TVersity Times

Solaris, mm loads of punters seem to like this version so I thought I'd give it another go. Nope still didn't enjoy it. The acting is "cool", so typical of Soderbergh's work and though it's reasonably scripted it tries to hard to be art-house, which never really works without an intelligence behind it. It does look nice however while Tarkovsky's looks terribly dated now in terms of FX and set design it's just such a shame that both drift so far from the intentions of the author, in his own words.

"As Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book was entitled Solaris and not Love in Outer Space." er Zing.

Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland was not bad, not a complete success but probably way better than Burton's, though I still haven't seen it. Miller manages to create a nice daydreamy hallucinatory feel and there's plenty of quality on the actor front except, crucially, for the girl playing Alice whose strange zonked out performance leaves a big hole at the center of the very strange victorian styled proceedings.