From: Eric Baker
To: Adam Kempenaar; Sam Hallgren
Subject: I Think Psych 101 Would Have Shed More Light
I agree somewhat with Adam and "Island girl's" distillation of the film, but probably more with Sam's gut reaction upon leaving the theater. I usually don't enjoy reading a number of reviews about the same movie, but this one generated such visceral reactions from everyone who wrote about it that the critical response suggested there was HOTS going on (that's Higher Order Thinking Skills for the uninitiated, and yes I got that from my 5th grade teacher). I didn't read the story either, and in this instance I'm quite glad I didn't, mainly because I like to get my entertainment by staring at something for a few hours with my mouth open. I was flipping through the channels the past week and came upon one of those "Making of the Movie: 'Solaris'"-type shows. They made a grand to-do about how, though James Cameron owned the rights to the story, Soderbergh wanted to do it so badly he came up with an entirely original treatment that blew Cameron's production company out of the water. Two items caught my attention as the over-earnest documentary continued: 1) Cameron felt his role as producer required him to stay away from the set but become hands-on once the editing work began, and 2) the studio panicked when the movie tanked in front of test audiences. I'm not suggesting we have another "Touch of Evil" here, but I wonder if this really is the picture Soderbergh envisioned. Unlike a lot of critics, I stayed with this sci-fi, and it started to work a little for me in the second half, but I thought the plot manipulations hamstrung the film. Not the Macguffins in the beginning, but the meetings with everyone at the end, and the posturing as Viola Davis' character tries to escape seemed to stray from what Soderbergh was building as an allegory to love lost. (Do you guys keep typing "Soberbergh?") I felt it was pretty clear that Kelvin's dreams were a manifestation of his guilt over his wife's death, even if it was Solaris, which is the biggest Macguffin of all, responsible for creating them. It's likely Soderbergh, or more accurately Lem, though it was ironic to cast Kelvin as a psychiatrist as he struggles with his feelings about her, but I felt it just made it that much harder to swallow. Maybe I've been reading the psychiatrist's club dissect too many of the "Sopranos" episodes on Slate. I didn't feel like the "dilemma," as Adam has couched it, was really a dilemma at all. So ultimately, in my mind, the blame has to fall to Soderbergh for creating such surface-level characters and denying the narrative access to Kelvin's point of view. Soderbergh's trademark flashbacks provided context but lacked emotional heft in a story deliberately unraveled at a snail's pace so as not to let on too much. Of course the camerawork is impeccable, and who would expect anything else from a Soderbergh film? But where did all the money go in this supposed big budget feature: Clooney's salary? Apparently there are no natural fibers in the future and everything looks like Battlestar Galactica, which really is enough to make me want to kill myself. I have to assume Soderbergh, like the aforementioned Michael Moore, makes films primarily to entertain people, meaning he has to get people to go to them first. The box office numbers are crap -- Soderbergh better be careful, lest he become more irrelevant than Woody Allen. To paraphrase Crash Davis: "You can afford to be artistic when you're making $50 million a movie."
As to directors whose work I'd see despite exhortations otherwise, Adam knocked most of mine off with Scorsese, Lynch, Sayles, Wong Kar-Wai, and the Coen Bros., though he left out Atom Egoyan and probably Garry Marshall. Adam also forgot to mention that any show produced by Dick Wolf he will dutifully watch no matter the critical washout. Of course it wouldn't be a film snob list without perennial snooze maestro Abbas Kiarostami on the list.
It sounds like we're going to be placing an increased reliance on lists during the next month, so I thought I'd just reiterate my thoughts on how I rank movies for both club writers and readers. I liken my method to Justice Potter Stewart's explanation of obscenity: "I can't tell you what it is but I know it when I see it." I make some kind of judgment after I watch a film about whether I liked it, then I try to fit it in some haphazard framework at the end of the year. Given how messy that sounds, I guess I can't blame Hollywood for withholding their Oscar contenders until December.
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