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GuyOnTheLeft — 12 years ago(November 27, 2013 11:23 PM)
You are being pedantic, and you have your facts wrong. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following example for the word:
"The houses in the neighborhood are large and pretentious."
Clearly one need not be a sentient being to be pretentious, or at least to be accused of same.
See a list of my favourite films here:
http://www.flickchart.com/slackerinc -
Darvidd — 12 years ago(December 09, 2013 08:20 AM)
Perhaps the biggest flaw the film has is the completely absurd lack of understanding of the geography/size of Australia as presented by the film makers-the deep interior of the continent (as the locale of the father's suicide is presented) cannot be reached in a short drive by a conventional road car, even the redoubtable VW Beetle. This is many hundreds of Kms inland. Then hundreds more to reach the northern tropical/ temperate zone where the film concludes-and if you found a sealed metalled road in 1970 you had to be very near civilization of a sort. As an Australian, all this perplexed me greatly when I first saw this film on TV in the mid 80s-it was obviously a Poms view of Australia being all of a hundred miles across from coast to coast
'What is an Oprah?'-Teal'c. -
GuyOnTheLeft — 12 years ago(December 09, 2013 11:49 PM)
I had to Google "Poms" and figured out that it means "British"right? I don't think Americans would make this mistake, as our lower 48 contiguous states are about the same size as Australia.
See a list of my favourite films here:
http://www.flickchart.com/slackerinc -
spookyrat1 — 12 years ago(December 11, 2013 05:19 AM)
Perhaps the biggest flaw the film has is the completely absurd lack of understanding of the geography/size of Australia as presented by the film makers-the deep interior of the continent (as the locale of the father's suicide is presented) cannot be reached in a short drive by a conventional road car, even the redoubtable VW Beetle.
Roeg certainly simplified things. I think the suggestion is that the film begins in Adelaide and by its conclusion appears somewhere up within the Northern Territory. A picnic drive in a VW will not get you into that sort of terrain from any Australian capital apart from arguably Darwin and that wasn't Darwin at the start of the film.
The geographical aspects aside I still think it's a great, somewhat over-cynical film, only spoilt in parts IMO, by an overly lush score. -
Petronius Arbiter II — 11 years ago(April 12, 2014 04:43 PM)
You are being pedantic, and you have your facts wrong. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives the following example for the word:
"The houses in the neighborhood are large and pretentious."
Clearly one need not be a sentient being to be pretentious, or at least to be accused of same.
Oh, for crying out loud.
"Pedantic," that's another word you would do well to drop from your vocabulary about 99.9% of the time.
Especially if you're going to cite a
dictionary,
a work of descriptive linguistics, as some sort of final authority on what is essentially a question of
prescriptive
linguistics, i.e in this case, not "what does the word 'mean' as X number of people use it," but "what is
good
usage of the word?"
In other words, you have done the very kind of thing a not-very-accomplished
pedant
would do.
I find it sometimes borders on the hilarious how (usually younger and) rather glib writer-critics so often use the word "pretentious" to describe something that by its very nature
cannot
"pretend" to be something it is not.
When people use the word "pretentious" to describe a house, they're really using a shorthand expression to accuse the builder and/or owner of being pretentious. It's a very imprecise usage of the word in a situation where precision isn't especially important, so that could be seen as okay.
Serious film criticism, music criticism, etc. is another thing altogether. A higher degree of precision is called for than if one makes a relatively casual statement about houses in a neighborhood.
The leader of a rock band may be pretentious as all get-out, and many are. He may go around telling anybody who will listen that his latest album is the greatest piece of music ever created since Handel's "Messiah," or whatever.
But unless that very claim is somehow embodied in the album itself, unless it's something many people readily agree they
hear
when the album is played well then, calling the album itself "pretentious" just makes one sound like a bit of a bloody fool At best, like someone who hasn't put much thought into it.
Same goes for how one discusses movies. I know of no claims by Nicolas Roeg that "Walkabout" is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But even if he
had
boasted about this film's greatness, how could that possibly affect the quality of the film itself?
BTW, @ whom it may concern, the word "movie" is so often used as completely interchangeable with the word "film," without a value judgment implied toward the artistic quality of the movie/film being discussed, one would do well not to object to that interchangeability. Unless one doesn't mind being called "pedantic."
