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List Price: $34.99 | | Label: Film Prestige
Salesrank: 32202
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| Our Price: $7.99 |
| Used Price: $14.00 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Russia released, DIGIPAK GIFT EDITION, NTSC (USA and Canada), ALL REGION, FULL SCREEN. AUDIO OPTIONS: Dolby Digital 2.0 ENGLISH (movie is completely in English) and Dolby Digital 2.0 RUSSIAN (voice-over). .............................................................. SYNOPSIS: Zabriskie Point, director Michelangelo Antonioni's only American film, is an unusual, visually stunning examination of youthful rebellion against the Establishment. The film, initially presented in quasi-documentary style, presents a group of college activists discussing key issues of their political agenda. Mark (Mark Frechette) steals an airplane and flies over a desert where he meets Daria (Daria Halprin). She is the pot-smoking secretary to businessman Lee Allen (Rod Taylor), while he is a rebel searching for a worthy cause. In the midst of the arid surroundings, Mark and Daria fall in love. Antonioni's nonrealistic approach to American counterculture myths, his loose and sluggish narrative, and the dialogue (credited to Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe, and Antonioni) caused Zabriskie Point to be poorly received when it was first released. The score features songs from Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Kaleidoscope, The Rolling Stones, John Fahey, The Youngbloods and Patti Page.
Zabriskie Point - by Michelangelo Antonioni (Import) Reviews:
Knocking Boots 
2009-08-29 - Let's talk about this edition, since everybody reading this probably already has an opinion about the movie. This is a Russian edition, with Russian menus, Russian liner notes, and Russian narration (which thankfully can be turned OFF). It is most likely a bootleg, since the focus is pretty significantly fuzzy throughout, and the film is not to my knowledge officially available on DVD due to music clearances. The DVD cuts off at the last scene, before the credits. The "extras" consist solely of four crew bios... written in Russian.
On the good side, the sound is clear, color balance is good, and this was dubbed from a print without any dirt or splices. And it's cheap! Perhaps there's something APPROPRIATE about bootlegging a film about revolutionary politics of the 1960s....
Flawed Masterpiece 
2009-01-10 - First, this DVD is Russian, poor quality and not in wide screen. But it's the only one available so we have to make do. This is the weakest of Antonioni's English language films: "Blow Up" and "The Passenger" are much better. So what went wrong: lousy, amateur actors, multiple script writers (incl Sam Shepard) make a real pig's ear of any pretense of a story and some rabid anti-Americanism. But it's worth seeing for one reason only: the final 10 mins of the desert house blowing up. It's up there with "The Passenger's" final famous tracking shot and the park scenes in Blow Up. Only for die-hards. In the same vein, check out the original "Vanishing Point" and "Electra Glide in Blue"
Lost Idealism 
2008-09-20 - Director Michelangelo Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT is a masterpiece of pure cinema that somehow seems lost to those that despised it as well as to those that embraced it back in 1970. Mark (Mark Frechette) the iconoclast hero is disenchanted with the discussion of college students that we see him congregate with inside a lecture hall somewhere in Los Angeles. The students discuss peace and peace activism conducted and achieved through acts of civil disobedience. Apparently they can't reach a consensus on what means they will use to achieve their end. Convinced they are not willing to take the most extreme of all actions and tired of their rhetoric Mark leaves, buys a gun, nearly kills a cop and impulsively steels an airplane leading him off into the desert. . Simultaneously, we see Daria (Daria Halprin) a very young secretary to land developer Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) decidedly skipping a workday and driving off into the desert in her old Buick. Eventually their paths cross in the desert and they stop their flight at the crest of the Zabriskie Point overlook. For me viewing this film I don't necessarily see the contrast between an American society so decadent, self-centered and materialistic when compared to the two protagonists Mark and Daria. They are unaware that the very thing they are trying to escape, they are in fact part of or even symptomatic of. They look into the barren terrain of the desert and see a beautiful landscape. Yet when they make naked love they are consumed and covered in sand and dust which is symbolically the resulting fruit to the consummation of the act. They are from dust. Their result shall be dust. When Daria first drove into the desert she stopped at a roadside bar frequented by a man long past his physical prime and lost in a singular moment of youthful triumph. Outside the roadside bar Daria found a group of young boys, much younger than her, who equally were lost in their youthful retrogression and idleness. There is no growth in this film for any of its characters, only stagnation. There is no real emergence of a counterculture or any notion of such in this film. There is only the singular culture of man and the limitations of man when compared to the immense and vast majesty, beauty and beguilement of nature. Cinematographer Alfio Contini's color images capture this so vividly. Even the script is more revealing than it appears. We still get the cliched version of a Los Angeles police force. But the business establishment represented by land developer Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) is also seen to be at odds when selling his idealized project. We don't specifically see it, but we get the notion that he is trying to sell a housing project that will incorporate itself into the landscape and become one-with-nature. We see the home that developer Allen has created for himself, a beautiful domicile in the desert, which at first glance seems to go in tandem with this notion of co-existing with nature. But this too can not be in such a vision that Antonioni has created. Equally along the way Mark's fate has prophetically been sealed. Daria's final apocalyptic vision is that of director Antonioni's. No matter what culture man establishes there can never be true harmony. The only true harmony is nature unto itself.
Zabriskie Point
2008-06-11 - I was nervous when it arrived because the dvd package was in Russian. But it's an English speaking movie. My man's favorite and it was new to me. Good film, awesome soundrack!
ANTONIONI AT HIS MOST PRETENTIOUS
2008-04-10 - Give an European art film director too much money (as Hollywood always does) and this is what you can expect. The photography (despite the laughably unending house explosion at the finale) and the music aside (buy the album instead of the movie), the most memorable dialogue spoken by the catatonic actors as they sit in the sand and comment on the desert, She: "It's beautiful." He: "It's dead." So's the movie.
