Hot Picks
|
|
|
Slaughterhouse-Five
USA 1972
produced by Paul Monash, Jennings Lang (executive) for Vanadas Productions/Universal
directed by George Roy Hill
starring Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche, Sharon Gans, Valerie Perrine, Holly Near, Perry King, Kevin Conway, Friedrich von Ledebur, Ekkehardt Belle, Sorrell Booke, Roberts Blossom, John Dehner, Gary Waynesmith, Richard Schaal, Gilmer McCormick, Stan Gottlieb, Karl-Otto Alberty, Henry Bumstead, Lucille Benson, John Wood, Ladislav Jakim, Otto Sevcík
screenplay by Stephen Geller, based on the novel Slaughterhouse-Five Or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut jr, music by Glenn Gould
review by Mike Haberfelner
|
|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks), a successful optopometrist well into the
second half of his life, has just survived a plane crash while his wife
(Sharon Gans) has died in a car accident - when he's convinced he's
abducted to another planet, Tralfamadore, where the aliens who are all
mind convince him that he's "unstuck in time" and able to travel
back and forth between all points in his life (including his death) ...
and they also give him a Hollywood starlet (Valerie Perrine) to mate with.
But of course, this might all only be the result of a long gestating post
traumatic stress disorder, a remnant from World War 2, where he, a
pacifist, served as a chaplain's assistant, but was captured by the
Germans and thrown into a prison camp, where he soon attracted the wrath
of fellow American prisoner Lazzaro (Ron Leibman), who promises to one day
kill him - and that's only on top of all the other cruelties of a prison
camp he's exposed to - including the bombing of Dresden, which not only
leaves the town in ruins, but Billy and company are also tasked with
corpse removal. And eventually, Billy even witnesses his fatherly wartime
buddy Derby (Eugene Roche) shot dead by the Germans. Billy returns to the
US outwardly unscathed, but never seems fully able to lead a normal life,
until the conviction about his abduction to Tralfamadore gives him new
direction ... If after reading above synopsis you might say
"this doesn't make a whole lot of sense" - then pretty much,
you've got it: Slaughterhouse-Five isn't your typical genre movie
where there's a resolution in the end that explains everything, and the
hero is vindicated one way or another, where everything's neatly packaged
and labelled. Heck, this movie doesn't even follow a linear narrative
structure and jumps back and forth in a very associative manner pretty
much all the time - and all of this works just beautifully, basically
because the film's very cleverly written (including and maybe especially
the rather campy scenes on planet Tralfamadore), it's expertly structured
in a way that makes sense of all the non-sense, it's beautifully filmed,
and George Roy Hill's direction shows just the right playfulness for the
material. The outcome then is a truly fascinating movie that's not to be
missed!
|
|
|
review © by Mike Haberfelner
|
Feeling lucky? Want to search any of my partnershops yourself for more, better results? (commissions earned) |
The links below will take you just there!!!
|
|
|
Thanks for watching !!!
|
|
|
Robots and rats,
demons and potholes, cuddly toys and shopping mall Santas,
love and death and everything in between,
Tales to Chill Your Bones to is all of that.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to -
a collection of short stories and mini-plays ranging from the horrific to the darkly humourous,
from the post-apocalyptic to the weirdly romantic,
tales that will give you a chill and maybe a chuckle,
all thought up by the twisted mind of screenwriter and film reviewer Michael Haberfelner.
Tales to Chill Your Bones to
the new anthology by Michael Haberfelner
Out now from Amazon!!! |
|