"I don't deduce, I observe." -
jd-276 — 12 years ago(March 31, 2014 11:35 PM)
And I strongly advise dropping the word "pretentious" from your vocabulary, at least when applied to reviews of movies, music, art, etc. It's utterly meaningless in this context: if "Walkabout" is "pretentious," then what, pray tell, is it pretending to be?
Please post this every time some wannabe iconoclast says it. I'm fed up with people who are simply incapable of looking beyond the superficial telling the rest of us we're pretentious because we get more out of it than they do. That's their problem. They need to take ownership of it.
I'm on the verge of making your quote my signature.
Bravo. -
feodoric — 11 years ago(January 22, 2015 01:39 AM)
Walkabout is a masterpiece, although not perfect, which is not a contradiction by any means. I had no hesitation whatsoever to give it a 10 and my only deception is that I could not exceed the maximum to make it stand out among the other films that are masterpieces in my personal list Kidding? Yes of course Seriously, this movie is absolutely extraordinary. There are so many values and qualities, many of them unique in the history of cinema, which make of Walkabout a journey almost comparable to that of the trio who are walking through a very strange and spoliated Garden of Eden, version "after sin".
So please no moronic arguments about the movie being "pretentious", or about pedantry, etc. There is really no place for such petty talk in a forum on a movie such as Walkabout.
I saw this movie for the first time two years ago only and it has been resonating in my head constantly since then. I just want to say that Walkabout is aimed at anybody who cares about Nature, first in its Thoreau-ic sense (now I'm the pedantic one, I suppose? I don't care !!), and secondly, in its Lucretian meaning (uberpedantic !!). I'm not necessarily implying that Nick Roeg deliberately or consciously devised his film as a kind of essay on Nature from such an academic perspective, absolutely not! However, I'm fairly convinced that the director put so much of his own love for the subject and the outback with its flora and fauna and aboriginal inhabitants, etc. that he edited the final product in a very profound manner and at the end of intense reflections about some metaphysic questions that presented themselves as the filming was proceeding: Roeg's own discovery of the outback, the very intense communion with nature that he certainly experienced despite all the strategic and logistic aspects of the filming , all the elements of an authentic trip in the sense that we were giving it in the early '70s are there forever digitalized for generations to come.
One has to keep in mind that the filming took several months and that according to Agutter (the girl), there was a feeling that they had all the time in the world to finish up this movie. So my opinion is that Walkabout is a rare or perhaps even unique example of a zen movie that saw the light of day and that was completed and released in a polished, formally magnificent work of art. How many zen movies have never been finished up and ended up as rolls and rolls of a potential film that had too many pitfalls, too many problems that could never be fixed without stopping the Earth from turning, etc. In a word, well never know the epic or the superb documentary or the original story that some more or less well known director had in mind or in stock but failed to complete because any one of these movies had been conceived first and foremost as an intensely personal experience and for that reason, needed to be created at a rhythm and using an approach that were inherently incompatible with the economics of movie making.
Therefore, for anybody who has not yet watched this ruby among the rubies, try to portrait the result of what a filmmaker totally dedicated to his art, with a unique vision and with an endlessly inspiring subject matter (a book replete with a spiritual love for the Australian natural beauties and the continents inhabitants, and that gave Roeg the founding idea of an initiatory journey of the mind and body, a drug-free Castaneda of the antipodes) Start with the idea of a zen trip, and, yes, Ill say it, why not? a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the purity and innocence of both youth in its concrete meaning and of Earth as it was before mankind slowly but surely spoliated its riches, emptied it from life (cf. the pervasive bone/skeleton/carcases/death imagery) and even from its mineral riches (cf. the abandoned mine that seems to serve no apparent purpose but takes several minutes of the story).
To manage achieving the realization of an infinitely beautiful movie that addresses so many profound questions without being neither too didactic nor arcane should command respect in itself. But a movie so inviting that as a spectator, one can actually embark in it as a sort of personal, intimate journey into and across the Garden of Eden and to experience what the trio of travellers experience themselves, is a real
tour de force
.
One of a kind. 11/10 at least.
P.S.: some of the imperfections:- the scene of the fathers suicide does not work for me at all. At the very least, Roeg should have added a brief something (at the expense perhaps of a few non-essential shots, especially at the abandoned farm towards the end) to properly introduce the father as a real character and his troubled state of mind. I have no idea why the director made us use so much guesswork at this point for such an important plot point but I view it as a real weakness.
- about the length of the movie: a common complaint for this one. For me, a movies length is not an issue. Take La Maman et la