George Clooney looks forlornly into the mirror and wonders "why"?
 

http://www.boxofficeguru.com/weekend.htm

Crashing into seventh place was the George Clooney/Steven Soderbergh collaboration Solaris which picked up an estimated $6.8M this weekend for a poor per screen average of $2,818. Critics reviews were mixed with most saying Clooney's performance was the highlight of the film, but moviegoers universally panned the film as CinemaScore.com reports that viewers across the board gave the movie an F. Apparently film fans were hoping for something different than what the mega-star and Oscar winning director had to offer.

Weekend total:

1 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets $ 32,165,000 TOTAL: $ 200,020,000 Warner Bros.

2 Die Another Day $31,000,000 TOTAL $101,620,000 MGM

3 The Santa Clause 2 $12,310,000 TOTAL:$ 113,901,000 Disney

4 Treasure Planet $ 11,870,000
TOTAL: $ 16,500,000 Disney

5 Adam Sandler's 8 Crazy Nights
$10,100,000 TOTAL: $ 15,100,000 Columbia

6 Friday After Next $ 7,750,000 TOTAL: $ 25,600,000 New Line

7 Solaris $6,780,000 TOTAL $9,450,000 Fox

8 8 Mile $ 5,906,000 TOTAL: $ 107,567,000 Universal

9 They $5,700,000 TOTAL: $ 8,000,000 MGM

10 The Ring $5,500,000 TOTAL: $ 120,000,000 DreamWorks



I think this is a sign of things to come. Bond and Potter trashed all newcommers. This either bodes well or bad for NEMESIS (one I'm rotting for) cuz either A) its going to be a good season for franchise movies or B) its going to get lost in the shuffle.

Pitty about Solaris too. Clooney, Sodbergh & Cameron produced. I thought it'd at least do respectable. I guess old George isn't as big a movie star as people think he is . . .

When I first saw ads for Solaris it looked a cool space movie, but when I heard it's a lame ghost love story I decided not to go.

8 crazy nights beats Solaris. Jesus. I dind't see either, but Solaris is actually supposed to be somewhat of an intelligent movie.

poor Soderbergh. Solaris isn't even going to make back it's budget.

nah screw that. soderberg will never be in trouble. he's one of the few recognized geniuses in the movie industry. he can do enjoyable hollywood hits like erin brockovich, oceans 11, and still pop out Traffic. he's a great director.

Are you serious? I've never seen that sort of mass exodus from a movie.

I work in a movie theater and I've already seen it, but I love predicting how many people will want refunds for it. It's amazing, the auditorium that it's playing in has 120 seats, and only 25 people showed up today. Yeah, there were 8 refunds.
This kid that's about 12 who is always skateboarding out in front of our theater came up to the box and asked what it was about and I told him that it 'Was sweet and had a lot of explosions and boobs.' He bought a ticket and sat through the whole thing, not seeing either of the promised things. On his way out he said 'Uh, dude, the movie was fucking gay.'
So yeah, people seem to hate it. Even if they sit through it, they all end up deciding it was bad.

Traffic - stolen from BBC miniseries (much better, btw)

Oceans Eleven - very overrated, another bad remake (why do they always try to remake the good movies? You're only going to fail.)

Erin Brockovich - decent, self-righteous feel-good movie

Solaris - thank god this is going to go down like a lead balloon. I don't know why he was trying to redo Tarkovsky. (get the original on Criterion - it just came out this week)

Full Frontal - well...no need to kick a dead horse


Soderburgh's been washed up for a long time. He left indie/experimental films because his post S,L,&V material was getting shit on and he didn't have any studio pull. He deliberately said he was going all Hollywood. Now he's trying to get back his indie cred by remaking Tarkovsky. Why not just go for broke and try to remake Welles or Kurosawa?

I expect 13 to start flaming me away any minute for my "elitist film snob" views. But I really don't like Soderburgh. Sue me.

:cheers:

that was my favorite scene in the movie.

haven't seen Solaris, but I'm always up for some high-concept sci-fi. There are reports of walkouts across the board, though. It might be a love-em or hate-em flick, or there's the good possibility that it just might outright suck. I wanna give it a shot, though.

Clooney seemingly got star status pinned on him with Perfect Storm & Oceans Eleven but he didn't hold them together. While I've liked some of the flicks he's been in (Oceans Eleven was a damn slick piece of moviemaking, I haven't seen Dusk till Dawn for years but I remember it had a good b-movie trashy horror vibe, intensional or not. 3 Kings, O Brother & Out of Sight are fairly enjoyable in different ways) he can't carry a flick as this shows - yet somehow he's been raised to movie-star status. The Peacemaker, One Fine Day & Batman and Robin are examples of typical movie-star crossover crap he's tried.

I usually use him as the exception to the rule when you point out that TV stars just can't hack it as movie stars. That probably has something to do with the fact that you can go see the movie and think "damn, I saw this jerk on TV for free" and can't hold presence onscreen. But he keeps getting work and jobs and name recognition, so I guess he's like the Rob Schnier of drama - someone we kinda call a movie star but don't really know why.

how much you wanna bet his next flick will be baltantly commercial after this bomb?

very true. Calling a guy who's made 3 remakes in less than 3 years a "genius" is ludicrous. I finally saw "Sex, lies, and..." recently, and it's decent, but I feel no need to watch it ever again.

the guy who wrote the BBC'S "Traffik" also did the amazing miniseries "The Tenth Kingdom". Sometimes my siblings and I will watch all 6 and a half hours of it in one sitting.

Oh, I'm just kidding around with you, you big lug! I don't mind you being a film snob, name dropper, whatever, but I get ticked off when you start criticizing people for their film exposure. Sue me.

Anyway, Solaris' poor box office performance only suggests an impossible marketing scheme for a movie that escapes immediate classification, and it shouldn't reflect on clooney's star appeal. One moment it's a love movie, then it's a sci fi movie, and i think that can only frustrate the average knuckle-dragging filmgoer who expects things to be more concrete than that.

I personally loved the movie. So much that I have no intention of even going back to watch the first adaptation- despite being a tarkovsky fan. It's one of those subjective movies that works directly on your own worldview- which explains its hate/love reaction.


um um sig test!

Re: George Clooney looks forlornly into the mirror and wonders "why"?
 

is that a positive or negative thing?

i hope this movie is really good, i just got into star trek and now im addicted.

Jesus fuck, kids spilled so much fucking popcorn during that movie.

yo what article is your sig from? I'd love to read it. edit: fergit it just found it.

as for Liquid J - the future of Trek movies is probably banking on how well Nemesis does. Since the general public doesn't really give a flying fuck about Star Trek, this is going to be an acid test of how many trekkies are still out there considering the number of franchise flicks out there (Potter, Bond, LOTR) see if they flocked away from trek. The fanbase has been really split up since VOY & ENT but the TNG fans are probably still out there. Franchises and sequels are really in now thanks to Star Wars, Potter and LOTR so it might do well. or it might just get lost in the shuffle.

as for the flick itself, it should be good. Spoilers I couldn't help but read made the flick sound awesome, alot like The Wrath of Khan. But the hardcore fans are bitching -- but the hardcore fans of anything bitch alot, so its easy to tune them out.

actually this is a really great interview so I'll post it. don't think its the one where 13's sig came from though. :(

I always find interviews with Cameron fascinating & Soderbergh seems cool too:

http://www.cinecon.com/news.php?id=0211251


By Sean Chavel in Los Angeles

"Solaris" is not your everyday science-fiction film. The filmmakers, director Steven Soderbergh and producer James Cameron, hardly want to label it that way. Sure, George Clooney plays a guy who takes a trip to outer space, but he has close encounters not with gooey aliens but rather his former and presumed-dead wife. In a film that is one of the most strongly metaphorical to come out of Hollywood in a very long time, Soderbergh and Cameron have made a bid to release their film uncompromised and untouched by studio guidelines.

Cameron: There are movies that transcend their moment in time, their moment in the marketplace. This is a science fiction film of ideas. But when people realized they could make money having loud scenes of robots beating the crap out of each other then science-fiction was ghettoized into an arena of pseudo-pop myth. Really, literary science-fiction is a lot what Solaris is doing. It’s saying, ‘We’re holding up a mirror to the human condition and taking you to another place so you can see things in a metaphorical way instead of a literal way.’

