SOLARIS THIS WED. at ERIKA's HOUSE @ 7PM

Erika and I wanna start Movie Night Up Again...SO This Wed. At ERIKA'S NEW PLACE (it's off of Hampton, Contact Us for specific address INFO)

And what better way to pick ourselves up from our cold exile from each other than with Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS?It's got a 97% on Rotten tomatoes It's a movie I've swore to watch a million times, and never have, so now I WILL...

Bonus Tarkovsky fun fact from Roger Ebert When Tarkovsky was given an award at a film festival, this was his acceptance speech:

"The cinema, she is a whore. First she charge a nickel, now she charge five dollars. When she learns to give it away, she will be free,"

We're going to watch the original, Russian Version, here are some words about it from the NYTIMES 1976 Review:

Set in some future time, it is about the voyage of Chris Kelvin to the space station on the planet Solaris. The Academy of Sciences has found no profit in the long studies made of the planet. Chris's mission is to talk with the three scientists at the station and to report on closing it down.

The surface of Solaris is something like a sea, a great pulsating mass. A previous scientist, Burton, has come back in severe nervous shock; he believes that it may not be a sea but a superior order of consciousness, a great brain, in fact. Chris, a haunted but practical man, a missioner of human progress, is prepared to order a final experiment: a massive infusion of radiation into the "sea."

Burton, now older, is horrified. "You must not destroy what you don't understand," he says. Chris's father, a solitary, severe man, is also appalled. "Space is too fragile for your kind," he says.

The whole long, strange trip develops the theme. Mankind, with its aggressive expansionism — intellectual as well as material—destroys more than it finds. Chris is the practical man who, by the film's end, will be converted.

He finds that the space station, that summit of technology, is a heart of darkness. All three scientists there have been shattered by encountering the mystery of the planet. Solaris is, in fact, a great consciousness. Thought is made reality there, including the deepest thoughts of its visitors.