FOT Forum
The Best Show on WFMU => Show Discussion => Topic started by: ben on January 10, 2008, 12:38:34 AM
-
zardoz is the new rick roll. It's certainly annoyed everyone i sent it to today!
http://www.utc.fr/~macret/cine/realisateurs/boorman/photos/zardoz6.jpg
dumb idea, or really dumb idea?
-
I saw Zardoz with my parents when it first came out. My father--who doesn't like many movies (though he is a fan of Alec Guinness)--loathed it and made his disgust known to everyone in the audience. Soon, we all joined in on ridiculing the film, and I suspect that was perhaps the best time any group of people had watching that benighted movie.
-
Fuck it, I'm running with the Superman trivia:
When I was about six years old, Superman had a regular rivalry with a bald, hairy guy in speedos, go-go boots, and a vest. Growing up in the 70s (with parents who did things like take me to see The Man Who Fell To Earth), I was always wondering if I was just a kid and would figure things out eventually, or if everything really was as weird as it seemed. Well, you be the judge:
(http://sidewayspony.com/images/trough/production/2007/mar/22/19987_orig_397px_vartoxdcu0.jpg)
It wasn't until some time in the late 1990s that I realized who the Superman artists were referencing. Why is another question.
-
And this is from Wikipedia:
Nora Sayre, in a February 7, 1974 review for The New York Times, called Zardoz a melodrama that is a "good deal less effective than its special visual effects"... a film "more confusing than exciting even with a frenetic, shoot-em-up climax."[2]
Jay Cocks of Time called the film "visually bounteous", with "bright intervals of self-deprecatory humor that lighten the occasional pomposity of the material."[3]
Roger Ebert called it a "genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators....The movie is an exercise in self-indulgence (if often an interesting one) by Boorman, who more or less had carte blanche to do a personal project after his immensely successful Deliverance."[4]
Total Film magazine rated Connery's costume at number one of the dumbest decisions in movie history in 2004.[citation needed]
Decades later, Channel 4 called it "Boorman's finest film" and a "wonderfully eccentric and visually exciting sci-fi quest" that "deserves reappraisal."[1]
Might this actually be a good movie? Or did most mainstream critics suck back then, too?
-
Might this actually be a good movie?
I think not. True, it's been more than thirty years since I saw it that first and only time, but I remember it as fraught, pretentious, and massively overacted. Plus silly to a point where one wanted to turn one's head away in embarrassment--for both the actors involved and oneself for watching them.
-
Wow, that "bandwidth exceeded" picture is kind of perfect. So instead of editing my post, here's another pic:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1a/Vartoxdcu0.jpg/250px-Vartoxdcu0.jpg)
And thanks for the update, Sarah.
-
I used to work in a video store, and the most excited I'd ever seen the manager was when we got a dvd copy of Zardoz in.
-
i must say, being rather a young'un and having had no idea what or who zardoz was, i had THREE NIGHTMARES involving this picture after looking it up when tom mentioned it on tuesday. Three. I would google the film to find out what it's about, but now i'm just so afraid.
-
[youtube]kbGVIdA3dx0[/youtube].
-
We really need to figure out some sort of concept for a Zardoz-Tarkus crossover.