Comments | sanspoof: all these resurrections

sanspoof

all these resurrections

Feb 23, 2008 16:46

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 ( Read more... )

shut up less 2008: movies, 2008 artings, directors

Comments 12

piehead February 24 2008, 01:58:09 UTC

I liked the original here a lot better than the remake, especially the "Solaris water" effects in the remake are crap compared to the original. That might just be because I have an extremely low tolerance for palette cycling plasma fractals these days.

I watched Stalker a bit ago, and liked it quite a bit. On reflection [redacted in case you want to watch it.] It's also long, ponderous and Russian, but I'll just assume that's not a problem for you.

sanspoof February 24 2008, 02:08:07 UTC

Mos def; the plasma crap was pretty lame.WP says of the original that "[i]n the end they choose a liquid mixture of acetone, aluminium powder and various dyes." Mmm, analog. All around, the remake is much diminished for me now.
I like long/ponderous/russian almost as much as I like long/ponderous/swedish. All is well.

mmcirvin February 24 2008, 02:26:46 UTC

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 ( ... )

piehead February 24 2008, 02:41:16 UTC

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.

Thread 6

graydon February 24 2008, 07:05:17 UTC

I never saw the remake, but I echo your enjoyment of the (sweaty) original.

sanspoof February 24 2008, 20:22:28 UTC

The remake isn't _bad_, it's just sort of slicked up and hollywooded by 80%. It's... sort of a shame.

I'm on an ocean that has a brain and makes us dream eideteker February 25 2008, 02:08:05 UTC

Have you heard the Failure song based on the Tarkovsky version?

Re: I'm on an ocean that has a brain and makes us dream sanspoof February 25 2008, 02:27:04 UTC

I did not know about this! Should I go in search?

Re: I'm on an ocean that has a brain and makes us dream eideteker February 25 2008, 11:52:02 UTC

Nah. I gotcha. Failure is good music, though.

frescadp March 18 2010, 15:22:55 UTC

Thanks for commenting on my blogspot blog!

"all these resurrections"---what an amazing line in an amazing movie...