Fri, March 28, 2003
Solaris and the Business Travelers
I was on a cross-country flight recently and so of course there was a movie. I make a point not to watch movies on airplanes because they're pan-n-scanned, edited for time, content, and plane crashes, and frequently interrupted by turbulence advisories. My feeling is, if I want to see this movie (again or for the first time), I'll do better to rent the DVD later and just try to find other ways of amusing myself in the air.
This time, it was Solaris, with George Clooney, which was somewhat surprising only because it's such a recent release and it didn't seem to be such a crowd-pleaser that Delta would have been clamoring to snatch up the rights. I had seen it in the theater back in the first few weeks and been underwhelmed, but I have to say it makes a difference to watch it in bits and pieces without the sound! If I were the unscrupulous type and given to revising history, I'd probably go back and add Peter Andrews to the Best Cinematographer list on my Oscar® picks. It's really a beautifully shot picture. In my opinion, the story was pointless and meandering (in a word, "Soderberghian"), but the photography – especially the wispy shots of the planet itself – was just gorgeous.
So, in a sense, it was the perfect plane movie. Pretty pictures to look at, and nothing missed by not listening to the dialogue. In many ways it felt like kind of a fun side project for Clooney and Soderbergh, something each did on his own (and at considerably less net loss) in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Full Frontal respectively. But it was good to see them having fun. Personally, I'm a fan of Clooney's acting, but many who are less enamored criticize his style as "repeated, extended staring." This was certainly the right vehicle for that.
By the way, travel on a Wednesday during the day. It's amazing the number of bulky IBM/Dell laptops running PowerPoint you'll see. In Atlanta, I watched a dapper young businessman carefully shredding an entire legal pad before dropping it a wastebasket. (I was tempted to offer, for a fee, to eat the shreddings if he wanted.) It was also entertaining to watch them holding their laptops and huddling around the few power outlets like Londoners around a clean water well in the 1850s. The cellphone chatter was non-stop, and during boarding one of them told his friend on the other end of the line that he thought I looked like Robin (presumably Chris O'Donnell, not Burt Ward) and snickered as I made my way to my seat.
