
>> wouldn't say it was one of his best films. If you've never seen a
Tarkovsky
>> film, it's worth knowing that they tend to be a) very long and b) very
>> slow.
>
>> At best they are like celluloid meditations, at worst they lapse into
>> serious tedium. Solaris has a particularly celebrated/notorious sequence,
>> early on in the movie, where the central character is driving through a
>> system of road tunnels (we're still on Earth at this point) and there is
>> something like ten uninterrupted minutes of tracking shots of the tunnel
>> walls flashing past. This actually looks great, but certainly goes on for
>> long enough to make viewers a little restless. However there are people
who
>> rate Solaris as one of the greatest films ever made. Its reputation was
>> probably hurt somewhat by being tagged as the "Soviet answer to 2001" by
>> some sections of the press, and the two were compared in a sort of head-
to-
>> head way in some reviews at the time. I haven't seen the Cloonified
remake,
>> but I imagine it would be much more in keeping with the conventions of
big
>> budget cinema.
>> Tarkovsky made another film, "Stalker",

>Based on an extremely interesting SF novel, "Roadside Picnic" by Boris
>Strugatsky. The "catastophe" to which you refer was basically a UFO
>stopping by for a picnic. The weird shit that happens afterwards is, in
>the concept of the writer, just a result of the picnic leaving some
>trash behind. Think of it as "The Gods Must Be Crazy" in reverse, where
>we are picking up the aliens Coke Cans and wondering "what the fuck is
>this and what does it do?" Part of it is that anyone who leaves "The
>Zone" will cause million to one accidents, and that shit deep into the
>Zone can instantly turn you inside out, or worse. The "Stalkers" are
>just people who've learned to navigate the Zone, and since they can't
>make a living elsewhere (see above) they take tourists into it to look
>for Good Stuff and try not to get turned from innies to outies.
>
>All in all, the movie missed several interesting themes from the book

Certainly sounds like it, it's a long time since I saw the movie but I'm
sure much of the above wasn't in there- I don't even think it was ever made
clear what the catastrophe actually was. OTOH one of the things I liked
about the film was (to borrow Paul's word) its impressionistic quality- it
didn't bother me that the narrative (what little there was) gave no sense
of context, as this meant the events depicted seemed to exist in their own
weird bubble of space-time, without reference to anything else, and this
actually made the film fascinating, and added to the sense of psychological
exploration. However I can imagine feeling a bit short-changed if I'd
previously read the book, based on your description above.

Nick