The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter December 2023
4K Heaven
The greatest motion pictures are those that excite you for their use of the medium itself. The shared discovery, between the filmmakers and the viewer, of what occurs when images are combined and juxtaposed, sound and music are applied, emotions of the characters are exposed, ideas are expressed, and thoughts are manifested, because a film has been put together in a specific way, creates a deep emotional response that transcends the film itself, allowing the viewer to grasp the imagination, the beauty and the justification for existence that life itself has to offer. Terrence Malick’s 1978 Paramount feature, Days of Heaven, is one such motion picture.
The standard Blu-ray included in the 4K Blu-ray Paramount Criterion Collection release of Days of Heaven (UPC#715515289214, $50) is identical to the Criterion BD release we reviewed in Apr 10 and is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1. The 4K presentation, however, is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1, eliminating a sliver of picture information from the bottom of the screen. While hues are more subdued on the 4K presentation, the image is more finely detailed. Arguably, the slight subjugation of tone is more appropriate to the drama. Essentially, however, both versions look fantastic and since they both come in the same package, there is no shortcoming to having both variations available.
There is less ambiguity in the 5.1-channel DTS sound, which was drawn from a 4.1-channel magnetic track. As we mentioned in our previous review, there is a rumor that the original 70mm prints had a 6.1-channel audio track, with a more pronounced mix, but this remains an elusive Holy Grail. As for what is at hand, while the sound on the standard BD is terrific, not only are the directional effects more pronounced and better defined on the 4K presentation, but the sound itself is more liquid and more transporting, enveloping the viewer in the film’s early Twentieth Century period setting. The musical score, a combination of Ennio Morricone, Leo Kottke, Camille Saint-Saëns and others, serves as a direct highway between the film’s fulfilling historical melodrama (it is also, at key moments, enormously funny), its captivating images of nature, people, and machines, and the abstract concepts of beauty and spirit, making the 4K presentation a transcendent experience.
The 4K platter comes with optional English subtitles and the group commentary originally produced for Criterion’s DVD (Nov 07). The standard BD comes with a 22-minute interview featuring star Richard Gere, a 13-minute interview with co-star Sam Shepard, a 12-minute interview with co-cinematographer Haskell Wexler, and a 20-minute interview with camera operator John Bailey.
4K Oppenheimer
Amid a flurry of deeply flawed science-fiction films and above average comic book movies, Christopher Nolan made an exceptionally good World War II feature, Dunkirk (Jan 18), which still toyed with temporality in a gimmicky manner but captured the essence of the history Nolan wanted to share. Nolan has now returned to World War II and its aftermath for a serious and astoundingly well-marketed/popular 2023 biographical feature, Oppenheimer, a three-platter 4K UltraHD Blu-ray from Universal and SDS Studio Distribution Services (UPC#191329253120, $50). The world is at the mercy of the failings of its geniuses. The film depicts how human and how flawed everyone involved in the creation of the atomic bomb was, and how even more flawed those who were not directly involved in the project were, particularly those concerned about security. Hindsight hovers over the film like the bomb itself, as the uncertainty principles of politics enmesh the hero in delusive entanglements.
Cillian Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, from his days as a college student to receiving post-retirement honors, with much of the 180-minute film looking at his overseeing of the development of the atomic bomb and the problems he encountered after his work was done, because of his liberal political views before the war and his own indecision about how the bomb should be utilized. In a weird way, the film reminded us of Hamlet, creating a profound portrait of human ingenuity and insecurity in the face of crisis, compiled with an elongated string of beguiling obscurities. As with his other movies, Nolan mixes together timelines, but he does so in a fairly traditional manner, and utilizes changes in both the film’s aspect ratio and a mix of black-and-white and color footage to effectively differentiate the time periods and points of view of specific, intercut scenes (Nolan is masterful at this compared to the primitive attempt Steven Soderbergh made in Traffic). It is the intricacy of these storylines and how they blend together the draws a viewer back to the film multiple times and makes owning the disc worthwhile. That Nolan was able to accomplish this sort of attraction without resorting to overt gimmicks in his storytelling is a welcome maturation of his capabilities as an already exceptional filmmaker.
The film’s periphery also teases the viewer with audiovisual evocations of quantum mechanics and the theory’s bent reflections within the cultural horizons of the Thirties and Forties. When the bomb goes off, there is quite a boom—be sure to tie down your dishes before you start the film—but most of the movie is conversational, with a little bit of sex and some nice-looking locations to keep the delivery of the movie’s facts, arguments, deliberations, divergent psychologies and outright backstabbing stimulating. Murphy does not in any way, shape or form make a dashing hero, even with the cool hat he wears, but he still manages to be present in a majority of the film’s running time without exhausting either one’s patience or one’s sympathy.
