Well, let's just say there's no particular spectacular, indulgent special effects.
At a certain point, I really hope the enthusiasm for special effects in general goes away, as it is becoming increasingly possible to simple do anything you can imagine. Instead of being impressed by the effect, one can be impressed by the vision itself. That's more or less what happened in Western art - as it became easier and easier to become completely realistic, culminating in photography, virtuousity in realistic portrayal stopped being very interesting in art.
That is a very limited definition of science fiction. By that standard, James Bond is science fiction (since so much of it is about what he can do with whizbang technology).
A better definition of science fiction, which I take from Samuel Delaney, is that it is a literature in which the episteme - the nature of knowing and the known (which, after all, is what "science" means - technology being, essentially, the material result of certain kinds of knowledge in the context of human needs and desires) - is the primary character. Pi is definitely science fiction by this standard, as is Blade Runner and its ilk.
Solaris is about this, and it's no accident that it's at another planet, and not at a haunted house - it's no accident that they seek scientific explanations for the phenomena, and even find some (leading to the destruction of the visitors, remember). It's no accident that Gordon says she "wants to figure it out" and she "wants the humans to win" - she has phrased the experience in classical SF terms.
Well, this movie is pretty much going to get it from both sides. The space-opera fan-boys are going to hate it from the get-go: it's trying to be a pensive, philosophical art-piece, there's no special effects, the science-fiction diagesis that they want isn't coming to them, and all in all it's not the kind of movie they are looking for. Those of us on the other side of the equation are disappointed with the movie, though: as a pensive, philosophical art-piece, it's not successful. The camera work doesn't provide the visual poetry necessary to make a movie like this work. Clooney was fine here, I have no qualms with his performance. But the script was thin - the dialogue was fine, but the film failed to explore enough topics. The questions about the motivations for being at Solaris were touched upon but not explored or expanded - it's as if Soderbergh lost the nerve to go there.
For the fan-boys, the film didn't provide enough answers. For the cinephiles, it didn't ask enough questions.
And it's true that the Clooney + spaceships formula attracted a lot of people who normally wouldn't come to a philosophical art-piece, and that is possibly a good thing. It would have been more effective, however, to give them a better movie, even if it was even farther away from their expectations.
I think it's still worth seeing on the big screen, despite it's flaws (it bugs me how many people will flock to see a film they know is bad - like the latest Star Wars disaster - yet get miserly for more ambitious, if flawed projects). I agree with you about the review - and about the state of science fiction in cinema. We need more Blade Runners, Gattacas, Pi's and even Solarises, and we aren't getting them because the studios have been taught that even a horribly written, improbable, badly-acted blockbuster with whizbang special effects will outperform thoughtful SF at the box office - and the geeks keep proving them right.
I disagree. It was a sci-fi flick, because one the themes of the film was about the limits of human knowledge and understanding - and how different people react (Gordon, for example) to the failure to overcome them.
Re:A few things... (also, the book Solaris)
on
Solaris: Another View
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I saw the film last week, and then I picked up the Criterion edition of the Tarkovsky version, which I hadn't seen in a while. Solaris is not Tarkovsky's best by any means - he was disappointed by it, and Lem didn't like it at all - but it is still far and away a better film than the Soderbergh version.
My biggest disappointments with the Soderbergh version are the lackluster script, and an overall failure in cinematography. Tarkovsky fills in his sparse scripts with a mastery of the camera that is truly breathtaking - he practically paints the screen with the camera, and it's that visual poetry that makes his films effective, with relatively little dialogue or exposition. Soderbergh just tried to hold a camera still at certain points to create a feeling of profundity, misunderstanding completely both Kubrick's and Tarkovsky's technique. I was almost embarassed for him.
The new version wasn't a total failure. The acting was effective, the dialogue acceptable. It's still better than 90% of the so-called science fiction cinema out there. But compared to the master it was really hoping to compete with, it fell short.
If they weren't working at Bonzi, they would be part of the pool of people who are competing for other jobs and contributing less money to the overall economy.
