all these resurrections

[sanspoof]

Solyaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky. February 22, 8pm. View count: One.

I definitely enjoyed this first version better than the Soderbergh/Carpenter one, despite its more cluttered structure and more Joe Don Bakerish leading man (though I say that as someone without interest in Clooneys). My respect for Solaris-the-remake is even somewhat diminished

Comments

[mmcirvin]

I was a bit disappointed by Stalker because I was a big fan of the novel it was adapted from, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, which is a short and zippy novel packed with lots of cool things, albeit in a grim and extremely Russian manner. The Strugatskys actually adapted the screenplay themselves, but there was no way Tarkovsky could possibly film all the incomprehensible alien tech and weird events in the novel, so the movie is really a short extract from an already short novel stretched out into a very long movie.

By comparison, Solaris is actually a really faithful novel adaptation; the main change aside from the tweaking of the ending is that Tarkovsky unrolled the story into a straight chronological sequence where Lem had a past and present thread alternating. The look of everything is exactly right, even where Lem's descriptions don't make a lot of sense (I really wonder about the engineers who designed that rocket launch chamber).

I thought it was interesting that in the George Clooney version, the parts that Soderbergh added out of whole cloth--the flashbacks to Kris and Rheya's relationship--were also the bits that were filmed in a self-consciously Tarkovskian style.

[piehead]

I haven't read either of the original stories. I was interested in Roadside Picnic, but it was horribly out-of-print on Amazon. Though now I see this:
http://www.amazon.com/Visitor-Outer-Space-Science-Fiction-Stories/dp/1589633318/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203820723&sr=1-2
(Too bad it uses Arial instead of Helvetica on the cover!)

As far as Solaris, I always have good intentions of reading Lem... and then find it very hard to get through. I think it's a personal problem.

[mmcirvin]

Solaris in English isn't a good introduction to Lem, because the English translation is pretty bad. It's actually an English translation of the French translation of the original. Lem can be rough sledding when he's in his ponderous, idea-heavy serious mode, and you really want a superior prose stylist doing the translating to help you along. Michael Kandel's great, but the English Solaris isn't one of his.

[diaryarena]

THERE IS A FEATURE LENGTH FILM OF ROADSIDE PICNIC BEING WORKED ON RIGHT NOW WITH JOHN TRAVOLTA AS THE LEAD

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY