Change Your Image
badbro13
Reviews
Stalker (1979)
insufferably boring and egotistical
This was in fact the most boring film I have ever seen in my entire life. I am not a hater of slow paced movies-- my favorite film of all time is 2001: a space odyssey-- but some movies, like this one, manage to drag you through what seems like five hours of mud without any payoff that you expect from a movie directed by a snail. This film very easily could have been a short story or a novella as the whole film was just simply walking and walking and then an occasional pause that the characters would take to reflect on universal truths and the meaning of their lives. Two hours could have been edited out. There are shots that last over five minutes where the camera does not move the least bit, and there seems to be no motive whatsoever for this decision. I felt many waves of pretentious as I sat through these laboriously long takes that gave the impression that the director did not in fact no how to build tension or emotion in a scene, except by letting the characters handle it. This works in Woody Allen movies, but in this film since the dialog is so repetitive and there is rarely any dramatic movement from the characters, you are left with the urge to gouge your own eyes out. I would rather eat my own flesh than watch this pointless exercise in pretentiousness and boredom. This film could have been a short play or a magazine article, and saved us the pain of watching three characters do the same thing over and over again in a series of mundane and repetitive shots. The lighting was awesome.