Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy
If you've been reading the dreaming track for a while, you'll know of my interest in Tibet, so when Bean and I saw the advertising for Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy we thought we'd go check it out. The brand was Tibet. The hype was perbole. It sounded awesome. It was awesome alright - awesomely bad!
Among the plugs for the movie was "Four years in the making and critically acclaimed and hailed as a masterpiece, Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy has not been seen in theatres for over 20 years." Yeah! We know why. It should've been locked away forever. I guess we should've wondered why a masterpiece had to wait 20 years before it saw the light of projector again....
Originally 231 minutes (!!) looooong, it had been "digitally restored and recut to a spell-binding 134 minutes". Uh huh. Spellbinding alright. Even The Reverend (whose lead I'm following here) at his most devilish, could not have cast a glamour of such stupefying boredom. We kept thinking "it'll get better, we'll wait just a bit longer". Alas, there was no respite.
The "cinematography" was underexposed to the point of graininess. The subtitling was.... well... I just don't know what to say. As a matter of fact, I can't continue, because the trauma's flooding back as I write. I so desperately want to place the whole experience in the repressed memory bin.
Oh wait! There was CGI. Oh yes... third eye CGI...
Maybe if you were a serious student of Buddhist ritual the film would be worthwhile. Maybe. The overwhelming impression was that it had been made by a bunch of British arts students who were all new converts to Buddhism. Arts students who had no idea how to wield a 16mm movie camera and recorded all the audio on a home cassette recorder with a built in microphone.
You know, we thought we'd be all inspired over dinner afterward, excitedly chattering "How was that...." and "That landscape..." and "What did you think of...." - but we just sat and stared at each other as if we'd just witnessed a horrendous accident.
Oh - I forgot to mention that there wasn't a single frame of Tibet in the whole thing! Not one...
Ahhhhhhhh! At least in space, no one can hear you chant...
posted by evenstar at 6:11 PM
8 Comments:
Gee, how did I miss that? Did it have an unhinged serial killer? Breasts, at least?
Better keep my third eye out for the DVD I guess.
Heh heh! No unhinged serial killers, although there was an image of a rather fierce looking guy wearing a necklace of human skulls, pouring blood out of a skull cup, sinking his fangs into some poor naked mortal, while stomping more of same beneath his impressively clawed feet.
Breasts, though? Oh yes. The second part of the thrillogy showed a complete, uncut Green Tara ceremony in which, if my memory serves me well, there was the subtitle "Tara - with the firm breasts of a sixteen year old girl" !!!! I'm serious! It was about at that point that the MC's eyes began rolling back in his head. I really wanted to believe he was attaining mystic transport, but you know what? I think he was as bored as we were!
So, is it better than Sunshine or what?
Heh heh! Even though I've never seen "Sunshine" (and have no desire to after reading The Reverend's post!) I'm certain I can tell you it ISN'T. By all means watch 'em both and tell me I'm wrong JMF ;)
Wow...
I've been to movies like that, where you just wait and wait and wait for it to get better, but it never does.
An advantage to having children is that we go out less now, and rent or tivo more movies, so if we fear we're stuck with a stinker, we can fast forward to make sure, and waste less of our lives.
www.pridemama.com
Hey Pridemama! Welcome!
"waste less of our lives."
Amen to that Jessica. I wondered what the rest of the (silently) departing audience thought of it. I also wondered at the cinema's extension of screenings of it on the basis of its "popularity". I would have thought everybody who'd seen it would have warned their friends off! I dunno - maybe there's just a lot of serious students of Buddhist ritual in Perth...
Thanks for dropping by :)
Anytime! I used to pester Bean with my continual presence all the time, so I drop in and lurk now and again to see how you two are doing.
And for the insightful, gorgeous photography.
Have a good one!
www.pridemama.com
Thanks so much Jessica :) :) :)
We're doing well! Our new site's almost ready to go live - we've just got to finish creating the first posts and then find a decent broadband connection to upload it from. We'll email you a link as soon as it's up.
See you soon!
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