Reviews

Oldest story form which frankly not many take on today-the journeyman theme. I caught this movie on VHS and wish that ,in the age of the DVD someone would remaster this title,so I can retire my old beat up version. I've watched this movie a dozen times and love the journey. I didn't always appreciate the soundtrack BUT one reviewer aptly calls it classic; the movie would not be the same without it. The surrealism of using actors to double roles, the jumpy nature of his journey and the metaphor going on in that cold war installation joined with the crazy dark experiment scene! You won't find a statement/image like that in many movies, underground or mainstream. What a shocker! This is a great movie. A DVD version has just got to happen.

I like to breeze through the comments posted before I write up. I'm just amazed. Bad acting? Compared to what? Bad direction, then show me some examples of good. Anyway, I suspect in the era of reality tv more and more people have less an less patience with a movie that has a story. Sophia Coppola did what ain't easy to do on film,she put together elements that could simulate the feeling we all have had of getting lost in time,and what happens when we do. Great job. Bill Murray has turned in great performances before as seriocomic dramatist; both in The Razor's Edge and Maddog and Glory,where he frankly outpaces Deniro, here, he is assured and seems to just understand what Coppola is after. My wife has watched this flik on DVD nearly a dozen times, and it is a beautiful piece of filmaking-especially coming out of America during our cultural wasteland period.

I'm afraid that in the era of pop-no-where-ism, where the reality show sets the rules; films like this one will get worse and worse reviews as time moves on. I didn't read Vonnegut until my early thirties and I grew up with Vonnegut's as a kid-no kidding. When I started reading, I just read and read in one extensive gulp. First, there's no good way to try to adapt a Vonnegut book to film. To the reviewers -if you can call them that-who say I've read the book and this movie is a miserable adaptation-go figure?! This is a very good vetting of the themes Vonnegut loves, and using the rambling urban neuroses approach, mastered by Altman, Rudolph revvs us up for the big psychic upchuck that this is all about. This is not a great movie but given the importance of self reflection to American society and the rarity of it, in contemporary society-this movie is a landmark and a watermark, both.

Goodness gracious it's amazing how many reviewers missed the most obvious aspect of the film. This tale is about innocence and it approaches that from many different angles. As for Roeg practicing camera tricks-maybe today these are tricks but at the time the style was a pioneering method of telling and showing psychological elements, wasted on todays audiences. Roeg presents innocence in juxtaposition with the hardness and neuroses of society, not as WHITEMAN BAD but as society, modern society makes us very neurotic by taking away our innocence. Roeg makes an brilliant point and stylizes a mostly nonverbal experience by letting us journey with children all on the cusp of some new stage of growth. This movie is a small masterpiece!!

I have to laugh sometimes when I read otherwise sane comments from amateur reviewers. This film has fairly awkward productions values compared to the present, also many of the actors playing native people are very much NOT native. That aside, this is a BREAKTHROUGH movie for Hollywood circa 1970. This movie is not similiar to Dances With Wolves-it's effectively the other way around. I find it strange so many people make that comment. This movie predates the other by more than THIRTY YEARS!!! Anyway ackward production values aside the presentation of the Lakota is far from the touchy feely view Costner presented,we see the brutal side of their way of doing things also, which is as factual as what we see today just not very PC. This is a great period classic,well worth watching.