Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)
“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” (Kilgore Trout) - Kelvin is a psychologist sent to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, which in a startling pre-biblical way is covered by a raging, formless sea. Something has gone awry on this scientific mission, and Kelvin is tasked with investigating the crew before blasting the planet’s surface with one last radiation scan and shutting everything down. But Kelvin finds the space station largely deserted... Read More
A Review of a Review of Bird’s Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema
Over at Extravagant Creation, Michael McIntyre has a very interesting post interacting with responses to Bird’s somewhat recent book on Tarkovsky. McIntyre is a great resource for Tarkovsky scholarship, and is often interested in the lack of well-reasoned religious response to his films, asking this time around: Where can one find books or articles that take seriously this obvious connection between Tarkovsky and the Russian religious philosophers of the Silver Age, that... Read More
Would You Like to Meet Andrei Tarkovksy?
One of the interesting routines I have enjoyed this year is tracking the distribution progress of Dmitri Trakovsky’s documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky via his twitter feed. There have been some reviews and discussions of the documentary cataloged at a website for the film, and the Claremont Courier ran a brief and informative piece on the whole affair. More recently, Image ran a bit that reiterated the need for a number of pre-orders that will fund the “final phase... Read More
Andrei Rublev: The Passion According To Andrei (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
I’ll never paint again. Because it’s of no use to anyone. That’s all. This film doesn’t pander. It barely accommodates. You can watch for an hour, you might even make it all the way to the end, without being entirely sure which of the grim Russian monks is the title character. They look all alike, and names are rarely spoken. In the opening sequence, a mob tries to prevent a man from taking flight in a hot air balloon made of animal skins. He soars headlong... Read More
Canary and Its Imagination of Disaster
Unless you either caught it at this year’s Cinequest or are planning to attend the upcoming Migrating Forms, I don’t think your chances of catching Alejandro Adams’ latest film, Canary, are very good. But I hope it secures the distribution it deserves. Set in a near-future science-fiction, Canary trails a repossession agent (the bewitchingly ghostly Carla Pauli) of a corporation that leases organs to clients. When clients fail to keep up with the contracted exercise and... Read More
What a rush.
I know that fan is moving air, I can see it in your hair But I can’t bear to breathe it in somehow - Joe Henry, “You Can’t Fail Me Now” The trailer for Spike Jonze’s movie Where the Wild Things Are spread like wildfire across the Internet this week. Call it “The Tweet heard around the world.” And it caught my attention for many reasons. First, it’s a beautiful trailer, a perfect match of imagery and music. As it begins, a boy wakes... Read More
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