Zabriskie Point (2009) Review

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(More customer reviews)I give this move 5 stars for personal reasons. If you peer ever so closely at the panoramic 'orgy in the desert' shot, you will see me groaning with "her" in the sand. While there was no actual fornicating going on within my range of vision, I can tell you the gal next to me was asking out loud for it! Damn! I miss those incredibly naive, self-indulgent days. It was, I believe, October of 1968 and I was a senior in a Las Vegas high school. I answered the casting call for extras. Miracously, my father allowed me to miss a week of school to "train" with a feely-touchy dance troupe from NY. When shooting started MGM would bus us from Vegas to the Point every morning at 5am. Most of my time on the set was spent gawking at Diana, Antonioni, and all the wild movie equipment. They even imported fine silk sand to blow around. I guess Death Valley sand was not european enough. I remember Antonioni, in full archetypical director mode, chasing Mark F. off the sound set for laughing at our feeble attempts to create "love noises" for the orgy scene. HA! The setting was surreal, the weather incredible, the catered lunch edible, and the young ladies sensuous and willing in that 60's way. You know how you sometimes fantasize about going back to a time in your life that was almost perfect? Well, this is one of those times for me.
Oh, I read the Time Magazine review when the movie came out and the reviewer said, "The moral of the story? Don't help a good boy go bad. Lock your airplane, take your keys." Since I wrote that "review" back in 1991 I had occasion to revisit Zabriskie's Point (the place, not the movie). It was my 50th birthday and my wife treated me to a stay at the famous Furnace Creek Inn.
We went over and it was as I remember it. Stunning. The only change was the parking/view area. You can no longer just drive on in to the canyons as the catering truck did back in 1968. So, while I am 'pointing and pondering' these three beautiful ladies arrive. They are talking away in some Euro language and I hear, "Antonioni". I say, "you know the movie?"
"Yes, we came to Death Valley just to see this place."
I say, "I was there when the movie was filmed".
They all came unglued and plied me with questions. Had to have a photo. My wife was bemused, to say the least. For a moment, I was once again Making Love, Not War.
I am just realizing what an effect this movie has had on so many people and how lucky I was to be even a small part of it.
The real miracle of it all is that my father let a 17 year old wanna-be hippie skip a week of school to bounce around Death Valley with a bunch of radicals. Another odd thing was that I had recently sworn off drugs and alcohol so I got to be totally "present" for the experience. From my observation, I may have been the only sober participant...!

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In a story of youthful rebellion, a young man steals an airplane and flies over the desert, where he meets a young woman and falls in love.

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Blow Up (1966) Review

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(More customer reviews)Michelangelo Antonioni's view of Britain in the 1960's was a groundbreaking film that appeared at a time of turmoil and change in the lifestyles and mores of the Western world. Britain ruled supreme in pop music (Beatles, Stones, Animals) and in fashion (Mary Quant, Twiggy, Carnaby Street). The jazz stylings of Herbie Hancock were used as the soundtrack for the film, but the live Rock performance in the film was performed by the post-Clapton Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. To reflect the London fashion scene, Antonioni used the German model Verushka in a simulated photo shoot that has been called the sexiest scene in film history.
(As an aside, Verushka's real name was Vera and her father was one of the German army officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944; with the failure of the plot, he was executed and his family was interred in labor camps.)
When I first viewed this film in 1967, I was enormously impressed. The photography was brilliant and the audio was the first "surround-sound" I had ever encountered. (During the park scenes, I kept looking over my shoulder to see what birds had gotten into the theater!) When I again saw this film about 1975, it looked dated and out of fashion. Now, more than 40 years later, I see that it is a true period film that reflects much of the character and thinking of the time.
David Hemming's character in the movie (known as "Thomas") is not satisfied with his success as a fashion photographer and wants to become a "reality/documentary" photographer in the genre of Dorthea Lange or Henri Cartier-Bresson. To this end, he pretends to be a street person and spends a night in a doss house, a sort of cheap barracks accommodation with shared sleeping and bath facilities. Thomas sneaks his camera into this establishment in a paper bag and surreptitiously photographs the other guests as they shower and dress in the morning. The clicking and whirring sounds of his camera and the stop-action showing the photographs that were produced constituted the opening scenes of "Blow-Up". Thomas intends to use these and other such photographs in a book that he hopes will establish him as a "real" photographer. For some incomprehensible reason, this entire opening sequence has been deleted from the Turner/MGM DVD release. Instead, the movie opens with Thomas leaving the doss house in the morning, after the original opening photography sequence. In the original movie, Thomas then returns to his parked Rolls-Royce, places his camera in the glove box and drives away. We viewers are surprised; is he stealing the car? This scene has also been deleted. In this DVD release, he suddenly and inexplicably appears, already driving the Rolls down the street.
With the deletion of the movie's opening scenes, it is difficult to make sense of some of the later scenes in the film. At one point, Thomas meets with his publisher (an early appearance by Peter Bowles, later known for his performances in "Rumpole of the Bailey", "To the Manor Born" and "The Irish RM") and reviews the photographs he had taken at the doss house. This is the only brief chance viewers of the DVD have to see anything of the opening scenes.
Those opening scenes are important because they set the theme of the film. Thomas first appears as a down-and-out man, but turns out to be far from it. Viewers are put on notice that they can never be sure what is real and what is make-believe. This continues through the film's final scene, where the make-believe of the mimes' tennis game becomes more real than the murder that Thomas accidentally photographed.
The DVD is marred by additional deletions. Thomas develops the roll of film he shot in the park, studies the photos and sees something. (We viewers never really see what it is.) He makes a series of larger and progressively blurrier enlargements. Finally, he makes his largest blow-up, examines it, and instead of hanging it out in the open as he had the others, he conceals it between a pair of cabinets. This seems a fairly long sequence in the original film and it is only later that we learn of its significance. Of course, the name of the film comes from this scene. I can only assume that Turner/MGM felt this sequence was boring and deleted most of it from the DVD. When Thomas later finds his studio has been robbed, we don't even know what was taken or why he has this one enlargement left. There are other odd little deletions here and there in the DVD; perhaps there were some bad frames in the original film from which the DVD was made. When I purchased the DVD, I expected some of his romp with the two young "wanna be" models to be deleted. I did not expect the evisceration of the basic theme of the film by the deletion of the important opening scenes.
I might describe this DVD as a "Bowdlerised" edition, but perhaps "Turnerized" may be more correct. The DVD includes commentary by Peter Brunette, an academician. author and presumed expert on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. I have carefully listened to his commentary twice through, and can only conclude that he never saw the original film. His comments refer only to this DVD edition. At one point in his commentary, Mr. Brunette notes that the clothes worn by Thomas at the doss house mysteriously disappear. Yes they do, because of another nonsensical deletion!
I would not normally recommend a DVD with so many deletions, but it seems that this flawed DVD is the only version of the film that is currently available. To see it in this form is better than to not see it at all. I give it 3 stars instead of the 4+ that the original film deserves.

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Taking photographs of a couple making love proves deadly when the photographer enlarges the image and discovers murder.The film and pictures are stolen from his studio and the body vanishes.In this elegant balance of deciet and trickery, the photographer must question the reality of what he has actually seen.

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