For a little while, perhaps. If they have real skills, however, ultimately they will produce goods and services that have value to others, for whom other people will give them money, with which they can purchase goods and services that they want from others. Just because money is moving around doesn't mean that value is being created. When people are "employed" in trades that produce no value, there's something called opportunity cost. The whole economy would get more for its buck if they were just given the same money to stay at home and not do *anything,* and far more for its buck if they are producing something that is actively valued by others,
Andrew O'Hehir is dead-on. Treating films like little surprise boxes is childish, and real film criticism isn't going to waltz around the plot just to satisfy that. We all get a sense of how 90 percent of stories end, anyway - we don't listen to them to "find out how they end," we listen and watch to see how they are told. We all know how all the Shakespeare plays end - if its a comedy, it ends with a wedding, and if it's a tragedy, it ends with the death of the hero - but we certainly enjoy watching them again.
I am going to quote Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir:
Actually, my view is that the spoiler obsession, born of the Internet's fan-geek culture, is the enemy of real criticism, real discussion and maybe even real thought, but that's a subject for another time.
I couldn't agree more. Films aren't jack-in-the-boxes or jokes with punch lines.
In one sense, I have more respect for someone wearing a Tux t-shirt than an Apple one, in that Tux isn't a corporate logo, and you aren't turning yourself into a walking billboard for a huge, litigatious multinational corporation by wearing one (or a BSD Daemon logo, for that matter.)
The decentralized, non-corporate, community basis of the Open Source "brands" (anti-brands is more like it) is what makes them appealing to me, more even than their technical quality (which is still very good.)
Most people use Microsoft because it's the default operating system at work, at school, on their home PC's, what have you. It takes a conscious, sometimes extended effort to *not* get a Microsoft product. Many people like the Microsoft way of doing things (I don't, although I respect some of their models), but they didn't have to "swim upstream" to go Microsoft, and so they don't have that zealotry. I've met a couple "Microsoft fanboys" (just like I've met fanboys for virtually every brand and corporation - it's really a frightening phenomenon, when corporations get groupies) but they seldom betray the kind of aggressive, proseltyzing evangalism that Mac groupies do.
Non-Microsoft users not only had the "trial by fire" of chosing an alternate route, but they have to justify some of the dissonance they have regarding format incompatibilities - they may not be able to play a game, or watch a video, or see a web site, that their MS-using friends and family can. If a critical mass of the market were on the same platform as them, however, there would be less of that interplatform disconnect for them.
In some alternate universe, the correct words, with grammatical sense and everything, are floating around, looking for the above post. If you help them get there, I'd be grateful. Time for bed.
I'll agree and expand, by quoting Samuel Delaney (my personal favorite SF writer): science fiction is literature in which the episteme is the primary "character". The feature that makes it science fiction gives it the prerequisite that it's world-concieving aspect be compelling - it's existence as literature (or cinema, or whatever other media it might be in) creates aesthetic criteria for those of us who care about those media. People who don't really understand care about film qua film look at science fiction films with eyes that seek only the episteme, and likewise with readers. There's two different breeds of critics/audiences/viewers/readers - those literature in the target medium, and those who aren't - and too often geek-critique is dominated by the latter.
Tarkovsky is brilliant, one of my favorite directors. Andrei Rublev and Stalker are both "must see" films for anyone who cares about good cinema (I'm happily elitist when it comes to film, incidentally).
But his Solaris is problematic. The truth is, he wasn't happy with it - it was the least favorite of his own films, and he largely made it because the Soviet film bureau paid him big bucks (in Soviet terms) to create a Soviet competitor to 2001. I haven't seen the Soderberg version yet - I'm going tomorrow - but it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be a better over-all film than the Tarkovsky version.
I don't think including a clause against the use of the software to violate someone else's human rights is the same thing as just enforcing a viewpoint. There's a non-trivial, not-slippery-sloped difference between using a cron job to run a torture device and using apache to publish racist propaganda.
Funny how they can be so cute and flip when they flaunt convention and IP law, but such assholes when they are on the other side of the bar.
Re:.. and in the darkness bind them
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 3, Informative
Microsoft is trying to get legislation to force people to use their software? Since when? And since when did Microsoft have data indicating that MS software causes cancer, yet refuse to relase it and go on marketing it as safe? And Phillip Morris is quite happy to continue advocating against anti-smoking legislation in the rest of the world, even as it puts on a 'friendlier face' in the US - and they sure as hell tried to keep the antismoking legislation at bay. There are plenty of smoking-workplaces in the rest of the world - and if you are a waitress or bartender, you're probably in a smoke-filled environment. (Again, the "change jobs" rejoinder applies to MS users) Nothing that Microsoft has done comes even close to what the tobacco industry has done to keep money coming into its coffers.
