 
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
|
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
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
Follow Ups:
now that was really funny and not stale. lol
You do have humour after all.
But no he does not do that while watching Solaris, he usually sleeps when I watch it. (surprise!?)
I was using starwars just as an example, and by the way I enjoyed the first 3 (old) movies very much.
Aha, so you like other movies too, good to know.
Of course it is always a big question of taste as well what one likes and doesn't. But maybe you got roughly my point with expensive and primitiv holywood movies anyway.
I put the word "art" in quotation marks, since that is what other people use to refer to it, I do not like the word at all myself.
And I completely support your opinion that not everything declared as art and made with pretendious stereotypes is worth even watching.
In case of solaris I think one would have to see it in a different light since it was made in Russia when the country was still under dictatorship.
Just quickly to tell you what I like about the movie is the atmosphere it is creating (somebody said it is better than taking dope), this of course is not effecting everybody the same of course and I can understand that it does nothing to you exept make you sleepy, but hey as you said earlier, it saves you the sleeping pills and it is completely untoxic, think about that, and once you have it on DVD (or video) it is very cheap to in comparison to expensive pills. So it could be of benefit to you after all.
You made your point clear now but nevertheless I think you might have missed a lot of the story. So I ask once again, have you read the book? (just out of interest). If not I highly recommend it after all, but of course it is slow and probably tiring for you, though worth the effort I think.
Apart from that there are many exellent books written by Stanislaw Lem, even a few funny ones and also some thrillers. I found "the invincible" very gripping and "thus quoth Golem" (I think that is the English title. I did not read it in English) extremely interesting from a theoretical and technical point of few. (Do not read "memoires found in the bath tub" !! Even I found that tiring and boring).
I think S.Lem is one of the greatest SF authors and I do not stand alone with that opinion.Kia Ora
Joe
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