There are also quite a number of engaging supporting actors, including Matt Damon (who is fine as General Leslie Groves, but pales in comparison to other actors who have filled the role in previous films, notably Brian Dennehy and Paul Newman), Robert Downey Jr. (who is outright chilling in what is probably the film’s most unexpected storyline, playing AEC Chairman, Lewis Strauss), Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh (as Oppenheimer’s Ophelia, Jean Tatlock), Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Matthew Modine and Kenneth Branagh. In an eye-opening advance of age for two enjoyable performers, Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein and James Remar is Henry Stimson. Gary Oldman takes a shot at being Harry S. Truman.
Because the jumps back and forth in time require concentration, the better the film’s delivery the more involved a viewer becomes in the drama, and to this end, the 4K format is ideal. A standard Blu-ray presentation has also been included in the set, along with a standard BD platter with special features. Those two platters are also available separately (UPC#191329253045, $40). The standard BD is absolutely terrific, sure, but the particle accelerations that occur when the sights and sounds of the 4K presentation interact with your brain cannot be reproduced with lesser technology. There are fleeting smears in darker areas of the screen on the standard BD that we would normally dismiss, except that the smears are not there on the 4K playback. The film was shot in IMAX and so, being closer to the vividness of its source, the image on the 4K presentation is sharper and hues are more compellingly defined. Rather surprisingly, the sound on the 4K platter (as well as the standard BD) is limited to a 5.1-channel DTS mix, but it still delivers an enveloping and detailed sound field, and again, the audio is slightly richer on the 4K playback. The 4K platter has alternate French and Spanish audio tracks and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. In addition to those choices, the standard BD platter has an audio track that describes the action (“Under a blue sky, the Oppenheimer’s convertible crests the top of the mesa. Following a dirt road, they pass a small white building with a sign that reads, ‘Los Alamos Project Main Gate,’ on their way into the newly built town.”).
The second standard BD platter has five trailers, including a 5-minute teaser and a trailer promoting the film’s projection in the IMAX format (with different variations in aspect ratios than appear in the standard presentation) and a rewarding 35-minute 2023 NBC Meet the Press session in front of a live audience, hosted by Chuck Todd, with Nolan, the co-author of the Oppenheimer biography upon which the movie is based, Kai Bird, and a couple of physicists. They talk a lot about the politics depicted in the film, the realities behind the movie’s creation and the fact that Oppenheimer’s desire, in allowing the bombs to be dropped on Japan to prevent them from ever being used on people again, has worked, as one panelist says, “So far.”
A terrific 8-minute segment looks at how the film’s cinematography was processed. Despite Nolan’s future-oriented filmography, the movie was not made digitally because the digital format has not yet reached the pixel count that IMAX film stock can achieve. Not only was the editing done by hand (concurrently with editing it digitally), but parts of the film were shot on a previously unutilized 65mm black-and-white film stock, which then had to be processed with non-color processing chemicals, challenging all of the youngsters who had never worked with that sort of material before. As part of a great 72-minute collection of production featurettes, there is a segment that goes further into the challenges and achievements of the cinematography, and how one might very well be tempted to watch the 4K presentation simply to absorb those accomplishments, celebrating the dynamic between science and cinema.
Finally, as an ideal supplement, Universal’s NBC News group produced a 2023 documentary about Oppenheimer, essentially covering the same periods of his life that the film covers, and explaining what happened in a more traditional, documentary style. Other than including an insightful interview with Nolan, the promotional links to the feature film are minimal, and running 87 minutes, it is an ideal program to watch first if you know very little about Oppenheimer ahead of time, or to watch afterwards, if you want to sort through the film’s dramatic fusions and fissions in a more linear manner.
Ford in 4K
Two films that would have succeeded anyway, but were clearly boosted to blockbuster hits by the presence of Harrison Ford in their lead roles, have now been released in 4K format on Blu-ray. Ford’s movie star presence is secondary to the almost fumbling innocence he projects as a hero, imbuing his characters with a pragmatism that forces him to push through desperation and reservation in the search of truth and justice. While his occasional deer-in-the-headlights expressions can be disarming, his performances are subtle and careful, nuances that often got lost on older home video releases of his films, but can be better appreciated in the clarity that 4K provides.
