An all time favourite that glows a little brighter with every new viewing.
Casually demonstrates the beauty that can be locked in stillness and the resplendence to be found in decay all of which is thrown onto the screen with a staggering level of restraint.
Typical Tartovsky in that it takes a phenomenal idea and then executes it very slowly with no humanity until it becomes an emotionless intellectual exercise. You might as well read a textbook.
ReplyDeleteNope. This is a brilliant film. In stark contrast to the utterly tedious, infuriatingly self-important Inception I witnessed the next day.
ReplyDeleteAnd Stalker is FULL of humanity - it's the very essence of the human condition laid out before you.
ReplyDeleteTed, this is my opinion and is as valid as yours. It's what I post to almost everything Al posts on this blog that I've seen. Just because I don't like something you do (and vice versa) does not make either opinion wrong. It's only when opinions are stated as facts (eg "Nope. This is a brilliant film.") that they skirt with being wrong.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you actually read my opinion I never state that this is a bad film. It is not. It is a very good film that executes what it is attempting to execute very well. It's just that what it's doing is completely intellectual, it is devoid of empathy. The characters seem to be there as cyphers for the ideas and not real people you give a damn about; hence "devoid of humanity". 2001 is an intellectual exercise too, but when HAL dies you give a fuck, you see the humanity of a machine pleading for survival. That is why, for me, Kubrick is an infinitely superior film-maker to Tartovsky who, in the few movies of his I've seen, is more concerned with engaging an audiences mind and not their heart.
Hence "I may as well have read a textbook", because textbooks have no emotional core, they are just feeding intellect.
And comparing this to Inception is unbelievably pointless. It would be like comparing 2001 to Ocean's 11, Radiohead to The Beatles, The Wire to Fawlty Towers, chocolate to curry, a textbook to a novel.
At least, that's my opinion.
Well, fair enough. That's your opinion - I don't agree with it though. If you were to just read a philosophy textbook as you suggest, then you'd miss out on the magical beauty of Stalker ;-) And maybe it's just me, or the odd way I identify with characters in films, but I find plenty of humanity in the central character of Stalker - I shared his sense of soul-crushing devastation when faced with peoples' lack of faith and imagination at the end of the film - the collapse of his inner world.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't intending to compare Stalker to Inception except in the fact I'd seen them in quick succession and my immense enjoyment of one threw light on the disappointment of the other. That said, one criticism you have of Stalker is EXACTLY what I would level at Inception - namely; "the characters seem to be there as cyphers and not real people you give a damn about". Snap.