Rhapsodies

Well before I start this week’s double feature review I have to confess this one is going to be slightly incomplete. The DVD of my first film on my list Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon was scratched so I was only able to watch three quarters of it. So any thoughts I have about it are incomplete. I’ve always liked Oshii’s work from the Wolf Brigade, The Ghost in the Shell films, Beautiful Dreamer and most recently Sky Crawlers and I was looking forward to watch his live action films.

I enjoyed what I saw of Avalon. It’s a quiet lyrical science fiction film about a professional game player in a near future trying to find the truth behind the game that seems to dominate this future culture. Done in a sepia palate and skillfully using all of it’s shoestring budget, I enjoyed what I saw of Oshii’s signature style. (Including an adorable Basset Hound!)

The next  film on my list was John Boorman’s Zardoz. To be honest I’m mildly embarrassed that I’d never seen this one before. As a longtime science fiction fan I was certainly aware of it, it was in all my textbooks about science fiction films and we’d been making jokes about Sean Connery in a speedo for years.

To be honest I was completely surprised by this film. Based on everything I knew about it I was expecting a barbarian, post apocalyptic action film. What I watched was quiet and cerebral meditation on the meaning of life, immortality and death.   Scenes of armed horse riding “brutals” only appearing sporadically throughout the film, all in all far better than I ever imagined.

One thing I found interesting in both of these films it is with so many critics complaining about the modern viewer’s short attention span I was actually surprised to watch a movie with such a deliberately slow pace. Both Avalon and Zardoz were better for it.