Delicious Green Challah (Zardoz)
Jan. 15th, 2007 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zustiferZardoz (John Boorman). Jan 13th, 11pm. View count: 5? 6? 14? Who knows.
Zardoz is an appalling movie. It's often held up as a quintessentially bad movie because of its many, many poor choices. My high school best friend and I sort of adopted it because of its hilarity, so some of the imagery and silly lines gave me that weird 'man, I KNOW that!' feeling that I really should be used to by now. For some reason, my dad really likes it, kind of semi-ironically. He maintains that the ideas in it are good ones (society of 'stupid' coddled eloi ('Eternals') safe in bubble that protects them from clever hunting Exterminators and mortals in general), which I guess is not untrue.
But this does not change the fact that this movie is all over the place, and in no way cohesive or actually even sensical. The totally perfunctory director talkover provided almost no clues as to what the heck Boorman was thinking (this man directed Deliverance! Deliverance is very well executed in many ways. I don't see a whole lot of connection). I think at one point he opined that 'this film has so many ideas in it!' which was hilarious considering the final state of most of those ideas.
The thing's a mess. It's like a student film writ large, and a 70s student film at that. It's one of those movies where it's so dense with things that it's easy to pick out stuff to focus on, but little of it hangs together. So you pretty much end up just laughing at essentially everything that happens onscreen, but you remain lost as to each event's connection with the other. Some connections do actually exist, but there's no effort to get these across.
Then there's the completely isolated details like the green bread, the business-suited Brutals (?), the finger-wiggling hivemind procedure, the people all with normal names except for one that's called 'Friend' for some reason. Hoo boy. I mean, it's all very amusing. But it's also just a bunch of stuff. I have no reason to actually believe that Boorman had anything cohesive in mind, especially given his talkover.
Very basic plotwise, obvious questions include: why do the Eternals punish one another with ageing? A big deal is made out of oh, the memory of why you're immortal is inaccessible! but this has nothing to do with their system of justice. Making immortals long for death is I guess a fun idea, but their problems could easily have been soluble within their society. Maybe this was just a manifestation of how Completely Stupid they were (I guess), but MAN did that not get across.
I know it's wrong to even consider the characters in the movie as actual entities with personalities, but why did Consuela's attitude toward Sean Connery just flip like a switch? You're a horrible beast, oh, no, whoops, I mean let's get married. I imagine the RAW AWESOMENESS of Sean Connery and his little loincloth was just too much to ignore or something, but who really knows. And freckle lady, the one who actually seemed to like him I guess just wandered off into a bullet. Who can say?
I am so not even getting into Sean Connery's magic sweat. Criminy. Anyhow, it's sort of an ADHD: The Movie, except the editing isn't particularly snappy and it's almost offensively groovy. Maybe it's ADHD: The Script. It is good for arkples and similar party-like events, but not good for much else.
Conclusion: If you want a movie where the protagonist's two verbs are Rape and Shoot (okay, and Sweat), then heck yes. (Arguably a great FPS could be made around this movie. I think that could be really good, especially if the player was not also made to sit through interminable cutscenes of jellyfish floating around and people wearing crocheted afghans in between shooting defenseless guys in suits and Apathetics who don't even move.) Also it's really amusing and quoteable. But it's not a real movie, no matter what wikipedia says.
(The end has Beethoven's seventh symphony, second movement, which is probably my favorite piece of classical music, too, if that's a bonus.)
Zardoz is an appalling movie. It's often held up as a quintessentially bad movie because of its many, many poor choices. My high school best friend and I sort of adopted it because of its hilarity, so some of the imagery and silly lines gave me that weird 'man, I KNOW that!' feeling that I really should be used to by now. For some reason, my dad really likes it, kind of semi-ironically. He maintains that the ideas in it are good ones (society of 'stupid' coddled eloi ('Eternals') safe in bubble that protects them from clever hunting Exterminators and mortals in general), which I guess is not untrue.
But this does not change the fact that this movie is all over the place, and in no way cohesive or actually even sensical. The totally perfunctory director talkover provided almost no clues as to what the heck Boorman was thinking (this man directed Deliverance! Deliverance is very well executed in many ways. I don't see a whole lot of connection). I think at one point he opined that 'this film has so many ideas in it!' which was hilarious considering the final state of most of those ideas.
