Solaris and Dorian Gray reviews

[alobear]

I bought Solaris by Stanislaw Lem after re-watching the modern film "re-imagining" a few months ago.  I've never quite been able to pinpoint why I like the film - it speaks to my emotions on a visceral level, and I don't care that it's wibbly, almost plotless, and makes little sense.  I was interested to see what the book that inspired it was like, and the answer is - totally different.  It's very much in the vein of traditional 60s-70s science-fiction - full of incomprehensible technobabble, remote, and almost wholly cerebral, despite a potentially heart-rending subject matter.  I have to admit that I skimmed the second half, just to see whether the end was different to the film, which is was, and not in a good way.


Last night saw a cinema trip with Dave and nezumi_sama to see Dorian Gray.  It had its moments - Colin Firth was deliciously corruptive as Henry Wootton, and Ben Barnes has the nicest hair I've seen on screen in quite some time.  However, as the titular character, I didn't think Barnes convinced in any of his three stages - wide-eyed innocent, debauched pleasure-seeker, or guilt-wracked repentent.  There were plenty of scenes I couldn't watch for fear of scariness or ickiness (I have no idea how actually scary or icky they were because they were telegraphed well enough for me to miss them altogether), which made me again wish I wasn't quite so much of an incredible wuss, but there wasn't any real emotion to it, so it wasn't truly affecting in the way that it should have been.

Comments

[prunesquallormd.livejournal.com]

To my shame, I've never read The Picture of Dorian Gray. This may or may not have helped me in my appreciation of the film. As I may have mentioned before ;) I'm also fairly easily pleased. It looked wonderful, it was deliciously spooky, the clothes were rather fabulous and Ben Barnes is really quite pretty to look at. So mostly I enjoyed it. There was nothing too icky or scary though (I think your imagination probably made things far squickier than they would actually have been).

Of course, of the four characters that I had any sympathy at all for (Dorian's actress girlfriend and her brother; Basil the painter guy; and Henry's daughter) 3 of them came to thoroughly unpleasant ends. I sometimes think that basically any character I like has a far better than even chance of coming to a sticky end. It's really not fair.

I do agree that Dorian wasn't that convincing. I would maybe have had some more sympathy for him had he taken rather more persuading to become a murderous amoral hedonist, but he just seemed to wander into it because it seemed like a good idea at the time. I assume the journey was rather more believable the way Oscar Wilde tells it.

[alobear.livejournal.com]

You should definitely read the book, as Wilde is always worth it.

And you're probably right about my imagination being worse than anything that was actually on screen. I have real problems with this - but also real problems with *actual* squicky things on screen.

I'm thinking maybe I should embark upon a gradual aversion therapy campaign, starting off with something like Disney's Snow White, and slowly builing up to 28 Days Later (which I attempted to watch some years ago and it actually catapulted me up off my chair and out of the room at high speed).

[(Anonymous)]

I think I remember that! :-) Did you watch District 9? As everyone else says, it's one of the better films of the year, but it does have a pretty high "ick" factor so I wasn't sure whether to recommend it or not!

[(Anonymous)]

It's Lindsay, btw (though you probably guessed!)

[alobear.livejournal.com]

I did guess!

The 28 Days Later incident was at James' house, and everyone very kindly opted to change movies to Catch Me If You Can when I proved too fragile for zombies.

I have heard many good things about District 9, found the both the concept and execution very intriguing. However, reports of exteme ickiness have prevented me from going to see it - sigh. Sometimes, it sucks to be me - not very often, mind you, but sometimes.

[prunesquallormd.livejournal.com]

28 Days Later is fabulous but I reckon if you have problem with gore and ultraviolence you'd be better of watching Day of the Triffids, because it's basically the same story, except with walking vegetation instead of zombies, and a lot less squick :). I remember the 1981 mini series with John Duttine as being rather good.

[cholten99.livejournal.com]

> I didn't think Barnes convinced in any of his three stages - wide-eyed innocent,
> debauched pleasure-seeker, or guilt-wracked repentent.

Interesting. I would say the first two were pretty good and the only reason the last one didn't work was because his character wasn't genuinely repentant.