In what was probably Ford’s biggest hit in terms of the boxoffice, outside of the sci-fi action spectacles he anchored, he played the wrongly accused protagonist in the outstanding 1993 Andrew Davis thriller from Warner Bros., The Fugitive, based upon the popular Sixties TV series, which has now been released as a fantastic WB SDS Studio Distribution Services 4K UltraHD Blu-ray (UPC#883929813889, $34). Although many might argue that the film was stolen by second-billed Tommy Lee Jones, playing the United States Marshall heading the search team chasing Ford’s character after he escapes incarceration, it is instead the polarity between the two performances—Ford is warm and fuzzy while Jones is cold and efficient (but not above wisecracking)—that fuels the film’s continual, unwavering energy. When they finally bond at the film’s end, it is an emotionally explosive moment, as compelling as any romance.
During the climax, Ford’s character has an extended fight with the villain in a hotel building and at one point the two, rather dazed, are in an elevator. The villain staggers out and the door starts to close, but a single arm suddenly appears in the remaining gap to push the door back open again. Indeed, throughout the film and especially during the harrowing scenes of the hero’s initial escape, Davis and Ford worked out that Ford would often use just one arm to do things and leave the other arm relaxed to the side. It isn’t always the same arm and he doesn’t do it when it is impractical, but it is a wonderful subliminal touch that you only see after you’ve watched the movie dozens of times. Ford’s character is searching for a ‘one-armed man,’ who murdered his wife, but the subliminal tease is that maybe, after all, he is the one-armed man himself. Of course he isn’t, but it is a brilliant bit of direction and acting.
The film is superbly constructed. The stars are a part of it, but so is the script, which has no false moments and has many lovely interludes between the chase scenes, from the joyously witty patter Jones’ character exchanges with his ‘team’ as they look for clues (his unit seems to have been the model for umpteen television shows that followed depicting crime detection groups) to the wonderful moments when Ford’s character, a doctor, is unable or unwilling to suppress his urge to heal someone he sees suffering, even when the police are breathing down his neck. Ford’s performance may frustrate purists who want more responsiveness from an actor, but he fulfills the part of the wrongly accused innocent with an unprepossessed determination that is far more meticulous than it appears, trusting that Davis and Jones would fill in the rest, and making the 130-minute film the monster hit that it was.
The movie is so tightly realized and so rich in motion picture suspense that the 4K format is ideal for its delivery. Everything—the image, the Dolby Atmos sound—is perfect, so that your attention, already riveted by the story and the performances, is completely locked down by the preciseness of the delivery. The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1. The sound may have a 1993 mix, but it has plenty of power and is crisply defined, making it fully immersive and adding significantly to the effectiveness of James Newton Howard’s score. There are alternate French, Spanish, Italian and German audio tracks and fourteen subtitling options, including English. Along with a trailer, there are 60 minutes of excellent retrospective featurettes breaking down every major action sequence in the film, celebrating the cast and going over many details of the movie’s long gestation and frantic shoot. (Incidentally, nobody ever mentions Ford’s single arm bits in any part of the supplement.)
Davis and Jones supply a rewarding commentary track, accompanied by a mildly confused 2-minute teaser/introduction to the commentary that also includes a quick acknowledgement by Ford. Recorded in 2011, Davis does most of the talking, describing what was happening during the staging of each scene (and offering up trivia—Davis grew up in Chicago and many of the locations were from his own childhood; also, David Janssen’s mother has a cameo part as a juror in a courtroom scene), but Jones speaks up at appropriate moments, talking about the contributions of the artists around him and the expectations they had for the film, which were minimal (in one of the featurettes, costar Joe Pantoliano recalls a conversation with Jones before shooting began when they arrived on location and decided to goof off a bit since, ‘Let’s face it, man. Ain’t nobody gonna win an Academy Award on this one.’). Indeed, as Davis and Jones describe it, a lot of the film’s marvelous dialog was made up on the set as the actors got the feel for their characters and how they would ‘really’ talk in various locations and situations. At key points throughout the film, the story was changed, and always for the better. Although he doesn’t mention it directly, Davis explains the oddest moment in the film, where Ford’s character is walking down the street late at night and a woman stops to give him a ride. In fact, as Davis does explain, there was an earlier scene in which she was a waitress in a diner, so that she had already met him and wasn’t just picking up a strange man in the middle of the night out of the blue. Julianne Moore was just getting started at the time but she had a part as a romantic interest for Ford’s character that had to be radically trimmed when they realized during the shoot that Ford’s character should still be in love with his dead wife and not have his attentions distracted. Nevertheless, Moore has so much talent that her scenes that were left in the film, as a harried doctor in a hospital, are incredibly powerful because of the level of her performance.