If you had a sister addicted to crack, you might claim that it was "her choice," but you certainly wouldn't think that her drug dealer was innocent either.
Incidentally, you can access Exchange mail with standard unix MUA's and fetchmail.
Re:.. and in the darkness bind them
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 2
Yes, this Linux machine and the Mac down the hall are all figments of my coffee-addled imagination. I'm actually forced to use Microsoft software, even though it's only my evil twin that uses it.
Tobacco harms you - you - far more than you see. It raises health care costs (and takes all that income going to health care out of the rest of the economy.) If you have a loved one addicted to tobacco, it's far more destructive than a loved one who uses Microsoft. If your co-workers smoke, then you get second-hand smoke. (If "quit your job" is an option for smokers, then it's also an option for people working at MS shops.)
Here's an interesting question for fair use. By posting it in the forum, he enables other people to comment - and they've commented. So while on an individual level, there's no commentary, on a group or site level, there definitely is.(Me not lawyer.)
The difference in this case is that the ageism is built on a very, very, very reasonable inference: that someone who is 19 years old is unlikely to have the experience and cultivation of character required to lead an organization of this type. They may have character, poise, integrity, and even a decent amount of knowledge and perspective. But it isn't enough. Even a brilliant 19 year old who graduated from university at 15 still would have only 4 years experience in a work environment at best, and quite likely only in one small facet of it. It's a matter of math - there's just not enough time lived yet to put the requisite experiences in for a real organization of any breadth.
And, while I've met some 40 year olds who were as immature as most 19 year olds, too, I've never met a 19 year old that was truly as matured in a well-rounded sense (meaning more than just having a sense of presence) than a decently mature 40 year old.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let's just say there's no particular spectacular, indulgent special effects.
At a certain point, I really hope the enthusiasm for special effects in general goes away, as it is becoming increasingly possible to simple do anything you can imagine. Instead of being impressed by the effect, one can be impressed by the vision itself. That's more or less what happened in Western art - as it became easier and easier to become completely realistic, culminating in photography, virtuousity in realistic portrayal stopped being very interesting in art.
Do you realize that the underpants gnomes are suddenly a lot closer to a revenue model?
A better definition of science fiction, which I take from Samuel Delaney, is that it is a literature in which the episteme - the nature of knowing and the known (which, after all, is what "science" means - technology being, essentially, the material result of certain kinds of knowledge in the context of human needs and desires) - is the primary character. Pi is definitely science fiction by this standard, as is Blade Runner and its ilk.
Solaris is about this, and it's no accident that it's at another planet, and not at a haunted house - it's no accident that they seek scientific explanations for the phenomena, and even find some (leading to the destruction of the visitors, remember). It's no accident that Gordon says she "wants to figure it out" and she "wants the humans to win" - she has phrased the experience in classical SF terms.
For the fan-boys, the film didn't provide enough answers. For the cinephiles, it didn't ask enough questions.
And it's true that the Clooney + spaceships formula attracted a lot of people who normally wouldn't come to a philosophical art-piece, and that is possibly a good thing. It would have been more effective, however, to give them a better movie, even if it was even farther away from their expectations.
I think it's still worth seeing on the big screen, despite it's flaws (it bugs me how many people will flock to see a film they know is bad - like the latest Star Wars disaster - yet get miserly for more ambitious, if flawed projects). I agree with you about the review - and about the state of science fiction in cinema. We need more Blade Runners, Gattacas, Pi's and even Solarises, and we aren't getting them because the studios have been taught that even a horribly written, improbable, badly-acted blockbuster with whizbang special effects will outperform thoughtful SF at the box office - and the geeks keep proving them right.
I disagree. It was a sci-fi flick, because one the themes of the film was about the limits of human knowledge and understanding - and how different people react (Gordon, for example) to the failure to overcome them.
My biggest disappointments with the Soderbergh version are the lackluster script, and an overall failure in cinematography. Tarkovsky fills in his sparse scripts with a mastery of the camera that is truly breathtaking - he practically paints the screen with the camera, and it's that visual poetry that makes his films effective, with relatively little dialogue or exposition. Soderbergh just tried to hold a camera still at certain points to create a feeling of profundity, misunderstanding completely both Kubrick's and Tarkovsky's technique. I was almost embarassed for him.
