Solaris & Abyss (Widescreen Edition)

Starring:George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Viola Davis, Jeremy Davies, Ulrich Tukur, John Cho, Morgan Rusler, Shane Skelton, Donna Kimball, Michael Ensign, Elpidia Carrillo, Kent Faulcon, Lauren Cohn, Annie Morgan, Jude S. Walko, Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, Leo Burmester, Todd Graff
Director: Steven Soderbergh, James Cameron
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

Does Philip Glass make films now?
99.9% Cocoa
I love George Clooney
Sci-fi for the thinking person
Far Inferior to the Original

Solaris
Starring: George Clooney , Natascha McElhone , Viola Davis , Jeremy Davies , and Ulrich Tukur
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
ProductGroup: DVD
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Solaris
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ASIN: B00009ATIX
Release Date: 2003-07-29

Amazon.com

A curious mix of science fiction and metaphysical love story, Solaris centers around Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychologist sent to investigate why a space station orbiting an alien planet has stopped communications. The planet has the power to delve into human psyches and re-create lost loved ones--in Kelvin's case, his dead wife (Natascha McElhone), whom he then wants to bring back to Earth. Director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich) fills almost every shot with faces and bodies, as if to emphasize the human soul rather than outer space as the movie's true subject. Unfortunately, the vagueness of the environment--combined with a script that implies more than it shows--serves to dislocate our ability to engage with the characters, rendering Solaris emotionally inert. Jeremy Davies, as a lingering crew member, brings a hint of humor to the otherwise serious-minded proceedings. --Bret Fetzer

Description

Superstar George Clooney turns in a stellar performance in this "brilliant sci-fi movie" (New York Daily News) from Academy Award winners Steven Soderbergh (2000 - Best Director, Traffic) and JamesCameron (1997 - Best Picture, Titanic). Aboard a lonely space station orbiting a mysterious planet, terrified crew members are experiencing a host of strange phenomena, including eerie visitors who seem all too human. And when psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) arrives to investigate, he confronts a power beyond imagining that could hold the key to mankind's deepest dreams?or darkest nightmares. Co-starring Natascha McElhone and Jeremy Davies, Solaris is "mind-bending!" (Rolling Stone)

Customer Reviews:

Does Philip Glass make films now?.......2007-07-02

This film is an unbearably boring, irritatingly pretentious waste of celluloid. Were it filmed digitally, it would have been a waste of precious binary code. It raises rather under-elaborated metaphysical questions about life and death (at a sub-glacial, coma inducing pace) then fails to provide any meaningful message. After 90 minutes of waiting for something to happen, something actually does, for which I was extremely grateful: the credits rolled. Video stores should be forced to apply warning stickers to the boxes.

99.9% Cocoa.......2007-06-24

Some people just don't like dark chocolate. This movie gets short shrift from reviewers who don't care for its slow pace and that it requires a bit of thinking. The reviewer below suggests that Clooney would rather not have done this film. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Clooney applied for this role. This is a love story and a psychological mystery/sci-fi/thriller. It's an intensely suspenseful and fascinating story in which all the actors give excellent performances.

I love George Clooney.......2007-05-10

GREAT MOVIE! Well any movie with George Clooney is a great movie in my book. But it has a very good Story too.

Sci-fi for the thinking person.......2007-03-21

Solaris explores ideas about what it means to be human.

It has the feel of a European-made film, but with a Hollywood budget.

Soderberg, James Cameron, and George Clooney deserve high marks for being uncompromising in keeping to the spirit of the the book.

The original Russian film was long, talky and slow-moving - with poor special effects. The original Lem book was also rather wordy. Soderberg explores similar ideas but keeps things moving forward and concise.

The production design and visual effects are really cool.

Be warned this film is for the 2001:A Space Odyssey crowd, not for the Alien(s) crowd.

A fine achievement by the film-makers.

Far Inferior to the Original.......2007-03-16

Solaris is a movie that moves so slowly, it is often near the point of rigor mortis. It is a dumbed down version of the original Soviet movie. It is proof that sometimes American movies can be far inferior to Communist flicks.