Peter Weir’s 1985 Witness, a Paramount film that has been released in 4K by Paramount and Arrow Video (UPC#760137135760, $60) and has also been issued as a standard Blu-ray (UPC# 760137135777, $50), is pretty much the opposite of the sort of kinetic action thriller that Davis was mastering, but that is precisely why the 4K release of the film, in particular, is so compelling. Looking at America from the outside, Weir explores the Amish community in Pennsylvania where most of the film is set as an almost mystical world, one that is a component of what is, to him as an Australian, an equally mystical America. One of the film’s basic themes is that of an outsider’s view, and Weir communicates the concept with every choice he makes. The cinematography by John Seale is often soft and the lighting, underscoring the lack of electricity in the community, is subdued, but as a result, the close-ups of Kelly McGillis look like Dutch paintings. Ford’s skin tones are grey and almost lifeless in the scenes set in Philadelphia, where he is investigating a murder that the son of McGillis’ widowed character has witnessed, but as soon as he enters the Amish environment, even though it is night and even though he is genuinely lingering near death from a bullet wound, his flesh has warmth and you know immediately that McGillis’ character will be nursing his character not just back to health, but into life.
From Maurice Jarre’s electronic, Eighties score, to Weir’s natural inclination for lyricism, where older home video presentations of the 112-minute film were sleepy and lethargic, the 4K presentation is transfixing. Not only are the images compelling, but the 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound is exquisite, bringing an uplifting or pulse quickening sensory incision with every tone Jarre chooses—the grandest, most rousing use of the bass is not for the shootout at the end, but to introduce the barn raising sequence that has nothing to do with the crime story and everything to do with the soul of the film. There are optional English subtitles.
The standard Blu-ray is a complete duplication of the 4K version, including the supplemental features. While it still presents the film in a manner that should please fans, it does not facilitate the spine-tingling satisfaction that the 4K version enables. The picture on the standard BD is in fact a touch brighter, but it does not convey the painterly texture that the 4K presentation achieves. At times, the sound is not quite as crisp, either.
Danny Glover and Vito Mortensen had parts in the film before they became big stars. Lukas Haas, Josef Sommer, Alexander Godunov and Patti Lupone co-star. Film expert Jarret Gathan supplies an excellent commentary track, providing a thorough history of the film’s development and production, and how its different artists were gathered, as well as providing an exceptional level of detail on how the film faired in the boxoffice and around the world, and talking extensively about the ‘fish out of water’ genre.
Along with a trailer and a passable collection of publicity photos in still frame, there is an outstanding 63-minute retrospective documentary that includes interviews with Weir (“From a film perspective, which is what I immediately reacted to, was that really, within the one film, you had not just two countries, but two time zones, so without it being science fiction, you really had the Nineteenth Century and the Twenty-first Century in the same frame.”), Mortensen, Ford (who believes that this was the film which certified his boxoffice appeal as a legitimate actor), McGillis (in a particularly touching reflection) and others; a nice but excruciating 7-minute interview with Ford from 1985 (the interviewer spends more time pestering him with questions about Star Wars and Indiana Jones than about the film at hand); a very cute 4-minute deleted scene between McGillis and Lupone that was used to extend the TV broadcast running time but slows up the narrative at a critical juncture; a fine 15-minute analysis of the film’s artistry that reiterates some of the highpoints of the commentary and effectively summarizes how the film came to be; a very good 15-minute interview with Seale, who admits that sometimes the shots were out of focus but that Weir chose them because they had captured the best performances, and also explains that the Dutch painting look of the film was deliberate (“The interiors of the Amish house is unashamedly based on [Johannes] Vermeer, the famous Dutch painter. His paintings were on public display in Philadelphia at the time and Peter took us down with heads of department, down to the art gallery and we wandered through, had looked at all the Vermeer paintings, so that when you see, say, the interior of the funeral service, it’s basically a Vermeer copy in that the window light, the daylight coming into the windows, was the main light on the interior.”); and 16 minutes of older interviews with Weir, Ford and McGillis that generally cover the same material as elsewhere, but with a younger, less practiced perspective.
