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In Reply to: what I am saying is... posted by joe2cooled on January 17, 2003 at 03:39:13:
Sorry, couldn't resist! :o)You keep bringing up Episode II (Star Wars) as if I probably liked it, but if you had done your homework you'ld know that I'm among Episode I & II's harshest critics; BTW, that number is far greater than 1% I assure you! Looking at it anoter way, I "like" Lucas's Star Wars Redux about as much as I "like" Tarkovsky's Solaris, but for entirely different reasons.
You asked if there was any movie that has no action that I like. Well, if you mean the kind of flicks where people just sit around talking, "NO!" ...but if you mean films where the action is primarily dramatic (i.e., internal), then quite a few. Most of them are classic films like Welle's Citizen Kane, Von Stroheim's Greed & Foolish Wives, poignant comedies like Chaplin's City Lights & Modern Times, historical dramas like Abel Gance's Napoleon (Brownlow restoration) or Carl Theodore Dreyer's Joan of Arc (Criterion). Of more recent films with internalized dramatic content, I liked Cast Away, The Majestic, The Insider, and Glengarry Glen Ross just to name a few.
My problem with Solaris (i.e., the Tarkovsky original) is that it takes forever to tell the audience anything. It suffers with much of the same problem as Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in that it's slowly paced and rarly resolves anything as it plods along. However, Kubrick's transitions were sharply delineated and early on gave an indication that mankind's destiny was tied to something alien and sophisticated through the humming monolithic structures. After the clever segue into the distant near-future he kept the audience visually focused on the beauty and vastness of space while proceeding on that long semi-documentary stylized journey to seek the monoliths' origins.
But I digressed; we were discussing Solaris, right?
FWIW, I've tried to sit through Solaris on two separate occasions, the second time with my wife who fell asleep on the couch after about 40 minutes. Later she dubbed this film the most boring she'd ever seen, knocking Altman's Pret-A-Porter out of first place! I stuck with it another 30 minutes and finally gave up and hit the sack myself. In fairness, the movie was shown quite late on TCM, but in retrospect I think there may have been a good reason for that. At any rate, life is too short to waste on movies that can't get around to some semblance of a story after 30 or 40 minutes. I don't know if we are the exception or the rule, but creative folks tend to be impatient with pretension disguised as art.
You wanted "detail and niveau?"
Folks sitting around various rooms staring at one another or contemplating each other's navels isn't great cinema art; isolated nature shots taken by a lake with a frog being the star attraction isn't great cinema art; endless cross country drives and with the camera pointed out the window isn't great cinema art; the world's longest tunnel may be a technological masterpiece, but rolling film on it doesn't make it great cinema art; finally, any film with all of these elements which calls itself science fiction is just plain boring ...and it STILL isn't great cinema art!
So, now you have specific details, presented with as little "stale humor" as possible.
AuPh
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Follow Ups
- My question is, does your dog do that while watching Solaris? - Audiophilander 07:38:42 01/17/03 (1)
- good on you... - joe2cooled 21:03:25 01/17/03 (0)
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