George Clooney continually has this look on his face like he's wondering just how did he let his agent talk him into this film. The rest of the acting is similarly poor.

Watch the original movie before you ever watch this, unless you are suffering from an acute case of insomnia.

Average customer rating:

Islands of Memory
An Antti Keisala Comment: A Nine-Film Retrospective About Love - Tarkovsky
Slow moving cerebral sci-fi
Excellent film and transfer
Tarkovsky Masterpiece

Solaris - Criterion Collection
Starring: Natalya Bondarchuk , Donatas Banionis , Jüri Järvet , Vladislav Dvorzhetsky , and Nikolai Grinko
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Manufacturer: Criterion
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Solaris

ASIN: B00006L92F
Release Date: 2002-11-26

Amazon.com

The Russian answer to 2001, and very nearly as memorable a movie. The legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made this extremely deliberate science-fiction epic, an adaptation of a novel by Stanislaw Lem. The story follows a cosmonaut (Donatas Banionis) on an eerie trip to a planet where haunting memories can take physical form. Its bare outline makes it sound like a routine space-flight picture, an elongated Twilight Zone episode; but the further into its mysteries we travel, the less familiar anything seems. Even though Tarkovsky's meanings and methods are sometimes mystifying, Solaris has a way of crawling inside your head, especially given the slow pace and general lack of forward momentum. By the time the final images cross the screen, Tarkovsky has gone way beyond SF conventions into a moving, unsettling vision of memory and home. Well worthy of cult status, Solaris is both challenging art-house fare and a whacked-out head trip. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews:

Islands of Memory.......2007-06-14

Unlike Soderbergh's interminable and seemingly much longer take on Stanislaw Lem's novel, Tarkovsky's Solaris is a sensual film, but one where the senses aren't exactly numbed as dulled into a kind of half-dreamlike state. Like the reeds in the opening shot, you have to go with the ebb and flow - it's almost more of a feeling than a film. And, it has to be said, at times that feeling can be like being lulled to the verge of sleep, while at others it's like being caught up in a fever. It's tempting to wonder what Werner Herzog makes of the film.

Lem famously disliked the film with a passion, feeling it gave into the heart rather the head with trite clichés: "Instead of focusing on deeper moral questions related to frontiers of human knowledge, he made a drama-type Crime and Punishment in space, by making up unnecessary characters of parents and relatives, then adding a hut on an island," was one of his less bitter comments after he fell out with Tarkovsky writing the script, although that implies a far more sentimental film than Tarkovsky delivered. Certainly the issue of whether the visitors are a gift, an experiment, a probe or a defensive psychological attack on the scientists is all but ignored in favor of their emotional effects on Kelvin and (to a much lesser effect) the scientists: these characters really aren't looking for answers, they're looking for a mirror, and it's their insular nature that condemns them to literally float in their own islands of memory (or a `hut on an island' if you ascribe to Lem's view).

Rather than a formulaic movie redemption tale or Lem's examination of our inability to truly comprehend a superior alien intelligence because of the biological limitations imposed on us almost as design faults, Tarkovsky's film is about the limitations we impose on ourselves regardless of how far we technically advance and our inability to rise above them. Its nominal hero, Kelvin, is not a pleasant man and the film makes little attempt to bring the audience to his side. He treats the disgraced Cosmonaut Burton with insensitivity, professes a ruthless scientific pragmatism that allows for no human element and his immediate response to his first `guest' on the Solaris research station is to deceive and dispose of her. Yet ultimately, as much because of his emotional limitations as in spite of them, he's the one human being who acts most humanely by recognising, albeit in a totally self-centred way, that the fault lies not in the stars but in themselves. Like Burton's young son with the horse in the lengthy prologue on Earth, he displays a childlike fear and rejection of something he doesn't understand before reluctantly accepting that it may have beauty, even if it's a beauty he cannot comfortably embrace.