The definitive Barbarella
Part of the lingering cultural evidence that whole generations went through adolescence in the Sixties, Roger Vadim’s 1968 fetishized science-fiction sex comedy, Barbarella, barely functions as a movie, but it is an enduring collectible from an era which had decided to declare to the entire world that it had discovered sex. With its peek-a-boo space suits, love bite dolls and birds, whip-happy latex-ed villainesses, a bubbly ‘Mathmos’ danger, beds and pleasure machines at every turn, the film was designed as much for its multi-page pictorial spreads in Playboy as it was designed to attract eager young boys and, if available, their tolerant dates. Being a good sport, Jane Fonda stars as the title character, an interstellar agent sent to what passes for a planet on a soundstage to find a lost scientist. Along the way, she meets characters played by Ugo Tognazzi, John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, Milo O’Shea and David Hemmings, all of whom have sex with her (except Marceau), some in the traditional manner and some in a more futuristic and artificial process. The stars, and especially Fonda, are talented comedic actors, and it is as a comedy that the movie, based upon a French comic book, justifies its 98-minute running time, since otherwise the plot is loopy (the heroine’s arrival and activities instigate a revolution and mass destruction). The designs are imaginative—the spaceship used by Fonda’s character, though vaguely phallic, is unlike any spaceship in any other movie and can be commended as such—but are far more concerned with form than with any sort of logical function. During the opening credits, in which Fonda appears to do a striptease in zero gravity, the title song promotes the heroine’s world as, ‘psychedelia,’ and that is why, along with the sex, the film has remained an attraction as the decades have passed. It isn’t that its time has gone by, it is that the adolescent within wants to hold onto that time and never let go, and that as new adolescents come along and are exposed to it, they won’t want to let go, either. The Sixties were too much fun.
We reviewed a Paramount DVD in Jul 99. Paramount replicated that DVD as a single-platter Blu-ray with the misguided title, Barbarella Queen of the Galaxy (UPC#097361466460, $30—the bizarre title came from a theatrical re-release after Star Wars). Paramount has now joined forces with Arrow Video to release a two-platter Blu-ray that restores the film’s genuine title, Barbarella (UPC#760137139461, $50), and not only provides an upgraded transfer of the film, but an entire second platter of wonderful supplementary features. That second platter is also included with an even more upgraded 4K UHD Blu-ray (UPC#760137139454, $60).
The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1. The picture on Queen of the Galaxy looks fine, but the picture on the standard Arrow Blu-ray is nicer, with slightly deeper colors. Queen of the Galaxy is monophonic and is accompanied by alternate French and Spanish audio tracks, optional English, French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles, and a trailer.
As for the Arrow discs, the 4K presentation is the definitive version, as the image is less grainy than the standard BD while retaining its richer hues. The film is available both with it original mono track and with a Dolby Atmos track. The Dolby Atmos widens the sound and improves the bass response, but otherwise everything remains centered, although it is preferable to the harsher sounding mono track, so fans will definitely want to, as it were, experience the ‘Mathmos’ in Atmos. Fonda does her own dubbing on the alternate French audio track, including pronouncing the names of the characters with an alternate accent than she uses when pronouncing them in English. On the whole, the French track is quite lyrical and, all things considered, fairly easy to follow. There are optional English subtitles. Another monophonic audio track has just the music cues, in mono. The vaguely electronic score by Bob Crewe and Charles Fox is an artifact of its times, but as such, it is more appealing and addictive now than when it first appeared. A 2-minute alternate opening credit sequence repositions some of the credits and cuts down, just a little bit, on the shots of Fonda’s flesh. A minute-long alternate closing credit sequence has a pseudonym for the music credit.
Along with a trailer, a TV commercial, three radio commercials and eighty-five sweet promotional photos and lobby cards in still frame, the second platter contains a universe of satisfying supplementary features.
We have always found the voice of British actress Joan Greenwood to be highly intoxicating, but it took a slap-the-forehead revelation in film critic Glenn Kenny’s decent 23-minute extended introduction to realize that it is Greenwood who is voicing the villainess embodied by Anita Pallenberg. Viably suggesting that Barbarella is more of a vibe than a movie—and is certainly not an action movie—Kenny celebrates the film’s magnification of Sixties attitudes and presumptions. He claims that Vadim is not a film stylist, to which we would argue that anyone who would be the first to combine a supine Brigitte Bardot and Cinemascope is unquestionably a master of the dynamics of film imagery, and to illustrate a reference to Vadim’s La Ronde, a picture flashes on the screen of the poster for Max Ophul’s original film and not Vadim’s remake, but the talk is a stimulating appetizer that tantalizes one with the film’s strengths and charms. Another engrossing 14-minute introduction by Eugenio Ercolani focuses on the accomplished careers of producer Dino Di Laurentiis and the cast, also ruminating upon the glory days of Italian filmmaking and why Di Laurentiis decided to relocate to Hollywood.
