Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

morrison-dylan-fan Since having heard his name mentioned for the first time in connection to Alfred Hitchcock and Dario Argento on the info packed commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman's for Argento's classic debut The Bird With The Crystal Plumage,Luis Bunuel has been a director who I have become pretty keen on taking a look at.Whilst almost getting myself caught up in an endless back and fourth struggle over trying to decide what Bunuel film I should go for,I thankfully got a bit of luck,when I recently found his very first film being sold at a fantastic price,which led me to deciding that my first Bunuel would also be the first ever (non short) film that he made. The plot:Soon after they have started to passionately kiss each other like two wild animals,a young couple are pulled apart by a group of consisting of their families,police officers and priests who object so strongly to what the couple are doing on the beach,that they beat up the man in broad daylight on the beach.Taking the man to a police station,the man catches the two cops by surprise,by quickly knocking them out so that he can run to the house where his lover is staying with family.Meanwhile,whist the couple are attempting to get together,a long,disgusting orgy attended by some very unexpected participants finally reaches it end. View on the film:As this very entertaining,interesting surrealist film opens with some re-used old documentary footage (featuring a new narration) about scorpion tail's, Luis Bunuel and co-writer Salvador Dali (who would have a huge falling out with Bunuel shortly before the beginning of the films production)set up the scorpion "sting" for each section of the movie.With the beginning of the film having shown the ruthless behaviour of animals,Bunuel cleverly uses the minimalist soundtrack to feature animal sounds that connect the characters to primal instincts which the church and other "higher up" sections of society are attempting to destroy,from the sound of birds being used when the couple start to kiss each others hands,to raw sewage (!) being inter-cut in the scene where the unnamed man is getting beaten up and punished like an animal.Along with the soundtrack,Bunuel's directing also features a good number of stunning transitional/fading in/out shots that along with focusing on the beautiful features of lead actress Lya Lys, (whose performance gives the character a fantastic china doll-like fragileness,shows that she is an actress who should have been bigger than she sadly became)also help to make the 63 minute running time fly by,thanks to each transition bringing a new piece of the scorpions tail to this sometimes messy,but always fascinating film.

lonchaney20 This movie is something. Exactly what it is I don't know! But if I did, then I guess Bunuel and Dali wouldn't have accomplished what they set out to do.It's full of haunting images and haunting juxtapositions of classical music and image (the uses of Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde are especially striking!). The randomness of these images and scenes may put off some viewers, and it did take me a while to get into it, but they're likely to stick in viewers' minds for some time. In a way it reminds me of Bunuel's later The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, except this one has a couple's lovemaking constantly thwarted instead of dinner. While I didn't find this one to be quite as solid as that film, it certainly had its strengths.And I couldn't believe how despicable our hero was! Some of the things he does in this film are so wretched it's hilarious (such as punting a poor little doggy!). I also can't imagine that using the image of Christ in a scene based on the 120 Days of Sodom did much for the filmmakers' popularity at the time, but it is a striking way to end the picture. Last but not last, I just have to mention my favorite insane line from the movie: "What joy! What joy! To have murdered our children." This said by our heroine-of-sorts with a rapturous smile on her face.

jzappa L'Age D'Or is pure cinema, as silent films were, and despite how difficult it may be to feel absorbed in it, it really is a great work. It consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most prolonged of which tells the goofy satirical story of a man and a woman who are keenly in love. Their efforts to have sex are always obstructed by their families, by the Church and the bourgeoisie. In one attention-grabbing moment in the film, the woman passionately sucks on the toe of a religious statue as if it were a phallus, the iconoclasm of which is remarkable considering the time at which this movie was made, and consequently banned.Salvador Dali, the hugely amusing surrealist painter, co-directed this film with Luis Bunuel, and the tone of many of his paintings is captured in many moments of the film but in the appropriate manner for its medium, such as the scalps of the women flapping in the wind on a crucifix accompanied by cheerful music, or the twisted black humor of the final vignette, which uses comic-strip-like symbolism and details to tell of a Marquis de Sade-style orgy, the survivors (!) of which emerge, one of them reminiscent of the most conventional image of Jesus.Upon viewing, I was muddled by all of this. I laughed a bit, my eyebrows curled, and I didn't quite understand, perhaps because I'm not accustomed to the proper manner in which one views a a silent film from 1929, but I did reflect upon it and it grew on me, because I do believe that if this film were not banned by the ever-predictable church and the governments they still influence, it would have moved the viewers of its era to open its eyes a bit more to sexual repression, whether propagated by civil bourgeois society or by the church, and ponder the film's most plausible implication, which is that repression generates violence, which is very true. The fiendish gag is in the look of dog-tired depravity as Christ emerges like a De Mille figure staggering of De Sade's party.

