Iconoclasm Records #1
Some lifestyle changes happened that created a lull in my personal activities, but here I am, back again to deliver something nobody asked for. So, here is what might be standalone or the first in several blog posts that criticizes something people generally cherish. The target of focus of my criticism? The 1979 film Stalker.
I saw this movie back in my college years during a creative writing class. These were the years where I was brimming with enjoyment of most if not all things art; you could’ve called me a large bowl ready to be filled with all sorts of stuff, or a towel ready to absorb anything. One of the stark contradictions of the art I experienced was this film. Stalker. I hardly remember it and yet I remember it indelibly as the worst film I’ve ever seen. This wasn’t an opinion or feeling I slowly developed over time, no, no, no. When I first saw it, as I was watching it, I knew then and there: this movie sucks. This also wasn’t an opinion or feeling I was nor am passionate about, one that I held and hold with utter fury or glee, no, no, no. I simply think, feel, and know, from a cold, detached perspective: this movie sucks.
There are plenty of movies that are bad: The Room (2003); Birdemic (2010); The Last Airbender (2010); and The Ridiculous 6 (2015) to name a few. However, most bad movies are so bad they’re funny, or bad in a way they hold some other value even if only as a point of reference for how a movie shouldn’t be. And then there’s Stalker. The paragon of filmography’s worst. Stalker has no value. It’s a void. It’s waste.
How, then, does such a film become praised? I don’t know, nor do I really care. I guess the director Andrei Tarkovsky is thought to be among the best directors of cinema history, so maybe Stalker is a case of assumed brilliance or an emperor-has-no-clothes situation. The content of the film is largely static shots of nothing, with the occasional scene change of static shots of people saying and doing nothing, with the rare scene change of static shots of someone saying or doing something incoherent and pointless. The utter drag of the cinematography is just about all I remember of this film, as the plot is nowhere to be found. Suffice it to say nothing happens in the film. I can be immensely generous and say something happens, but nothing meaningful happens. Stalker is a tour de farce.
I can only rant so long about something that offers no meaning or value. As an example of something that does have meaning and value to take away from it, I had loads more to say about The Boy and the Heron despite it being poorly constructed from a storytelling perspective. With this film, what you see is what you get: nothing. If/when I return to a highly critical mood, I’ll definitely have more to say about literally anything else as Stalker is the outlier of bad things. It’s incomparable. It is abjectly bad.
