03-X-2009.
I drove the Miatta today. In the afternoon, we drove to Trader Joe's to buy some of those belgian chocolates - advertised as "pound plus" because they're exactly half a kilo. We usually buy six or eight of those, plus some better cheese, and sometimes some exotic beer, like that Starr Hill from A-burg (nothing to write home about, interesting but poor, lacking most of the components in the taste). The cheese is as good as it can get made from dead milk... cheese from raw milk being some kind of a federal crime around here.
Lovely weather, close to the coast, a roofless car of sporty persuasion, and my blonde sitting next to me, wind in her hair*. Buying chocolate...
This is how I dreamed about it, once upon a time, and it came true eventually, not bad at all, and not too late either, we still know how to enjoy it. Though, the car isn't ours, we aren't on some silly vacation, the sea is yet a few miles away and even if it was right ahead, it doesn't smell exactly right, the water being less salty because of this huge estuary, but we are the natural ones, at ease, with not much to worry about.
And I knew the backdoor into their parking, which allows me to avoid the worst traffic light, where one has to wait no matter which time of day. This happened to me before - when I start knowing all the best parking places and secret shortcuts, I've worn the place out and it becomes a bit boring, time to change.
Next day, in the blogue:
Солярис vs Solaris, or West vs The Rest
I ordered both movies to arrive together from Netflix - Tarkovsky's, then Soderbergh's. They came in that order, but the first one was on a DVD which seems to have passed through too many hands, and had irreparable scratches. I returned it and replacement came two days later. Doesn't matter that I saw them in wrong order - I saw Solyaris at least three times, roughly ten years apart.
The topic has probably already been elaborated by others - where Lem wants to discuss limits of human comprehension of the truly alien, and Tarkovsky explores the inner alien that a human becomes when hurled into the cold space away from Earth, Soderbergh... enjoys endless flashbacks over a love story, and doesn't give a cent for anything deeper than that. True, his movie stands out above Hollywood standards - it's dark, the characters are weird, even the Solaris station is something inventive (although not sufficiently battered).
I'd rather concentrate on what Soderbergh added and what he omitted. First and foremost, the long history between Kris (renamed Chris) and Hari (renamed Rhea, for no good reason) takes a lot of time, whereas it's completely absent in Solyaris, and is told in just a few sentences in the book. The reason for this is probably commercial - the flick is advertised as a love story. There's also the love-story-like ending, when dr Gordon (a replacement for Sartorius) flees and Chris and Hari stay on the station to fall onto the planet, which will perhaps embrace them or whatever. This also removes any doubts as to what would happen with the station - which is left hanging in both the book and Solyaris. As a reminder: book ends with Kris siting on the surface and reminiscing, Solyaris with Kris returning to his father in a classical prodigal son kneeling at his father's feet on the replica of their dacha on an island created by the Ocean.
For those who saw only Soderbergh's flick, the Ocean is just a blurry image of the planet - it's not mentioned at all, discussed or whatever. The thinking ocean is a huge matter in both previous instances - it's something that more than one generation of scientists grew old over, and haven't solved the puzzle; it's the only reason for the presence of the station. So Soderbergh omitted (now we've come to that) any mention of solaristics, scientific bodies, books about the planet, philosophy of science, anything that smacks of humans as beings who could be blamed for inclusion of the S in SF. What's left is just what is absolutely necessary for the plot - Snow's (Snaut's - would be pronounced 'snout', ergo renamed too) cryptic delivery, Gordon's rapid technobabble, without ever bothering to pretend that these are scientists who discuss a problem among themselves. Any thinking about the causes of what's going on is talked about as much as causes of vampirism is in a horror flick.
Besides, there isn't any scientific body which would govern the exploration - the station belongs to a company (!), which is pretty much invisible, apart from the two goons who pick Chris from his drab existence and hurl him into space. Of course, the character of Burton, pilot who first saw the phenomena on the surface, and plays a prominent role in Solyaris (and is mentioned in a long quote from solariana in the book), is also completely gone. No mention of the flights to the surface, changes in planet's activity - it's all gone. And with what happy end there is, there's no self-sacrifice of Hari. But there is a mandatory quotation of a lyric that's in high school curriculum, so the audience (presumably younger 'uns) would have something recognizable and would feel sophisticated for recognizing a literary reference. At least, there wasn't a biblical reference, though I'm not sure - a couple may have slipped under my radar.
(This is where this isn't about Solyaris vs Solaris anymore, it's about the West vs The Rest. Flipping the page...)
So we have a remake of a Soviet movie, based on a Polish book, facts which weren't advertised much. The critics do mention that... but, frankly, the advertising never does. Sometimes the remake is marked as a remake, when it's based on something well known. A new version of Romeo and Juliet doesn't need the recognition of the original; "You got mail" is delivered with some dedication to the "Little shop around the corner" (at least on the disk)... but that's where it ends. For most of the rest, the relationship to the original is omitted or even obscured. I doubt that many viewers, outside the artistic circles, know that "Breathless" was once "A bout de souffle"; or that "Battle beyond the Sun" was actually a Soviet film, repackaged by young George Lucas, whose main contribution to it was the erasure of almost all of the traces of the origin - dialogs were reworked, two seconds of red flag waving cut out, names of Soviet technicians anglicized etc etc.
Today I found one of the worst offenders: "Groundhog day". There was a Soviet movie, "A mirror for the hero" (Зеркало для героя), produced six years before it, which is actually yet another longer story which Hollywood simplified: there are two guys, not one, who get into a single day loop, and they have somehow jumped from their time in the eighties into a single day in 1949, in a little mining town - where they spend most of that day underground, in the mine, not playing piano.
This is not a trend. It's a tradition. Marconi stole from Tesla (even after the Supreme court decided that Tesla did, indeed, invent radio, the story about it being Marconi's invention persists and is repeated even today). Einstein got his wife's name erased from their first important paper - and mind, Mileva Marić was a mathematician, Albert was not; nevertheless, this theft of intellectual property not only went unpunished, but nowadays Albert is a synonym for a genius, while she is almost forgotten. In programming, there's a Polish notation. It's called so because nobody in the West could properly pronounce Łukasiewicz... of whom they generally know nothing. In reality, every planet has Milanković's circles, but only one in all the SF books (and not one in the movies) has them. And, BTW, Milanković devised the most precise calendar so far, which isn't mentioned among them, not even on Wikipedia (which mentions the cycles in the footnote of the calendar article (!)).
This tradition is called, in my dictionary, The Closed Gates of the West. The idea of cities enclosed under domes will probably suit this mindset, which firmly believes that anything outside of the dome is just raw material, if that, and can be freely be taken from, without any credit, without any inclusion (except maybe token delegates, to show our greatness) of anything intellectual or cultural from the other side of the glass, into any of the lists of "100 best whatever of all times". Because these lists are made in the West, and they are about the West, not about people.
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* „Eyes of Lucy Jordan“ came to her mind, too
Mentions: Annenburg (A-burg), blogue, in serbian
14-X-2016 - 8-IV-2026