But the most human character remains the least human: Hari, or rather his image of his dead wife Hari, unable to feel anything that he does not remember for her, stifled by his limitations and gradually assuming a painful awareness and despair of her own. Ironically, it's as she becomes more human that she becomes more unstable. To the other scientists it's because the visitors are unstable neutrino systems, but it's when the artificial Hari studies a painting - another artificial creation of man's consciousness - which triggers a real memory that the horror of her situation as a mere facsimile strikes home. To Kelvin she's at first more a penance than a second chance, a condemnation to repeat history while remaining oblivious - as he presumably did with the real Hari - to the person she is really becoming.

So, not exactly a barrel of laughs, but strangely compelling if you go with it. The 165 minutes don't exactly fly by, but they certainly can get under your skin if you're in a receptive mood and it's not hard to see why it's been so influential on Hollywood sci-fi (Sphere, Event Horizon and Star Trek The Motion Picture among the most prominent).

So, why only three stars? Well, sadly, I was shocked by just how bad the picture quality of the first hour of the Criterion DVD was compared to the PAL Russico/Artificial Eye one - aside from some grading and subtitle changes it looks like you're watching a bad standards conversion of a video tape that's been burned onto a CD-R for all of the Earth-bound sequences, although the color is better. If it weren't for the better extras package - including several deleted/extended scenes and detailed interviews - I doubt I'd have kept this copy.

An Antti Keisala Comment: A Nine-Film Retrospective About Love - Tarkovsky.......2007-03-21

I'm growing extremly wary of calling any of snobbish blattering theoretic, not even if I ever tried to present them coherently; and original they have never been. That is, it's useful to acknowledge influence and create a theory based on that, à la Harold Bloom in "The Anxiety of Influence". My thoughts have most certainly been said in a better fashion by those by whom I've been influenced, and by others who know about things a lot more than me. I follow Harold Bloom, Sören Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kabbalistic concepts although they aren't about cinema, per se. But they did write about things that make a life - and cinema is one way of living a life. In cinematic thinking perhaps the most influential concepts have been self-reference in general: the ideas of illustrated text by Peter Greenaway, sculpting in time by Tarkovsky and also the writings about folding by Ted Goranson, who has been writing on IMDb for years.

The only real goal of my film life is to see them lucidly, not through theoretical intellect but through my heart and soul. I'm not interested in giving you the polarized opposites of mind/heart etc., because what's at least as fun as watching the film is thinking about it afterwards. Then again, I'm in love with literature, so writing is a vehicle (often an excuse) to visit here time and again, updating comments that I confess aren't aimed at being that useful for anyone other than myself. A short definition of lucid experiencing is to be influenced in the soul in a positive way; and to experience that constantly is what should build us at least a tiny bit happier. Tarkovsky is a lucid master, and each of his films is an experience to be not only experienced, but really lived through again and again. They're all remarkable (nay, say brilliant) films that transcend conventional barriers, but I personally prefer "Rublev", "Zerkalo" and "Nostalghia" and find things from them that come easier than that from others.

But this particular film is one of the few that are cinematically sensual, heartbreakingly bittersweet. It's a moment of happiness that knows it will go away eventually never returning, a conscious step from one direction to another, knowing that each decision, each selection of images, will change our life and that it will never be the sam again. "Solaris" is part of the small selection of "romantic" films I adore for their quietude and bittersweetness and how this particularly complicated emotion translates to cinema. For isn't bittersweetness rather directly tied to the translusence of memories, and to the acknowledgment of times past? A conscious sorrow that defines and defeats itself, a force unnatural and unpredictable. The reason why we can emote to his art is taht although he is abstract, he's real - he doesn't invent an emotion that is artificially connected to the images that he creates, it's as if he channels it, that he would become one with a stream of life, freely hovering through space we can't see.

Yes, it's an illusion, but in his hands it's never a lie.

With best regards,
AK

Slow moving cerebral sci-fi.......2007-03-21

Russia's answer to 2001 is much slower and murkier than the Kubrick film.

The special effects are pretty laughable and there is little in the way of action. It is a real ordeal to watch with seemingly endless dialogue.

On the plus side some of the production design is quite good, and the climax is genuinely haunting.

