Screening Log
This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.
June 2006 activity
Total Log Entries: 38
- Adam (2)
- Andrew (0)
- Chet (0)
- Chiranjit (0)
- David (0)
- Eva (0)
- Evan (0)
- Ian (1)
- Jenny (0)
- Katherine (0)
- Leo (13)
- Megan (0)
- Rumsey (8)
- Teddy (0)
- Thomas (1)
- Timothy (0)
- Victoria (0)
Total Comments: 13
- The Passenger (0)
- Zabriskie Point (0)
- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (0)
- Total Recall (0)
- The Thin Blue Line (0)
- Vernon, Florida (0)
- Gates of Heaven (0)
- The Hills Have Eyes (0)
- Munich (1)
- Overboard (0)
- A Short Film About Killing (0)
- A Reason to Live (0)
- … Forever and Always … (0)
- The Mongreloid (0)
- Hold Me While I’m Naked (0)
- Little Red Flowers (0)
- Big Trouble In Little China (0)
- United 93 (1)
- Equinox (0)
- The Long Kiss Goodnight (0)
- Audition (0)
- X Men: The Last Stand (2)
- Dazed and Confused (4)
- Brother’s Keeper (1)
- La Notte (0)
- The Forgotten (0)
- Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (0)
- A Prairie Home Companion (0)
- Aliens (0)
- Torn Curtain (1)
- Laputa: Castle in the Sky (0)
- Czech Dream (0)
- The Night of the Hunter (0)
- Virus (0)
- Videodrome (0)
- A.I. (0)
- The Osterman Weekend (0)
- Commando (3)
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Zabriskie Point / USA / 1970
Having seen this and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (the latter repeatedly) in the same week, it’s hard not to see them as two sides of the same horny, hazy, and hirsute coin. Indeed, Meyer’s film is closer to Antonioni’s in spirit than even Easy Rider, which may seem the more obvious correlate. Both Point and Valley operate in a world of surfaces (those of both The Man and of youth culture), and both begin (appropriately and quite similarly) with dizzying montages of the mirage that is ’60s Los Angeles.
The difference is that Zabriskie Point lacks any of Meyer’s melodrama, replacing it with a more conventionally European-art-cinema disjunction of narrative. I’m not a fan of Antonioni overall, but I do like his more transparent bids for pop-culture street-cred, like this and Blow-Up, even though (or especially because) these are also thinly veiled attacks on pop culture. I guess I can swallow Antonioni’s oblique political allegorizing when I’m also listening to Floyd, Jerry, and John Fahey, and when hippies are orgiastically cavorting in a dusty riverbed.
It should also be noted that the print I saw at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was totally pristine, beautifully showcasing Alfio Contini’s astonishing Cinemascope photography. Here’s hoping it gets as comprehensive a DVD release as Meyer’s film.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: MGM 35mm Print
30 Jun 2006 12:42 PM | Submit Comment