The Syndicate

Ricochet wrote:After the Wedding - sheer coincidence, but I planned to see this (and did so) on Mongoose's birthday, which is funny, because her and I don't feel the same about Susanne Bier's achievements and this is the movie she's pitched me countless times to make me reconsider. And well... this sort of both works better, out of all her films, and displays the issues I usually have with them. It was interesting to see a younger Mads Mikkelsen with slightly different acting chops than the mannerisms we're used to nowadays (Hannibal, The Hunt and others). Some of the drama was real good, especially early on, but then it kept reaching for more plot development to fill up the other acts and the focus shifted so wildly from one character to another.

a2thezebra wrote:For me, Stalker suffers from the characters being degraded to mouthpieces for Tarkovsky himself all too often. They just don't feel like fleshed out characters to me, at any point in the film. Which is a shame, since visually and viscerally I think it is Tarkovsky's most impressive work.

a2thezebra wrote:First I have to say regarding Solaris, Tarkovsky himself expressed disappointment with that film not because it wasn't faithful to the novel, but because it was too confined within the science fiction genre. My issue with it is not that it wasn't faithful (I think adaptations are more likely to fail when they are too faithful than when they betray the material they're adapting) or that it was confined to a single genre, but that it didn't seize any of the opportunities within the narrative. Once the audience leaves Earth, the film immediately loses the immersive power of the first act and never finds it again. That is Solaris' fatal flaw.

For Andrei Rublev, part of what hindered my enjoyment might have been that I saw it on TCM with a very weak and murky print, but ultimately my issue with it was the pacing. Unlike Solaris, I thought there were many great moments and sequences in Andrei Rublev spread out over the course of the runtime (the ending being one of them although it doesn't have the profound effect on me that it does many others) but I also felt that the narrative unravels in such a way where I never felt that I was given a reason to care about what was happening. In other words, the fatal flaw for me was that the parts were greater than the sum, rather than the other way around as I think it should be.