Soderberg's tighter update is superior - and is an hour shorter.

Excellent film and transfer.......2007-02-09

As a quick footnote: contrary to Amazon's reviewer this film was NOT the Russian answer to 2001. (Why do reviewers write such things willy-nilly? Just because something seems like it "should be" true does not make it so). The timing was a coincidence and had actually to do with Tarkovsky's wish to shake off the problems that his previous film "Andrei Rublov" had created with the Communist authorities. That's why he set out to work as soon as the Rublov debacle was over (around 1970) and that's why he chose a subject about as diametrically opposite to the Russian Middle Ages as possible.

Tarkovsky Masterpiece.......2007-01-22

Think will not lie if say that it's one of the best (if not the best Tarkovsky movie). As a director he have very unusual vision of things.
He can show you a scene of ten minutes, where only rain falls and you will watch it as charmed, cause there is smth in it, but it's almost impossible to understand what.

The biggest difference between Solaris of Tarkovsky (1972 year) and Solaris of Soderbergh (2002 year) is that in first one the movie is more about person and a planet, about feeling of simple human being. In Solaris from 2002 the film is more about relationship between man and woman (and according to book it was not the main line in the book of Stanislav Lem)

Solaris of Tarkovsky was, is and always will be one of the best russian movie's, cause this film is rightfully is Classic of Russian Cinematography. And 5 stars is even too low for this film.

Average customer rating:

Intimate, sad and humorous

THE PINK MIRROR

Manufacturer: CustomFlix
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green
Soap
Available Men
Paper Dolls
Almost Myself

ASIN: B000EJW4GK
Release Date: 2006-07-13

Product Description

A Bollywood Entertainer with a difference - India's first film on drag queens! A comic-tragic evening with two Indian drag queens and a gay teenager as they attempt to seduce a handsome bisexual hunk. Apart from being a drag romp set a la Bollywood entertainer with song and dance routines, the film is an exposition of the Indian gay landscape, the humanly tender bonds between drag queens in India who form unique, non-patriarchal families and the lurking impact of HIV/AIDS. The film draws interesting comparisons between indigenous Indian Drag Queens who are a vanishing clan and the contemporary young gays of Bombay city's queer culture with borrowed western gay identity. NOTE: THIS DVD PRICE IS ONLY FOR PERSONAL HOME VIEWING. PUBLIC SCREENINGS OF ANY SORT NEEDS PRIOR PERMISSION FROM PRODUCER. INSTITUTIONS PLEASE CONTACT PRODUCER FOR SCREENING RIGHTS WITHIN CAMPUS AND FESTIVALS.

Customer Reviews:

Intimate, sad and humorous.......2007-06-19

Intimate, sad and humorous simultaneously, Gulabi Aaina, deals with a historical friendship in the purest Bollywood style. Music, songs, choreography enhance a love tangle of a very special quartet. An excellent example of Indian cinema, and it is surprising to know that it has been prohibited in its country.
~ Daniel Prada | Film Critic on gaybarcelona.net

Sridhar Rangayan's two-year-old short feature "The Pink Mirror," one of the most delightful films in the festival, was the first film about transvestites ever made in India and is banned in its native land. Bitchy banter, drama queen drama, handsome studs, dances and songs--and a dose of grim, health-related reality (to a melodramatic motif from Puccini's "Madama Butterfly")--fill its 40 minutes.
~ Bruce-Michael Gelbert | FireIsland Qnews

To me Gulabi Aaina seems like bridging a gap between say, Fire and Bombay Boys, more so its in Hindi, that in my opinion is adding that breadth of reality that people seem to bypass, the language of the masses... it reminds me of Benegal's Mandi, the black comedy, which is less of a story and more of character plays set in an unashamed, gaudily portrayed, in-your-face bordello.
~ Manisha Bhalekar-Kulkarni, Art Historian & Film Critique, Ohio State University

George Clooney The Collection (One Fine Day, Solaris, Thin Red Line)

Average customer rating:

5 minutes -- that's it.

