Books and Movies.....

A high ranking contender, in my opinion, for best film of all time is Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. It is slow and cerebral. Taking its time with every step. Painting us a picture more than telling us a story (after all, they say a picture is worth a thousand words). I wont go into detail about my love for the way Tarkovsky makes movies, I could ramble about his ridiculous talents, instead I want to get to talking about what I set out to talk about:I love this movie, yet I had never read the book that it was based on. The book is called Roadside Picnic and is by Boris and Arkady Stugatsky. It has been slow at work lately so I read the book online (available through the Wikipedia entry for the book, as no english edition is currently in print). Having seen the movie and read the Wiki for the boak I figured I knew what to expect. It turns out that the movie really only encompases a microcosm of what exists in the book. I have been in the middle of 5 or 6 books for a while now, seemingly unable to finish any of them, then this came along and I read it in 1 and a half work shifts (all the while still getting my work done), I just couldn't stop reading. It is a rare breed of science fiction, much like Stanislaw Lem's Solyaris (also turned into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky and later by Steven Sodderberg). These are both books/films about humanity on human terms, not about the alien worlds they hint at. What it is to be human in the universe. They ponder reality, but not in very romantic ways. They both present us with a setting containing evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Both pose the question: would humanity even be able to comprehend this intelligence? In Roadside Picnic it is likened tot he idea of a roadside picnic: you pull the car off the road, eat, drink, be merry. After you leave frightened animals slowly start to come out of the woods and find a candy wrapper, some empty bottles or cans, oil that leaked from the car, a hair clip, etc. While some animals might even be able to make use of some of these objects in some way, none of them would have the foggiest idea of their actual intent or use, they can't comprehend it. I love that idea, that we just simply would not understand an alien intelligence at all, that we would be like those animals. Anyways, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

I think I will read Lem's Solyaris next, as I have not read the novel for that either. I highly recommend either of the films to anyone, both are fantastic, but you need to be patient. They are long and slow and moving and beautiful. They give you time, as a viewer to think and process, they do not hold your hand, they give you room to space out and formulate your own thoughts. I would also highly recommend the book, even if you are not a fan of science fiction as a genre. Both would fall, in my opinion, more into the realm of speculative fiction anyways (much like Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth or Carl Segan's Contact).