Off topic: Solaris

James Jordan · 21 Jan 2003, 03:03 · from urth-v0301.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Off topic: Solaris
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 21:03:19 -0600
Message-ID: <urth-v0301-2734 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0301/2734.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 05:04 PM 1/20/2003, you wrote:
>Echoing what Andy said, thanks, Nutria, for all the stuff on Solaris, which
>was fascinating.

         Well, I feel pretty sure about it. I've written to one of the=20
Tarkovsky websites about this interpretation, to see if I can get any kind=20
of interaction. Solaris is the only Tark film I've seen, so I don't have=20
much context for my views. (Films like this only show in arthouses in huge=20
cities, and I've never lived in such. And I don't feel like putting out the=20
money to buy all of them on DVD.) As I recall, the Vatican gave him some=20
kind of award for Solaris, which indicates to me that I'm not too far offba=
se.

>But about Solaris: I loved the original Russian film, which I went to see
>twice in the week it came out in this country and have seen several times
>since. When I heard that Hollywood was doing a remake, I could hardly
>believe that they would do anything so hubristic and utterly redundant.
>Anyway, I've recovered now, and I gather that the new version is now on
>general release in the States. An off-topic question, therefore, to you and
>others who have seen the new movie, which won't get to the UK for a while I
>suspect: is it any good? Reply off-list if you think it more appropriate!

         Well, I don't mind replying here onlist, but I don't have much to=20
say. I saw the Tark version about a decade ago on video (the new DVD is=20
much clearer). I did not have it enough in mind, therefore, to make much of=20
a comparison with the new Soderberg version. There's nothing about the=20
father in Soderberg; it's exclusively about Kelvin and Hani, and I guess=20
kind of Hollywoody in that regard (love and sex). It's "Hani" who greets=20
Kelvin when he falls to Solaris at the end, and she says "all is forgiven,"=20
which seemed almost to come out of nowhere. But I need to see the movie=20
again and look for deeper elements, if there are any.
         Heck, I've never even read the book! I just liked the movie, and=20
thought it might make a good example for what we were discussing. (And=20
after all, Lem rejected the movie, so reading the novel is not very germane=
.)

Nutricious Nutria, the Other Brown Meat


--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net