George Clooney The Collection (One Fine Day, Solaris, Thin Red Line)
Starring: George Clooney , Natascha McElhone , Viola Davis , Jeremy Davies , and Ulrich Tukur
Director: Steven Soderbergh , Michael Hoffman , and Terrence Malick
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Out of Sight (Collector's Edition)
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ASIN: B000EXDS6Q
Release Date: 2006-06-06

Description

This pack contains 3 George Clooney movies in one slipcase.

Disc 1: One Fine Day Disc 2: Solaris Disc 3: Thin Red Line

Customer Reviews:

5 minutes -- that's it........2006-08-19

Don't buy this pack if you think Clooney has a major part in Thin Red Line. He's only in the film for 5 minutes. That's it. The movie is great--don't get me wrong. But this is not a "DEAL" if you're thinking Clooney Trilogy.

Average customer rating:

A movie way behind your eye lids

Stalker (with original Mono Soundtrack)

Manufacturer: Ruscico
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD
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ASIN: B000A3G0OM

Product Description

SOUNDTRACK (AUDIO): RUSSIAN (DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1); RUSSIAN (ORIGINAL MONO TRACK) / SUBTITLES: RUSSIAN: ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, DUTCH, SPANISH, ITALIAN, PORTUGUESE, JAPANESE, HEBREW, SWEDISH, CHINESE, ARABIC. The film is based on the science-fiction novel "A Picnic on the Roadside" by Russian sci-fi writers, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Stalker is the man who knows a lot about the system of obstacles and traps in the Zone. He knows the way to the coveted room where any wish may come true. To find this room is the goal of Writer and Professor. The writer hopes to find inspiration there, the professor dreams of making a discovery. Led by the Stalker, they finally reach the room... But will they be able to enter it? And what will the path of self-knowledge lead to? The Andrei Tarkovsky film does not offer definitive answers. Quoted in the film are the verses by poets Fyodor Tyutchev and Arseny Tarkovsky, the directors father. Luchino Visconti Prize for Andrei Tarkovsky at the David Donatello Competition in Italy, 1980; Special Jury Prize (Interfilm and OSIK) at the Cannes IFF, 1980; FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes IFF, 1981; Special Ecumenical Jury Prize for Off-Competition Films at the Cannes IFF, 1982

Customer Reviews:

A movie way behind your eye lids.......2006-07-04

Eerie, haunting music (deranged strings, melanchomanical flute, dark ambient) as a foreboding of imagery that consists of vast, weed-scattered plains filled with Trümmer, piles of dirt, ruins, litter. Gates that only seem to close and lock. High, rusty fences that only seem to be put there to keep people boldly out, and not savely in.
Degenerated panorama's and desolate scenes of scourched, withered remains of culture and society. Troubled pools of water with behind it a skyline of blackened factories and concrete buildings filled with hissing, steaming machines.
On and on. On and on.

Next... rundown houses, earth covering earth, puddles of black water and oozing mud. Houses without recognizable facades. Bars with stools you cannot easily sit on. Dank, hysterical poetry.
Outside soldiers march on, their backs crooked or even broken, burdend by the smog of unconceivable dreams.

Within the interiors of one of those many anonym bars, chilly, colourless shadows. They hide three faces. That of a scientist, that of a writer, and that of Stalker.
They look at each other. Not really being there. Not really loking at each other. More looking past one another, staring into some unknown empty, sun-ridden void.
They ponder, wander around in their own autistic minds. That they will soon enter "The Zone", a forbidden place beyond the vast desolate plains, is clear to them, but they are in no way arroused. No extasy, no emotion. Deadpan cries of Angst, of an omniscient feel of extensialim. Expanse-Schmerz.

Then, after the machine gun fire, the grunging engine of the jeep, the echoing of panic-arrousing footsteps, pieces of bricks plunging into the gazing, empty puddles of water, the mesmerising cadence of the trolley fills the screen. On and on. On and on. Silence creeps in.
Enter the wastelands.