A marvelous 15-minute collection of footage shot in 1967 and compiled in 2021 shows Fonda and Vadim’s domestic life, as well as offering up oodles of great behind-the-scenes material from the set. An excellent, well researched and thoughtful 31-minute piece by costume historian Elisabeth Castaldo analyzes the film’s design and the meanings of the costumes, as well as explaining how credit for the specific pieces became convoluted, and how the film ended up, several decades later, becoming a significant representation of Sixties European design.
A cute 17-minute interview with camera operator Roberto Girometti is included, sharing marvelous anecdotes about his days on the shoot and about working on The Adventurers. Tognazzi’s son, Ricky Tognazzi, provides a rewarding 22-minute stream-of-consciousness talk about his father’s career and his entire generation of Italian actors born in the early Twenties, who came to maturity during Italy’s greatest filmmaking period. Curiously, he does not mention what was probably his father’s greatest international success, La Cage Aux Folles, but he speaks extensively about his father’s passion for offbeat roles and interest in doing films that ‘no one else would touch,’ such as La Grande Bouffe (Nov 15). The great Italian action star, Fabio Testi, worked as a body double for Law in the early part of his career, sharing his experiences on the set and describing his many intersections with the movie business (from a teen stunt person to the lead in Coca-Cola commercials—with Laura Antonelli!) before he finally decided to commit to it full time in a marvelous 24-minute talk.
A 113-minute Internet conversation between genre expert Tim Lucas and European comic book expert Stephen A. Bissette goes over the full history of graphic novels in France and Italy, the history of Jean-Claude Forest’s comic book and its dissemination, and what has happened in the industry since the linchpin of Vadim’s film adaptation. They also talk about the film’s comic book aura (“There was sort of no point in taking acid for Barbarella”), the state of science fiction films at the time (for which 1968 was a seminal year, having also seen the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey—which Bissette suggests was designed for acid trips—and Planet of the Apes), and the legacy of the comic (including a brief insertion near the end of the segment that seems to have a different narrator) and the film, among other things, offering an interesting comparison between the strip teases that open Barbarella and conclude Alien.
Lucas also supplies an exceptionally good commentary track, meticulously detailing the film’s production history, the backgrounds of its cast and crew, and the cultural impact it had upon the world at the time and from today’s perspective. “When the President signs off by saying, ‘Love,’ it seems a bit silly today, but it behooves us to remember this film was made at a time when young people often greeted one another with friendly tribal hand gestures, accompanied by the words, ‘Peace’ and ‘Love.’ Therefore, where we may see naïveté or silliness today, the film was at least half seriously proposing a possible future to its young adult audiences, wherein ‘Love’ had become the dominant ethic and philosophy in the universe, and this was enough to propose Barbarella, the character if not the film, as a counterculture icon.”
He goes into great detail about the specific biographical and career links between De Laurentiis, Vadim, Fonda and Law, and how their lives not only entwined to create the film but continued to link as the connections unraveled. He also supports and explains more explicitly why Vadim, despite his innovative achievements as a filmmaker, was not as accomplished a stylist as his peers in—and was therefore not considered part of—the French New Wave. And he has a precise grasp of the film’s thematic intentions every step of the way. “As Barbarella’s gynecological gusto sends the frustrated device up in flames, [O’Shea’s character] cries, ‘The energy cables are shrinking,’ making them sound explicitly phallic. And then he adds the less well-dated line, ‘You’ve turned them into faggots!’ Mind you, he was speaking of ‘faggots’ in terms of combustible fuel, but the double entendre was very much intended. The outrage of [O’Shea’s character] in this scene has less to do with the damage done to his machine and everything to do with the damage done to his male pride.”
Lucas’ research is so amazing, it is as if he is ahead of A.I., seeming to have cataloged every scene in every movie that ever existed. For example, he cites films by Claude Lelouch and Eric Rohmer where characters pause in specific sequences to peruse French graphic novels similar to the one the film is based upon. On the other hand, and very much like A.I., he does make mistakes (or ‘hallucinations,’ as it is called in the A.I. world), claiming that Hemmings’ popularity was due in part to an appearance in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, a film Hemmings had nothing to do with. Thanks to his error, real A.I. will probably pick it up and carry it as fact, well into the Barbarella future.
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