"Stalker" (Russian sci-fi film by Tarkovsky)

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Watched this a couple of days ago. Didn't understand it. At all.

[Felch]

I tried watching it, and suddenly it made sense why the Russians got all excited about McDonalds when it opened. America is #1.

[Kuciwalker]

Learning Russian might help.

[onodera]

Tarkovsky had this uncanny knack of making boring films. Try the book.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Learning Russian might help.

Helpfully, all the words they spoke were translated into English and projected onto the bottom of the screen in the form of subtitles. You berk.

[Kitschum]

At all.

[JEELEN]

Watched this a couple of days ago. Didn't understand it. At all.

Try Andrej Rublev. Tarkovsky's early work especially focuses on visual impact; Stalker, for instance, has very little dialogue. Solaris, a brilliant movie (the original, not the remake), is a very psychological movie. Most of Tarkovsky's movies are about a threat or some kind of danger and how someone responds to it and all of his work is about personal challenge. Rather than being a moviemaker, Tarkovsky was a cinematographer.

Tarkovsky had this uncanny knack of making boring films.

That's rather an incorrect assessment - though his movies have a, perhaps typical of Russian movies of the era, explicit slowness. They're not interested in action of a physical kind - just like certain Bergman movies.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

"Slow" I can handle. "Incomprehensible" is a different matter.

"Stalker" doesn't appear to have an ending. It just stops. I think he just got bored.

[BeBMan]

Saw parts of it several times but never really got into watching the whole thing.

*shrug*

[Japher]

"Slow" I can handle. "Incomprehensible" is a different matter.

"Stalker" doesn't appear to have an ending. It just stops. I think he just got bored.

Written by the same guy who wrote "Lost in Translation" I presume

[Straybow]

Try "The Fountain." I kept thinking it would get better... foolish of me, really.

[Blaupanzer]

The original Solaris was great with subtitles or in Russian.. Stalker was -- wait for it -- wait for it -- slow to the point of going nowhere. Thus, you keep waiting for a point, a direction, a reason for the slow pace, an explanation of where the ending leaves us. Speaking Russian would not help this dying story. Haven't seen any of his other work, but feels like one for one so far.

[JEELEN]

Stalker is an eerie movie, about a place where noone dares to go. It doesn't become really explicit why this is; in this sense it's a mystery that doesn't get solved. That is, the mystery remains. Besides being mostly a visual movie, it plays on the viewers imagination and in this sense it's not an entertaining movie. Finding such a movie 'boring' is just the easy way out; if you're not into it, you will indeed not appreciate it. In the end that applies to all movies - and books.