many thanks to paramount, the edition is very very good and the bonus interesting. finally one of the most important italian fims of all time has been edited.
DVD release is excellent despite cheap pricing
I bought the dvd after running to four different stores to find it. No one has this dvd in store, and the one store that had it only had one copy which i now have, ridiculous because when you ask people for help they never even heard of the conformist. anyway the film is in italian if you so choose it to be, along with other dubbed versions. the reconstruction of the film being called an extended edition baffles me because in the special features bertolluci says the film should be two hours and five minutes but the back of the film only allows for 111 minutes of screen time. i have only watched the special features and have jumped from scene to scene on the actual film but am discouraged by this descrepancy. the movie looks great and the special features are a good deal as well. the italian version of the film is a little wierd too. i'm not used to seeing people speak italian but it looks like some of the time the mouths are not moving with the words. like the sound is not the correct speed as the film. I hope they didn't dub it in italian instead of having the original italian, i don't get it. it makes no point of saying anywhere on the dvd or packaging that it is the original language of the film. everything else is great and especially for the price only $15 is amazing, i remember buying Lawrence of Arabia for $40 when it first came out years ago, now its only $15 too. the dvd market is not passing the buck onto the audience anymore. new releases aren't huge mark-ups anymore thank goodness. I own the conformist and not a cheap $100 vhs or a burned dvd that looks bad but actually on dvd, been waiting a long long time.
Be Careful What You Write
The people at Amazon are a little touchy about reviewing this film via analysis of the motivation and thought processes of its protagonist, which is what the film is really about. I wrote such a review and Amazon must have deemed it too revealing as it failed to make it to print. I don't know why; I was very conscious of acceptable word useage. Still, I crossed some undefined boundary. I questioned how little Amazon's own reviewer revealed about the film, and now I know why it lacked so much content.
Bearing all this in mind, it should be said, nonetheless, that "The Conformist" is probably Bertolucci's best film. Most American's know Bertolucci from what I call his "American" period, in which he directed the Academy Award winning "The Last Emperor," and his worthy flop, "The Sheltering Sky." However, his Italian films of the late 1960s, early 1970s, were his best work, and "The Conformist" the best of the best. This plunge into the psyche of his protagonist, played with great care by Frenchman Jean-Louis Trintignant, goes deep within, set during the years Italy was in the grips of Mussolini's Fascism. Master cameraman Vittorio Storaro's atmospheric cinematography is an absolutely indispensible element of the film's feel.
Bertolucci presents us in "The Conformist," the story of a deviated aritocrat's clumsy, ill-conceived attempts to attain normalcy through the perversions of Italian Fascism. The critics frequently write Berolucci should return to the the type of filmmaking represented by "The Conformist," but his affairs with big budget filmmaking make that, in my opinion, impossible. That's too bad, but, even if he never makes another film, Bertolucci made his mark with "The Conformist."
1900 is one of Bernardo Bertolucci's adventures in epic filmmaking that never found the reception he had hoped for. Originally more than six hours long, it was chopped down to four hours for its U.S. release and as a result looked, well, choppy. Eventually, he restored it to five hours--but one wonders at all the effort on behalf of this alternately muddled and stunning story. The film, with a decidedly socialist agenda, examines two lives that begin the same year in rural Italy: the weak-willed son of the aristocracy (Robert De Niro) and the hardy, courageous son of peasants (Gerard Depardieu). They grow up as best friends on the same estate, until class differences pull them apart and then the era's fascist politics divide them for good. Despite strong performances by both leads,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Bernardo Bertolucci DVD Release Date: Released the 05 December 2006 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Here are three films that couldn't and wouldn't have been made at any other time. Contrary to popular belief, the history of Hollywood permissiveness, what filmmakers could "get away with" on screen, is not a steadily rising graph from puritanical early days to the party-hearty present. In the early 1930s, a national mood of shock over the stock market crash and impatience with Prohibition licensed a relaxation of the movie industry's self-censorship policies. Sexuality--always a driving force in movie plots and characterizations, even when repressed--became a more explicit presence, with costuming that sometimes pushed the envelope for exposure of epidermis and dialogue that could be shockingly blunt.
G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box serves as a filmic window into the decadent Weimar Republic because of its tauntingly beautiful star, Louise Brooks. Brooks, encompassing the very essence of sexual allure and mystery, is iconically linked to her character, Lulu, the dancer-turned-streetwalker who captivates all men in her path with her elusive beauty. Set in Berlin, 1928, Pandora's Box is about Lulu, an aspiring star whose patron, Dr. Schön (Fritz Kortner), finds loyalty to his fiancé impossible because of Lulu's unsurpassed charm. Schön's son, Alwa, also falls in love with Lulu until a series of tragic incidents render them destitute in London, where Lulu resorts to prostitution and, in a final devastating scene, picks up her final john, Jack the Ripper. In the... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 28 November 2006 Usually ships in 24 hours
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