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India Press Store - Zabriskie Point
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List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $14.25
Your Save: $ 5.73 ( 29% )
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Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Paul Fix, G.D. Spradlin, Bill Garaway
Directed By: Michelangelo Antonioni
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786301977876
Format: Color
ISBN: 6301977874
Label: MGM (Warner)
Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Warner)
Release Date: 1993-01-27
Running Time: 110
Studio: MGM (Warner)
Theatrical Release Date: 1970-02-09
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Intoxicatingly Ethereal Counterculture
Comment: This is a very intriguing film and rather euphoric in its approach from director Michelangelo Antonioni. It is a quixotically coherent effort from director Antonioni and the story works on several levels making it stand apart from other films in this era. The actors give titillating performances. It is so interesting to see Rod Taylor show up in this film.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A film awaiting rediscovery....
Comment: When this film was made, it was mercilessly ripped apart by the critics, and it majorly bombed at the box office. Antonioni didn't direct a feature film until 5 years later (the film was The Passenger). Is this film as bad as it was purported to be? Absolutely not. It's one of Antonioni's most visually beautiful films, with some of the best 2.35:1 scope photography you're ever likely to see. It shows a rather accurate (and critical) eye at the student protest movements in the 1960's, and at the aggressive, materialistic, overly commercialistic American lifestyle. When the film starts, it's actually quite amusing to hear the students talkin' about revolution (it was hip to be a revolutionary back in the 1960's). The dialogue is cringe inducing today, but not because it's necessarily bad, but one cringes at the fact that conversations like this actually took place. You really get tired of the pretentions of the students, and their rather naive, arrogant attitudes towards everything. The lead actor and actress, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, are not particularly good, but I've seen worse acting in many modern films than what these two come up with. They both manage to get by without too much trouble. The "Sunny Dunes pitch" session is hilariously bad, but then, I can actually see something tacky like that being presented at numerous marketing meetings across America, and the attendees at the meetings will enjoy it wholeheartedly. Antonioni's framing is impeccable as usual. The "love-in" scene is very strange and eerie, the soundtrack works very well throughout the film, but the main reason to see the film is the finale. We see Daria's boss's (played by Rod Taylor, the man from The Birds) villa destroyed in a set of glorious explosions. Daria is just imagining it, but the destruction of the villa really happens (no CGI here). This is all done while the song "Careful with that Axe, Eugene" by Pink Floyd is playing. It's one of the great scenes in cinema. So, overall, the film is very good, and it is an accurate portrayal of America at the time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Everyone is a Stranger to Candy
Comment: I saw "ZP" during its initial theatrical release at a theater on an Air Force Base in Texas. Although it was a little more controversial than "My Fair Lady", it was not the revolutionary and subversive piece that many of its current admirers like to believe, or at least the armed forces saw fit to make it accessible to the troops. Of course that was at least in part because nobody could figure out what Antonioni was trying to communicate with this film.
So let's get real, "ZP" is neither the masterpiece its fans claim nor the hopeless morass that most casual viewers find it after their initial exposure. It has some interesting themes and some innovative techniques. It was Antonioni's only foray into America and he had been marking time for several years after "Blowup". As a foreigner he was attracted to the growing student protests on US campuses, these were already a tradition in Europe but were almost unprecedented in America.
His outsider status provided an excellent opportunity for an objective evaluation of US culture at the end of the 1960's. Unfortunately his rambling tale was too superficial to really capture the moods, atmosphere, and dynamics of this period of social change. Other films like "The Strawberry Statement", "Getting Straight", "Joe", "Medium Cool", and "Gimme Shelter" are far better time capsules.
Antonioni's screenplay (if it can be called that) is more an excuse for filming lots of ordinary things in extraordinary ways. You don't ever forget his heroine's smile as she fantasies about blowing up her lover's luxury house, with slow motion images of our materialistic society being blown over the desert. All this to the Pink Floyd's "Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up"; a retooled "Careful with That Ax, Eugene".
Antonioni was probably trying to tell us something with his film, maybe that positive change is an internal attitude thing and that violence is not the way to change the system. In 1971 the obvious message was that it was irresponsible to run away or dropout from even an extremely decadent society, that once you get your own head together the responsible thing is to return and change the system with a positive example, even if it gets you killed.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The cathartic gaze!
Comment:
If you think it over there were six fundamentals films that focused in the adolescence crisis from four different angles between 1965 and 1970. If of Lindsay Anderson, The Young Torless of Wolker Scholondorff, The Strawberry statement (the weakest of the set), Easy Rider of Dennis Hopper, Carnal knowledge of Mike Nichols, and obvious this one, may be the most pyramidal of the set.
Michelangelo Antonioni, the great master of the silences, profited by the huge cry of inconformity all around the world in the late sixties to explore the roots of a dysfunctional portrait of fissured family, absolutely disintegrated. And since this vision developed a fascinating and powerful allegory of the youth's dreams against the somber perspectives offered by the future.
So this love affair is much more than a simple love story it's a poetic picture that emphasizes the supported conviction of distant voices as Jack Kerouac, and Allan Gingsberg in the middle fifties when the lost dreams of the steaming wrecks of the War left a raising boyhood not only orphans in the real sense but far beyond: ideals or trust in the future.
The film may be result dated for you considering all the flown water under the bridge but if you real want to analyze a wider perspective of all a generation from L.A. to the 68's French may (Forbidden to forbid), go for this emblematic movie.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Zabriskie Point
Comment:
Zabriskie Point by Antonioni is not a film but an experience, a voyage into the subconscious of America,
an apocalyptic portrait of an apocalyptic youth. Using a tone that emphatizes every movement, as if the
director were completely alienated by what he is filming (much like Fellini when he made 'Satyricon', in his own
words he shot Antique Rome as if he were 'making a documentary on martians') Antonioni made with
'Zabriskie Point', along with Bertolucci's ' The Dreamers' and 'Before The Revolution', Godard's 'Bande Of
Outsiders', Breillat's 'Fat Girl' and Clark's 'Kids', a grand immortal statement on the destructiveness of youth. Using the desert
as a metaphor for grace and refuge from the world, his characters, two young lovers trying to escape the obligations
of fate, seem at once lost and pure. Antonioni films their every gesture with candidness, they smile, they kiss, they
sometimes speak, but one feels their alienation, as they wander aimlessly on the sand. Antonioni concieves the film
as an illusion, it never feels like more than a dream yet with an emotional intimacy, and a deeply personal vision,
'Zabriskie Point' is alive and vivid, and it radiates a structureless beauty.
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