[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

ha ha ha -- the wrong ronaldo!

don't be so literal, i judge l'avventura to be the better film, but admit it, it's hard to digest, not easy to like, and it is hard to watch simply because each take lasts for fucking ever. if you let it seep in however you can enjoy it-- it's not like "oh the thrills!" though, it's a quiet deliciousness that makes a lot of demands on the viewer.

regarding blow-up, it's more commercial, more easily entered, but you peel off layers and get to the real meat, and to me it's a great movie. part of it is a sort of period piece, sure, like watching, i don't know, the lion in winter, or spartacus? you know, some historical shit, "life before AiDS". then there's teh whole aspect of the emptiness of the photographer's life which is, you know, surface "awesome" and cool for its day, but pretty horrid and boring and pointless, and more absurd 50 years later. and then there's the whole murder mystery which unlike, say, rear window, isn't a matter of finding the truth from signs, but the signs, being mediated and altered, call into question the whole reality of what is what, and that antonioni took from cortazar, nd las babas del diablo is a great short story.

whoa, barca playing w/ weird orange shirts. gtg.

Someone who hasn't been mentioned yet is Monica Vitti, the only actor for me who seemed to get Antonioni instinctively. That's not so important for some directors but I think he's one who did require very specific things from very specific kinds of actors and Vanessa Redgrave and David Hemmings have both admitted to admiring Antonioni but not really understanding what he wanted from them, which I think is a big problem throughout Blow Up, with too many scenes coming over a bit too much like amateur dramatics. Although it's not just the absence of Vitti; he worked ok with Jack Nicholson, but that may be because Nicholson didn't even try to understand him.

And those shirts, I know, shocking.