I watched (or partially watched) a couple movies in the last week: Bloom, which was an interpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris.

I didn’t get more than 30 minutes into Bloom before shutting it off. The big question I had going in was “How do you capture Ulysses on film?” The answer: not well. I think the acting put me off more than anything. Everyone but Stephen Rea seemed to be putting on stage performances, as if they were trying to project themselves to the cheap seats. For every second I watched, I was painfully aware of this being a film and the characters as actors. Not for an instant did I believe Angeline Ball was Molly Bloom or Hugh O’Conor was Stephen Dedalus. Oddly, O’Conor played Stephen, who I view as a grumpy wet blanket type of person, as merry and enthusiastic as one of Peter Jackson’s hobbits. He’s even smirking when he delivers the line, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

In fact, it was at that moment I lost patience with the film. The scene between Stephen and the schoolboys felt false, the discussion he has with Deasy far too blasé, and then the camera then centers on Stephen for his big quote. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” is undoubtedly an important theme in the book but it meant next to nothing in the film. Yet it was included and thrust upon the viewer with as much subtlety as a flashing neon sign. Add to that the questionable choice of starting the film with Molly’s ramble, the need for the constant voice overs, and the forced acting and you get a big “no thank you” from me.

Solaris was far better but, alas, fell short. I tend to be a purist when it comes to film adaptations; not because I don’t understand that it’s okay for movies to deviate from their source but because the book almost always makes more sense. Solaris is a great example of this (FYI, mild spoilers to follow.) Solaris the planet hardly features at all in the movie, or at least it’s not clear that Solaris is the sentient ocean the scientists are trying to study. Most of the movie falls into the “something weird is happening” category, which is fine. Personally, I like the idea of the scientists grappling to comprehend an unknowable planet but that might not make for riveting film making. I also didn’t mind them changing the reason for Rhea’s suicide, though it did reduce Kelvin’s part in it, which in turn complicates the rationale for his sense of guilt. But whatever, I was still on board.

Where Soderbergh lost me was in the last fifteen minutes. The ending reminded me a lot of Speilberg’s mucking with A.I. to give it a more positive spin. The ending of Soderbergh’s Solaris is reunion; yet this runs entirely counter to Lem’s novel, which I would describe as estrangement and unknowability. The best part about the novel, in my mind, is that there are no answers. Solaris starts as unknowable and it ends as unknowable. No one knows why Solaris sent sentient reproductions from the crew’s memories— was it being kind, cruel, teasing, or did it even know it was doing it? Kelvin never knows and neither does the reader. My problem is that not only does Soderbergh not play by that script, he actually overturns it. Which is disappointing because it would have been awfully brave to make a Hollywood movie that refused a Hollywood ending.

Yet the Cohen brothers did it with No Country For Old Men; how that’s working out for them again?

My suspicions that this is going to be a damn interesting semester have been confirmed. My Visual Narratives course, where we’ve been studying Dada and the Surreal, has been fantastic. My only problem is the format of being split into two, ninety-minute sections each week rather than a three-hour seminar. Because we’re watching a lot of films in class, we haven’t had any time to discuss what we’re learning.

My primary reason for wanting to go back to school in Creative Writing was most certainly not to learn how to write fiction (which is mostly trial and error from what I can figure out) but to open my eyes to a wide variety of, for the lack of a better word, stuff. To read books and criticism I normally wouldn’t read, to grapple with ideas I normally wouldn’t think of. Seeing how Modern art coincides with, reflects, and refutes what’s going in Modern literature is pretty cool, and being taught how to “see” art in a different way sets off a whole slew of creative chain reactions. Good stuff.

Current Mood: Okay |
Currently Listening To – Mississippi Fred McDowell – “This Ain’t No Rock n’ Roll”