Nice mention of "Stalker." One of my favorite movies (despite the author, Arkady Strugatsky not being crazy about it) along with Tarkovsky's other sf film, "Solaris." Both films I always highly recommend despite their sometimes-glacial pace in that they are serious, adult movies that ask fundemental questions about existence and life and…
Nice mention of "Stalker." One of my favorite movies (despite the author, Arkady Strugatsky not being crazy about it) along with Tarkovsky's other sf film, "Solaris." Both films I always highly recommend despite their sometimes-glacial pace in that they are serious, adult movies that ask fundemental questions about existence and life and don't provide easy answers. "Solaris," I think, is actually the better of the two because while "Stalker" sorta fudges the answer, "Solaris" has a wider scope and confronts the question more directly. Briefly, for those of you that haven't heard me write about it before, "Solaris" is the name of a distant, ocean-covered planet that an orbiting station has been studying for years without concrete results. Most of the personel have been withdrawn and the three people left on it have started acting strangely. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent to the station to evaluate the situation, only to discover that the planet is studying them, reading their minds and materializing people from their past - in his case, the wife who committed suicide rather than live with her cold, emotionally-unavailable husband - forcing him to confront the greatest guilt and failure of his life. It's also, to me, a powerful demonstration that mainstream fiction, which is constrained by what is possible, has less scope to deal with the problems of our age than sf, where we can play out any scenario we can imagine and see what the results might be, for good or bad.
Nice mention of "Stalker." One of my favorite movies (despite the author, Arkady Strugatsky not being crazy about it) along with Tarkovsky's other sf film, "Solaris." Both films I always highly recommend despite their sometimes-glacial pace in that they are serious, adult movies that ask fundemental questions about existence and life and don't provide easy answers. "Solaris," I think, is actually the better of the two because while "Stalker" sorta fudges the answer, "Solaris" has a wider scope and confronts the question more directly. Briefly, for those of you that haven't heard me write about it before, "Solaris" is the name of a distant, ocean-covered planet that an orbiting station has been studying for years without concrete results. Most of the personel have been withdrawn and the three people left on it have started acting strangely. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent to the station to evaluate the situation, only to discover that the planet is studying them, reading their minds and materializing people from their past - in his case, the wife who committed suicide rather than live with her cold, emotionally-unavailable husband - forcing him to confront the greatest guilt and failure of his life. It's also, to me, a powerful demonstration that mainstream fiction, which is constrained by what is possible, has less scope to deal with the problems of our age than sf, where we can play out any scenario we can imagine and see what the results might be, for good or bad.
I also a fan of “Solaris”— though saw it a few years after “Stalker” laid its hand on me!