The thing's a mess. It's like a student film writ large, and a 70s student film at that. It's one of those movies where it's so dense with things that it's easy to pick out stuff to focus on, but little of it hangs together. So you pretty much end up just laughing at essentially everything that happens onscreen, but you remain lost as to each event's connection with the other. Some connections do actually exist, but there's no effort to get these across.
Then there's the completely isolated details like the green bread, the business-suited Brutals (?), the finger-wiggling hivemind procedure, the people all with normal names except for one that's called 'Friend' for some reason. Hoo boy. I mean, it's all very amusing. But it's also just a bunch of stuff. I have no reason to actually believe that Boorman had anything cohesive in mind, especially given his talkover.
Very basic plotwise, obvious questions include: why do the Eternals punish one another with ageing? A big deal is made out of oh, the memory of why you're immortal is inaccessible! but this has nothing to do with their system of justice. Making immortals long for death is I guess a fun idea, but their problems could easily have been soluble within their society. Maybe this was just a manifestation of how Completely Stupid they were (I guess), but MAN did that not get across.
I know it's wrong to even consider the characters in the movie as actual entities with personalities, but why did Consuela's attitude toward Sean Connery just flip like a switch? You're a horrible beast, oh, no, whoops, I mean let's get married. I imagine the RAW AWESOMENESS of Sean Connery and his little loincloth was just too much to ignore or something, but who really knows. And freckle lady, the one who actually seemed to like him I guess just wandered off into a bullet. Who can say?
I am so not even getting into Sean Connery's magic sweat. Criminy. Anyhow, it's sort of an ADHD: The Movie, except the editing isn't particularly snappy and it's almost offensively groovy. Maybe it's ADHD: The Script. It is good for arkples and similar party-like events, but not good for much else.
Conclusion: If you want a movie where the protagonist's two verbs are Rape and Shoot (okay, and Sweat), then heck yes. (Arguably a great FPS could be made around this movie. I think that could be really good, especially if the player was not also made to sit through interminable cutscenes of jellyfish floating around and people wearing crocheted afghans in between shooting defenseless guys in suits and Apathetics who don't even move.) Also it's really amusing and quoteable. But it's not a real movie, no matter what wikipedia says.
(The end has Beethoven's seventh symphony, second movement, which is probably my favorite piece of classical music, too, if that's a bonus.)
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 05:17 pm (UTC)That's a very typical sixties/seventies kind of idea, though, particularly where Sean Connery is involved. Think of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger: she flips to the side of good (and, I think it's implied, heterosexuality) because James Bond essentially rapes her, or tries to until she starts to like it, I forget which. Also, in that era there was this whole mostly-well-intentioned idea of raw sexuality overcoming crushing conventionality by BLOWING CONVENTIONALITY'S MIND, which got mixed up with a bunch of wholly unsavory ideas about deflowering the stuck-up ice queen.
I'm ashamed to say that the first time I saw Zardoz, when I was a graduate student and easily impressed by pretentious stuff, I was kind of favorably impressed by how it actually attempted to pull together a lot of basic science-fiction ideas in an ambitious way, and I didn't hate it overall. The second time I saw it, the "oh, come on" reflex kicked in. I mean, it's just a completely ridiculous movie, and the good ideas that are in it were done way better by Arthur C. Clarke in The City and the Stars.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 05:23 pm (UTC)But I think I'm sort of familiar with the Sex as what, conduit to love or something? I guess.
But I don't actually remember any contact between Connery & Whatsername, do you? Maybe it was just the sweat again?
no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 06:58 pm (UTC)You may very well have seen this 14,000 times already
Date: 2007-01-15 08:00 pm (UTC)Re: You may very well have seen this 14,000 times already
Date: 2007-01-15 09:06 pm (UTC)I haven't checked that site since college. Curses.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 08:12 pm (UTC)Though I did notice about a hojillion sounds that were sampled by apparently every "electronica" artist on the planet.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 08:59 pm (UTC)Most of the users were metal bands, though, not strictly techno.
Those movies were on the list, but not as high up as you might thing. I don't know what was on top, but I remember that Bladerunner and various Alien saga films were well represented.