Solaris: Logos vs Pathos in outer space

Recently viewed Andrei Trakovsky's (Andrei Rublev, Stalker) Solaris, based on the novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem. In this film psychiatrist Kris Kelvin is heading to the planet Solaris and refuses to accept any emotional testimony about the mysterious planet before his journey. Kris leaves insisting that facts and logic are the only ways that man can hope to understand the alien world.
To bad the planet infiltrates the minds of all earthlings who come near and manifests those individuals' pasts into tangible objects. For logician Kris this results in the creation of an approximation of his dead, via suicide, wife, Hari. Who comes to being soon after he arrives at Solaris. Kris' logic and the reality of new-Hari's faux-existence fall to the wayside, and he falls prey to his emotions. Eventually he decides that understanding is not in knowledge but in myths, legends and the way we feel. So logos-0, Pathos-1.

Of course at this point Kris may have become mentally unhinged having learned to re-love his dead wife and having to experience her second suicide, so his opinions may lack ethos.

1990 & 2001 via 1982

Who says distractions can't be educational!
Recently I viewed Richard Brook's (In Cold Blood, Looking for Mr. Goodbar) prescient comedy, Wrong is Right. This 1982 film staring Sean Connery looks like and feels like TV movie, but is a rather amusing black comedy about manipulation. In the course of the film a news reporter, Patrick Hale, discovers what appears to be a plot from an unspecified middle eastern organization to blow up New York City and as he is a TV celebrity he is granted an audience by all concerned parties, because "if it doesn't happen on TV, it means nothing."

The plot in brief: Patrick Hale discovers that an Arab Sheik may have been plotting to nuke New York and Israel before his untimely death, which may or may not have been a suicide. As he attempts to find the truth behind the situation he becomes a pawn for all parties involved and eventually winds up being the tool for the US to justify a war on the middle east - in which control of the oil supply is the real reason.

The manipulation of the media by the government, big business, and special interests is a popular area for satire, but what makes this film so intriguing is its presentation of the idea of the U.S. government declaring war on the middle east under the guise of national security but in reality is an attempt to get control of the oil supply. Which appears to have become a reality twice now.