The new version wasn't a total failure. The acting was effective, the dialogue acceptable. It's still better than 90% of the so-called science fiction cinema out there. But compared to the master it was really hoping to compete with, it fell short.
For a little while, perhaps. If they have real skills, however, ultimately they will produce goods and services that have value to others, for whom other people will give them money, with which they can purchase goods and services that they want from others. Just because money is moving around doesn't mean that value is being created. When people are "employed" in trades that produce no value, there's something called opportunity cost. The whole economy would get more for its buck if they were just given the same money to stay at home and not do *anything,* and far more for its buck if they are producing something that is actively valued by others,
I'm not sure that the term "cost effective" applies to a project with a future revenue stream of ... zero.
Oh, you've seen my brother's wedding videos, too....
Andrew O'Hehir is dead-on. Treating films like little surprise boxes is childish, and real film criticism isn't going to waltz around the plot just to satisfy that. We all get a sense of how 90 percent of stories end, anyway - we don't listen to them to "find out how they end," we listen and watch to see how they are told. We all know how all the Shakespeare plays end - if its a comedy, it ends with a wedding, and if it's a tragedy, it ends with the death of the hero - but we certainly enjoy watching them again.
"Dude, Where's My Ring?"
I couldn't agree more. Films aren't jack-in-the-boxes or jokes with punch lines.
The decentralized, non-corporate, community basis of the Open Source "brands" (anti-brands is more like it) is what makes them appealing to me, more even than their technical quality (which is still very good.)
Non-Microsoft users not only had the "trial by fire" of chosing an alternate route, but they have to justify some of the dissonance they have regarding format incompatibilities - they may not be able to play a game, or watch a video, or see a web site, that their MS-using friends and family can. If a critical mass of the market were on the same platform as them, however, there would be less of that interplatform disconnect for them.
In some alternate universe, the correct words, with grammatical sense and everything, are floating around, looking for the above post. If you help them get there, I'd be grateful. Time for bed.
I'll agree and expand, by quoting Samuel Delaney (my personal favorite SF writer): science fiction is literature in which the episteme is the primary "character". The feature that makes it science fiction gives it the prerequisite that it's world-concieving aspect be compelling - it's existence as literature (or cinema, or whatever other media it might be in) creates aesthetic criteria for those of us who care about those media. People who don't really understand care about film qua film look at science fiction films with eyes that seek only the episteme, and likewise with readers. There's two different breeds of critics/audiences/viewers/readers - those literature in the target medium, and those who aren't - and too often geek-critique is dominated by the latter.
But his Solaris is problematic. The truth is, he wasn't happy with it - it was the least favorite of his own films, and he largely made it because the Soviet film bureau paid him big bucks (in Soviet terms) to create a Soviet competitor to 2001. I haven't seen the Soderberg version yet - I'm going tomorrow - but it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be a better over-all film than the Tarkovsky version.
I don't think including a clause against the use of the software to violate someone else's human rights is the same thing as just enforcing a viewpoint. There's a non-trivial, not-slippery-sloped difference between using a cron job to run a torture device and using apache to publish racist propaganda.
Funny how they can be so cute and flip when they flaunt convention and IP law, but such assholes when they are on the other side of the bar.
If you had a sister addicted to crack, you might claim that it was "her choice," but you certainly wouldn't think that her drug dealer was innocent either.
Incidentally, you can access Exchange mail with standard unix MUA's and fetchmail.
Tobacco harms you - you - far more than you see. It raises health care costs (and takes all that income going to health care out of the rest of the economy.) If you have a loved one addicted to tobacco, it's far more destructive than a loved one who uses Microsoft. If your co-workers smoke, then you get second-hand smoke. (If "quit your job" is an option for smokers, then it's also an option for people working at MS shops.)
Mozra.
Here's an interesting question for fair use. By posting it in the forum, he enables other people to comment - and they've commented. So while on an individual level, there's no commentary, on a group or site level, there definitely is.(Me not lawyer.)
And, while I've met some 40 year olds who were as immature as most 19 year olds, too, I've never met a 19 year old that was truly as matured in a well-rounded sense (meaning more than just having a sense of presence) than a decently mature 40 year old.