Word: boorman
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Boston Film Festival. A very respectable series, including too many films to list here. The highlight is perhaps Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien, a new film about French collaboration during World War II. But also Attica, a Laughton film, a DeBroca film, Max von Sydow as Steppenwolf, a Boorman film, Monty Python, and the new Bunuel. Call the Orson Welles for the schedule...
...SHAME that more people aren't going to see Zardoz. Perhaps homosexual rape and man's battle against nature ring more resonantly than sci-fi satire in the vacuous American psyche: No other hypothesis can account for the low popularity of John Boorman's latest film, which is almost as exciting and far more provocative than the same director's excellent and well-received Deliverance...
...John Boorman is always after something new. Much of his work (Having a Wild Weekend, Deliverance) has been a remolding of traditional genres-the musical or adventure film-to suit a more personal, sometimes dour vision. For example, he and Screenwriter Alexander Jacobs transformed Point Blank from an ordinary gangster-revenge story into an essay in gun-metal existentialism and a portrait of Southern California absurdism that is still unrivaled. Zardoz, his sixth film, loses something of its predecessors' fighting trim. Although Boorman excels at expressing ideas through action, too many of them, and too muddled, are tossed...
Like eager quiz-show contestants, Zed and Boorman are not bashful about flaunting their education. Bolstered by his psychic seminar. Zed drops quotes from Ecdesiastes, T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, whose idea of a superman he now suggests. For himself, Boorman borrows -and cunningly acknowledges-a crucial image from L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. The trouble is that none of these sources is assimilated; they are like footnotes without a source. Fortunately there are some bright intervals of self-deprecatory humor that lighten the occasional pomposity of the material...
...other of English accents, and the film draws much of its bleak, primitive beauty from the Irish countryside where it was shot. The costumes are comic-book eccentric, and fun: the women dress in tie-dyed gossamer, while Zed bounds around mostly in a red loincloth and bandoleers. Boorman gets good work from his cast. Besides Connery, and a fine assortment of character actors, there are the excellent Charlotte Rampling as a sort of stern, fairy-princess scientist; and Sara Kestelman, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, making a welcome debut as a rival of Rampling...