Soderbergh: I feel like it’s not quite like anything I’ve made before. While I was making it, I certainly felt it was something different for me. Which I why I think I was anxious during the making of it. I didn’t have the sort of handrails like I usually have. Every scene was unchartered territory for me.

As audiences, we’re not always in the mood for challenging and cerebral fare. Sometimes we want that rollercoaster ride. But other times, we should want something like "Solaris": Smart, thought-provoking and different. Aren’t most action movies forgettable, after all? Perhaps "Solaris" will stand the test of time and be in the lexicon of great films twenty years down the road, and perhaps not. But it will never be seen as an assembly line product or as a predictable genre picture.


Soderbergh: Clearly, it doesn’t have the rhythms of normal American films. But I don’t think that it should. But I believe that the movie picks up momentum as it goes. We spend time laying things out but in the second half of the movie there are things happening. Every scene is purposeful and integral. It’s a movie that takes its time to set up their stories so the payoff has the appropriate weight.

Cameron: It’s a quiet and very methodical film but it is a passionate film when you think about the outcome. When you think about a guy who is a rational man who is willing to making a leap of faith and go through a transformation and, I suppose, may be a metaphor for death and may be literally about death.

Soderbergh: Solaris, the planet, is basically a metaphor that you don’t know for sure. It could be a metaphor for God, for death, for love. It is a mirror in that regard. The entire movie is about whether you can surrender yourself to something that is unknown. The character Kelvin makes a decision whether to risk dying in order to see his wife again.

The film is perhaps the most technically accomplished of Soderbergh’s career, and is a major step up after his self-conscious and artificial cinema verité experiment "Full Frontal." Soderbergh has said that he has taken some grief for that film, but he still defends it. Shot on video and filmed in handheld style, it was sloppy compared to the meticulous craftsmanship of "Solaris."


Soderbergh: Full Frontal has a purposely unruly aesthetic. With Solaris, which in my mind in order to work need to has a very precise visual aesthetic… was tricky. In meant, on the one hand I could be sort of freewheeling with Frontal and then to make Solaris, where each image links to the next, imperative technique came into play. How do I shoot this in a way that will accommodate the performances of the actors and larger visual pattern I want to set up? In making this movie, there wasn’t much margin for error.

Cameron: I was very interested in seeing the film that Soderbergh was going to make. I was out of Los Angeles for most of the 43 days that the film was shot. I didn’t have to be there. We had gone over things in pre-production and then in post-production was when Steven would discuss the editing process with me.

In the early stages of development, Cameron had the rights for the film – based on the Stanislaw Lem novel which was made into the 1972 Russian film of the same name by Andrei Tarkovsky – at his Lightstorm Entertainment Company. Cameron only slightly fiddled with the idea of directing the film himself, but gladly handed it over to Soderbergh when he became a for hire option.

Soderbergh: I hadn’t ever come near sci-fi before, mostly because the hardware aspects of the genre don’t really interest me. Solaris was the type of movie I was interested in when I was asked by a 20th Century Fox executive what kind of picture of that genre I’d be compelled to make. I was informed that Cameron was developing it at his company.

Cameron: For me it was vapor-wear at that point. Sometimes you acquire a piece of material based on instinct. I hadn’t sat down yet and worked out what it was. Steven came in with a vision, an [abundance] of ideas. The project certainly has its share of dense, complex ideas. My instinct would have been more literal. More hardware, more special effects, designed more like The Abyss. I respect Steven because he threw all that extra stuff out the window and concentrated on the story, on the humanity.

But how similar is it then to the original Russian film? Is this a faithful remake? Well, it has a similar style and tone. But the film approaches the material with more varied metaphorical perspectives, although it leaves in some of the ambiguities. And while the original film clocked in at nearly three hours, this film cuts the fat to about ninety-seven minutes. Soderbergh chucked the lengthy one hour prologue that slowed down the original film and inserted flashbacks of its character relationships on Earth that he felt were crucial.

Cameron: I don’t think it’s healthy for a filmmaker to make a remake [the same] film. I think by saying that you’re going to make a completely independent adaptation of the source material is fine and healthy. I don’t think Steven was interested in what Tarkovsky made either.