Graham Greene I've always felt that it was somewhat unfortunate that the concept of a cinema presented as art has been largely abandoned in the last sixty years or so in favour of a cinema of wanton commodity. The idea that a film is little more than a consumer product intended to offer passive entertainment that won't require any kind of further thought or challenges for the viewer is incredibly sad, and inevitably leads to the endless regurgitation of codes, conventions, stories and images that we're currently seeing through the endless production of re-makes, literary adaptations and variations on TV. I suppose it depends largely on how you view the notion of "art" in an entertainment sense. I'd gather that very few of the people posting negative comments here would gladly spend the afternoon in an art gallery, not simply learning something about the artist and their work, but actually enjoying it. Many think of art as something incredibly serious; there to be admired from a distance without ever attempting to form a personal connection or engagement with it on an emotional or intellectual level. It is this attitude that leads to the various implications of the term "art film", which now has a number of incredibly negative connotations that suggest something po-faced and pretentious; the idea that these films should be sat through and looked at with no real appreciation for the sense of fun, frivolity and subversive glee that the filmmakers bring to their work or the ideas behind it.As one of the previous reviewer already noted, it was not Buñuel's intention for this film to be looked at as something entirely serious; though there are certainly serious ideas being expressed. Instead, you could approach it as something radical, like rock n' roll or punk music, with the idea of a cinema of revolution and defiance that goes against all accepted conventions of what cinema is and what cinema should attain to; as well as commenting on the nature of society - with all its bourgeois values and the (then) prevalent idea of religious hypocrisy - in a way that would inspire thought and provoke a reaction. You might not enjoy it as much as a more conventional film that offers a plot and a theme and characters you can believe in - and all presented in a way that is comfortable and safe - but the experience, for me at least, is as a hundred times more rewarding than the latest Marvel adaptation or exercise in Hollywood nostalgia. Look at the current films at the top of the US box-office and it becomes clear that films like L'Âge d'Or (1930) and the proceeding Un Chien Andalou (1929) have become part of the minority. Nonetheless, when we view this film within the context of something like Kung-Fu Panda (2008), You Don't Mess With Zohan (2008), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Sex and the City (2008) - all currently top of the American box office - we can see the extent of how facile and meaningless much of contemporary cinema has become.It has never been my belief that a film requires a story or a character that we attach our own thoughts and feelings to, but rather, can survive simply as a platform for creative thought and artistic expression. The true power of cinema is in the sense that it is the only real art form that combines elements from every single separate art-form that you can possibly think of; from performance art, to photography, editing and design and of course, the various literary traditions that gave us the ideas of narrative and character. So, with L'Âge d'Or, we are presented with a mad jumble of images all flowing dreamlike from one scene to the next - sometimes boring, sometimes fascinating - often without interpretation or any kind of greater context outside of the broader notions of surrealism for the sake of it. It's still seen as something radical - perhaps even dangerous - seventy-odd years after it was first released, but really, its classic cinema in the traditional sense; e.g. a collection of abstract but penetrating images intended to be viewed by as many people as possible at the same time to create a shared and sensory experience. In this sense, the film is almost beyond criticism, or at least, beyond the higher intellectual/interpretative level of criticism that it normally receives, with the film standing as an ode to cinema at its most simple and sublime. All notions of intellectualism, or pseudo-intellectualism, are therefore thrown out of the window as the film transfixes us with some stunningly imaginative images that flicker to life on the screen.To seek answers from the film is missing the point, as there are no questions to be asked. The point of the film is not to entertain on the base levels of character, narrative and simple human emotions, but rather, to present us with something that we've never seen before. It's artist expression. If you have no interest in this then you'll have no interest in the film - which, although incredibly difficult and almost certainly not to all tastes, is still as close to the purest sense of cinema as you can possibly get. Some of the images are intended to shock, others to amuse and others to titillate and provoke thought, even when there seems to be nothing to really think about. Above all else, it is an experience, like all films, and one that is entirely visual and approachable on even the most immediate of levels. Don't think too much about it, or attempt to see something that isn't there. The point of surrealism was to go beyond such notions of the real and mundane to present something illogical, imaginative and devoid of rational thinking in order to find a new way of approaching the world. That's what this film represents.