Barbarella

11/6/2020

Decent watch, might watch again, but can't recommend unless it's for a Bad Movie Night. I want to like this movie, it really might have been a great movie, once upon a time, but it still would have been a "comedy-whatever" movie, and it's humor is done well. The production value is laughable 50 years later, but even so there are odd choices most likely done for the imagery or comedic effect. It is worth noting the changes in the MPAA over the past 50 years: the movie begins with a "zero g" striptease with tits out and fully nude (I didn't look close enough to determine if the cat got out), and from then on, her tits are pretty much out for about half the run time, sometimes behind plastic or transparent fabric, but the movie is rated PG. I want to like the movie, but it's so bi

8/29/2022

**Revolutionary in its time, and still highly regarded today, it is an attack on good visual taste and brings a very stupid story.** There are films that stand out because they are really very good, for the high quality of the production, the work of the actors and the story that is told. But a film doesn't become popular or iconic just for that... there are films that are so admittedly bad and strange that, in a way, they become remarkable and enter the so-called popular memory or collective memory. _Barbarella_ is a film inspired by a 60's comic book, and both the original material and the film itself were very influenced by the “hippie” culture, the libertarian ideas of May 68 and the Sexual Revolution. It was a time when eroticism became popular and massively sought after and exploi

6/3/2023

I can't help but wonder what Jane Fonda might think if she were to look back on this sexy sci-fi nonsense from 50 years ago. It is not alone in being terrible - there were plenty of drug-induced/enhanced films made in the late 60s so as to render this particular effort indeterminable from many others; but the fact that Fonda took on this role as an intergalactic space cadet on the search for "Durand Durand" and his (euphemistic ?) "Positronic Ray" is what is astonishing. The script is dreadful, the props buyer obviously didn't have the budget to stretch beyond paper mâché and bubble-wrap and the synthesised music is only marginally more interesting than that you might have heard in a Soviet lift around the same time. John Philip Law was already in his 30's when he agreed to dress in a larg

12/3/2023

Got the new Arrow Video 4K release and decided to give this another watch. Still not great but lots of fun to watch and of course Jane Fonda was sexy as hell. Wouldn't mind seeing the novel getting another adaptation, I can see someone like Edgar Wright giving it a shot (perhaps with Ana de Armas in the lead). **3.0/5**