This is "The Zone". A zone that is both history, fiction and enigma.
This is the forbidden world of Stalker.
Be a witness to both lurking fears, unseen extasy, cinematic idiosyncracies, waterfilled dreams and, in the closing shot, a small but sparkling miracle.
Let Stalker guide you through all this, and through all the hidden murderous traps and be astound. Be bewildered. Be anything more than you was before.

Then... closing credits. Close your eyes. Close your mind. Close a movie that transcends any genre or description. A movie that is almost an unidentifiable Zone in itself: it has and entrance, but no real exit.
Watch it once, and you'll watch it forever...
And ever...
And ever...

Average customer rating:

Solaris & Abyss (Widescreen Edition)
Starring: George Clooney , Natascha McElhone , Viola Davis , Jeremy Davies , and Ulrich Tukur
Director: Steven Soderbergh , and James Cameron
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0000C23EL
Release Date: 2003-11-04

Average customer rating:

Solaris / One Fine Day
Starring: George Clooney , Natascha McElhone , Viola Davis , Jeremy Davies , and Ulrich Tukur
Director: Steven Soderbergh , and Michael Hoffman
Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Comedy | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

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ASIN: B0002IQKYK
Release Date: 2004-08-03

Charlie Rose with Ibrahim Youssef & Richard Murphy; George Clooney & Steven Soderbergh (November 25, 2002)

Average customer rating:

Charlie Rose with Ibrahim Youssef & Richard Murphy; George Clooney & Steven Soderbergh (November 25, 2002)

Manufacturer: Charlie Rose, Inc.
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Description

Richard Murphy, director of Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and Youssef Ibrahim, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and editor-in-chief of Energy Intelligence Group, discuss the implications of accusations made about influential Saudis providing money to the al-Qaeda network through charitable donations and the impact of these allegations on US-Saudi relations. Then, director Steven Soderbergh and actor George Clooney talk about their new project, a remake of the the film, Solaris.

Average customer rating:

The Intervention

ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD
ASIN: B0001OON0S

Average customer rating:

Probably the best Russian World War II drama
Brilliant!

Ivan's Childhood Ivanovo Detstvo

ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0001OO8QW

Customer Reviews:

Probably the best Russian World War II drama.......2004-05-27

Ivan's Childhood is Tarkovsky's debut feature film about a 12 year old boy who volunteers to fight in the front lines against the German invasion because his family where murdered by Nazis. His size and height make him the perfect spy for the Russians as he slides his way across muck and swamp to bring back vital information about the German offence that no other man can achieve. At the same time his commanding officers object to this boy being used as a tool of war but have no control over the matter because of Ivan's convictions to bring down those that killed his parents.

Shot in beautiful monochrome the camera never ceases to capture nature, religion, dreams and love - all of which are major elements in any Tarkovsky film. This motion picture is one of the most stunning independent movies you will ever see, however it is Tarkovsky's first movie and has a short running time of 90 minutes only (most of his other works are around 180 minutes long), so don't expect to find a lot of long Tarkovsky's trademark time consuming slow shots. This one moves a little faster than most of his art house creations.

Sometimes Ivan cries like the child he is, but this is not because of the burden of war but because he can not do what he wants most - to avenge the death of his family. Other times he is like a General in the making - standing up to his commanders, spitting orders back at them, making other soldiers look pale in comparison and walking into the fray without any fear attached. The dichotomy of his fractured personality is evident the most when he is alone. One moment he is dreaming of his mother, the next he is stalking the ghost of a Nazi murderer in the room where he sleeps (which is one of the most disturbing scenes in this film and in cinema).

The final sequence in the ruins of Berlin fully brings home the impact of the film's premise. This is a story about Ivan's Childhood and that is exactly what you get. Heart wrenching from the first frame to the last and never equaled. To think this was all made in 1962! Shocking cinema at its very best and certainly the best rendition of the troubles of Child Soldier's ever presented on the silver screen.

Tarkovsky shot this movie in full frame so it is not in widescreen like most of his others.

Brilliant!.......2004-03-29

The first film by pantheon director Andrei Tarkovsky. The movie's so gripping you're ready to join little Ivan spying behind Nazi lines.

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