Soderbergh: The biggest difference between this incarnation of Solaris and the previous film and the novel is that our film details the past relationship between Kelvin and his wife – what happened to them on Earth years before. I felt if you were going to explore this idea of whether or not you’re doomed to play out a relationship the same way every time with the same person, then you had to see what happened to them before.

If you are late in following with the gist, and need to be reminded yet again, "Solaris" is not your typical science-fiction movie. But wasn’t 20th Century Fox trying to sell it as a science-fiction movie in its trailer before the movie was even complete?

Cameron: Fox was getting scraps of imagery like they usually do. Stuff from the editing room and they put together stuff for the trailer. They had George running down the corridor. They had George in a space helmet. And then they saw the movie, and they threw it all out. They had an epiphany. This is driven by the marketing people wanting to be more truthful to the film. They saw it as a relationship film, a romantic drama.

Soderbergh: (In response to the promotional advertisement of the movie which places his name alongside Cameron’s as co-author) I was anxious to use his name, because he has directed the successful film of all-time! I talked to him to see if it bothered him. And Cameron didn’t mind. He said, ‘Yeah we have to do this.’

Cameron: I’ve always tried to take a backseat. But Steven has always been, ‘I want to see your name up there with mine.’ He just doesn’t want to take the heat for it.

It's a complex film with such heavy abstract issues. It’s a $47 million film and it’s got to make its’ money back, right? Well, that depends on you, dear reader, by attending the film and supporting it with box office revenue instead of spending your money on the obvious. These guys have put together an out-of-the-ordinary film but it doesn’t mean that they don’t want it to make money.

Soderbergh: I’ve become more aggressive in trying things and challenging myself in different genres. I’d like to be able to still have the ability to have a career that will allow me to do that.

Cameron: If this doesn’t make money, then it makes it a lot harder to make these kinds of atypical, multi-genre pictures in the future. There won’t be financing for them. There will be people that will love it and people that will hate it, but hopefully nobody in-between that will go, ‘Huh?’ If we’re unclear in expressing our ideas in the film, then we failed. But I think we made a very accessible film, or at least I think so. Hopefully, the reviews will greet us with a warm reception and will encourage people to see it.

"Solaris" is in theaters this Wednesday.

kewl, yo! I didn't know Soderbergh was such a sassy bitch.

nah, soderbergh lost to himself (erin brokovich)

i was out of town for thanksgiving and just now came across this thread.
 

y0 i saw Solaris and damn it was so good. i too had the experience where over half the audience walked out and never returned, ive never seen anything like it.

anyways i had a lot of fun, i really enjoyed the movie and thought it was extremely well done. it was moving.

dan

ps: i havent seen the original version

Those all sucked.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/02/film-powers.php

Even before Soderbergh began shooting, a Tarkovsky fan chased him down the streets of Manhattan yelling, "You should be ashamed of yourself!"

Well, duh.

Indie-as-fuck movie afficiando: 1
Steven Soderburgh: 0

Soderbergh bothers the fuck out of me. Traffic was very good. Especially the performances in general, which I have no idea how much to credit Soderbergh with. Oceans 11 bugs me. First time in the theatre, I thought it was ok, but kinda wankish. Too much "look how cool Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Brad Pitt are" nonsense, and not enough "look how cool Don Cheadle" aka the coolest motherfucker alive "is" nonsense. Although, the more I watch it at home, and the more I watch the commentaries, the more I like it. It really is beautifully shot, and the more I learn about the process of the whole movie, the more I appreciate it. Out of Sight was great. The Limey was great. The rest of the time - it just seems like he's pissing all over himself because he gets cool people like Julia Roberts, who I still really like, and George Clooney, who I still really like, to be in his movies. The funny thing is that they're all excellent actors, but they're not going to be worth shit if they don't get into some descent story telling script-wise. Solaris was a mistake from the beginning, and everyone should have seen that from 100 miles away.

I would've done the same thing. The guy needs an original project, and not a stupid original one like "Full Frontal".

"Indie-as-fuck' retard: 0
Steven Soderbergh: 13 and counting