Zabriskie Point

[accatone]

Tom, "irony" (i tend to say its something else that would take to long to describe on my mobile phone here) is a major key to JLG - if it gets discarded its very easy to be on that JLG pretentious camp". I mean, just check out La Chinoise...

[Tommaso]

I haven't seen "La Chinoise", but I suspected I was on the wrong trail with "One plus One". Well, I'm notorious for not 'getting' JLG...

[tartarlamb]

I haven't seen "La Chinoise", but I suspected I was on the wrong trail with "One plus One". Well, I'm notorious for not 'getting' JLG...

I would give La Chinoise a try. My reaction to One Plus One (and ZP for that matter) is similar to yours, and I too don't 'get' Godard. La Chinoise is one of the few of his films that I really enjoy -- it has aged pretty well both as period pop art and as comedy.

[Murasaki53]

Does anyone happen to know why there are Japanese subtitles on the US Warner release?

To the best of my knowledge, it's very rare for English speaking movies to carry Japanese subtitles on R1 DVD releases.

Is it because of the Pink Floyd connection? Or was the movie popular in Japan on its initial release?

[tojoed]

I don't know why, but on the R1 DVD of California Split there are English SDH and Japanese subs and no others.

[colinr0380]

And strangely Japanese subtitles feature on Sony's R1 disc of The Fog of War, along with Spanish, French and Portuguese, but no English subs!

[atcolomb]

Just saw the film for the first time and knowing about it in Medved's book "The 50 Worst Films of All Time" it's not that bad. Nice visuals and sound track and always nice to see Rod Taylor. The only thing i felt sorry for in the end is the cool looking house and Rod Taylor being blown up!

[so lightly here]

Haven't ripped open the dvd of "ZP" yet but I saw a great print in Paris at La Cinémathèque française when it used to be near Trocadéro. I can understand the many opinions people have about the film itself but I would think all agree it is ravishingly beautiful to watch (I do hope my dvd copy - though unfortunately not Blu-ray, which it definitely should be) will show off how good the film looks. I do remember how disappointed I was with the dvd release of "Blow Up".

[atcolomb]

Warner Bros. did a great job on the transfer, i guess they found a great print of the film. I wished they added some extras besides the trailer like commentary from Daria Halprin or documentary behind the shooting of the film.

[Sloper]

The trailer is very good, though - makes the film look a whole lot more thrilling than it actually is! There must have been some seriously disappointed patrons...

[Aletheia]

This film is finally getting a dvd release in the UK. HMV have an exclusive release date for 28-09-2009: http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProductDet ... &sku=27192

Expect other retailers will roll this out very soon.

[WRomanus]

Ok, I'm going really in Deep of some ZP scenes.
Talking about the "Emotionally Sick Kids Sequence" from 36:49 to 38:11 of DVD, I didn't find anything about in the net.
I think is a very interesting part of the movie.
A sense of dislocation all around...the place...desert and waste , the broken auto, the broken piano and those kids acting strange...
all accentuated from that Off Key Piano Melody played by the probably most emotionally sick of all the kids.
BTW, do you think is taht kid playing piano or was he dubbed?
And may some of you tell where's that location of the Roadhouse in the desert?

I'm searching for all the ZP locations and checking different sources like this:
http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/z ... point.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Well, In my opinion the two lines The fabulous green and gold deco tower seen through Allen’s window is the Eastern Columbia Building, 849 South Broadway are wrong.
That tower is BLACK and gold and was demolished shortly after filming that sequence.

[WRomanus]

.........................
I'm searching for all the ZP locations and checking different sources like this:
http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/z ... point.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Well, In my opinion the two lines The fabulous green and gold deco tower seen through Allen’s window is the Eastern Columbia Building, 849 South Broadway are wrong.
That tower is BLACK and gold and was demolished shortly after filming that sequence.

I think the people of movie-location site is reading this forum since they deleted the above two lines

[therewillbeblus]

I strongly disliked this when I saw it in my youth, but ten years later I'm joining its cult chorus regarding it as an unsung masterpiece. I don't know what the actual 'intention' was on Antonioni's part, but the film reads to me as incredibly pessimistic and even critical of the counterculture movement's idealism while empathizing with the plight of powerlessness usurping their theoretically valuable ideals. Even if Antonioni is didactically moralizing against capitalist America, the film's cumulative mood crushes any single moment's pandering against the System. The desert sex is a fantastically utopian version of the Flower Power lifestyle, impermanently sublime and incapable of maintaining pleasure against the gravity of 'society' pulling these principals back. Sure, one could argue that the break from the desert and return to face consequences is rooted in these youths' moral compasses, but it seems implicit that they are conditioned to return to familiarity, to conform against their ideals, not only because they feel a helplessly-imposed 'need' to, but ultimately because their vision of a perfect world is impossible to actualize and sustain, even when it's literally happening in real time.

The framing of this narrative, where nothing else is acceptable and yet nothing can match the potency of the imagination, creates a tragic imprisonment for these youth. They are impotent to fulfill their own desires-turned-needs with fragile sensitivity- partially because they cannot brings themselves to compromise (exhibited as a weakness within this milieu rather than a strength), but more disturbingly rooted in their identities being mirage projections of dreams- dreams they are too afraid to engage in or that cannot corporeally match the idea of the dream. Daria Halprin's serene smile post-forecasted-imagination of destruction is simultaneously empathetic and pathetic- she smugly returns to the car after solipsistically satisfying her desire. We may share it, but this will lead to inactive complacency- the kind that is called out at the start of the film, and yet it's also a resilience born from the futility to make dreams come true.

Maybe the best we can do is collectively dream (and for artists like Antonioni here or Tarantino to use the magic of the movies to perversely alter real life) but there's something deeply sad and troubling about that as well. The ending of this film is masterful, though less the explosions than the return to Halprin's delusional heroine, isolated and alone, ripped away from the catharsis, riding off into the sunset to live a life that is going to consist of mostly isolation and loneliness and failure to make her dreams come true, yet smiling all the same. I felt disturbed.. I pitied, resented, and felt compassion for her (and myself and those I know in my life, through all past seasons of development along the spectrum of star-eyed agency to pragmatic inactivity).. and liberated at once, but the magnetic pull grounded me back to the fatalistically melancholic paralysis that would become detrimentally sobering in the 70s, after the promise of change, and would continue to this day through countless zeitgeists and beyond.