Hacker Cinema
Barbarella
1968 · Film · 98 min
Directed by Roger Vadim
Science FictionAdventureComedy
In the far future, a highly sexual woman is tasked with finding and stopping the evil Durand-Durand. Along the way she encounters various unusual people.
2 positive1 negative8 neutralfrom 11 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
12 comments on Hacker News
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
Space sex research [0] ? So, where can we sign up for this?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarella_(film)
cheerfully!
Here's 3 examples of movies of Cultural Import * that are copyrighted and technically, probably shouldn't be there. But they're unavailable, or hard to find; possibly outlawed in some places.
I'm quite grateful to someone for taking the trouble to find, digitize, and upload these classics, and that archive.org can host them.
+ I'll leave it to you to figure out what the "cultural import" is in each case here. As with all Art, it's certainly debatable.
https://archive.org/download/rollerblade/rollerblade.mp4
https://archive.org/download/flesh-gordon-1974_20220429/Flesh%20Gordon%20%281974%29.ia.mp4
https://archive.org/download/barbarella_202110/Barbarella.mp4
Sex in movies and TV is so banal and boring and pointless. No one has wanted to watch that since they first got to explore it in the 70s, because they tapped out the possibilities then.
Go watch "Barbarella" and "Flesh Gordon" and tell me there's a less cringe, more worthy depiction of sex in a video form made since then.
It always been morality play crap. the fevered imaginings of what personal intimacy should be, sourced from celibates, perverts, and anybody besides normal people with normal doubts.
I disagree there are fundamental differences. The reason Apple is blocking game streaming apps is because games could contain content that violates the standards of the app store.
An easy violation is nudity, there is an app for Playboy, but there is zero nudity in it. However, I can get the full, uncensored Playboy magazine in the Nook app. I can watch movies with nudity in Netflix or Amazon Video. I can even buy or rent movies FROM APPLE with nudity in the iTunes store, like Eyes Wide Shut, Walk Hard, Boogie Nights (which is about porn!), and Barbarella, all right from my iPad or iPhone.
So why can I see nudity if I buy it directly from Apple in a movie, but not an app?
I can download the Twitch app and watch streams of video games, but I can't download an app to let me PLAY the very same games?
There is no difference, it is simply Apple capriciousness.
The fact that people are still watching this movie 35 years later implies there is something very good about it.
Lynch distanced himself publicly from it, because it was an economic disaster bad on many levels, but I'll bet $100 that with some afterthought, people can recognize what is 'good' about it.
It's a genre defining feature, almost entirely unto it's own, the creative design was 'otherworldly' to the point it probably has not been matched in SciFi ever. Baron Harkonen's scene where he murders of his aid ... the scene where Paul sends his ultra-creepy sister Alia in, alone to 'face the emperor' and she murders Baron ... the representation of the Gild Navigators - just so well done.
Almost everyone but possibly Feyd (ie Sting) and maybe Duncan Idaho, maybe the Padishah Emperor was perfectly cast.
Lynch bit off more than he could chew, and there were too many characters in too little time.
You know when a creative representation just 'feels so right it's right'? For example with the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy? Frodo, Gandalf, the Elves - it was 'perfect' - it seemed to 'everyone' that 'this is right'.
I feel the creative direction with Lynch's Dune was that. Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam from Lynch? I think this image is etched into our minds as 'exactly what she is like'. Our comparisons in the future will be in reference to her.
There was a very interesting version by Jorodowsky that looked really fun, however, I feel it was way too corny, and would have ended up more like Barbarella [1].
For those interested: Jurodovsky's Dune [2].
The missing ingredient in everyone else's Dune is the acid! I would say to Villeneuve "Ok, now take what you have done, and remake it while you are on an acid trip". It's a psychedelic movie about transcendence, God, realpolitik etc.. Hardcore stuff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarella_(film) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
Blaming Jane Fonda's anti-nuke movement for retarding the foundational nuclear industry is like blaming her and her first husband's movie Barberella for retarding feminism, instead of the patriarchy who fought tooth and nail against the ERA.
https://purpleclover.littlethings.com/entertainment/7556-regrets-only/item/barbarella-68/
Now how exactly did you mean she was responsible for Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima?
Is this similar to the device used in the movie Barbarella [1968], where the keyboard virtuoso is able to cause a series of odd expressions to appear on Barbarella's face?
Oh that's interesting! I don't find the special effects in those movies laughable at all. In Dr. Strangelove they play only a minor role in the film, while I think in 2001 he cleverly worked around the technical limitations, and used a set and model design that still largely looks (60s style) futuristic, rather than dated.
Compare it with contemporary or slightly newer movies like Planet of the Apes, Barbarella, Logan's run. It's not a standard space opera with space battles, faster than light travel, alien empires and magic space gravity. Sure, the men in ape suits look a little naff, but then I don't see how else he could have done it. Claymation would have been worse, herding actual gorillas not an option.
I'm the same way - for me, "Bladerunner", "Barbarella" and "Flash Gordon" are on auto-repeat as my background noise for serious coding sessions. For some reason these 3 movies just work so well in that sense ..
/off-topic
I just realised something. The company name "Mathmos", according to the article, dates from 1992 or so.
Lava lamp blobs were a pretty big backdrop item in Barbarella [0], released 1968. The place where the seething blobs were prominent? "Matmos."
There has to be joke hidden in plain sight with the company name choice.
[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062711/
I sort of dislike the "recently watched" list since it sometimes limits what I am willing to watch.
There's a British movie on Netflix, at least in Canada, called Cashback. It was a really decent movie, but it was really poorly marketed. The cover art is a woman frozen in a state of undress (with the title obscuring her bare breasts), and the description of the plot talked of a bored employee at a grocery store with the ability to freeze time who used the frozen time to undress customers and sketch them nude.
I was curious, as many men would be, but I didn't want to watch it because I didn't really want that to be the first thing on screen in the "recently watched" list when my girlfriend turned on Netflix.
In fact, I only ever watched it because Netflix later recommended it to me as "mind bending", which seemed like an odd description of the boob-filled teenage sex romp it seemed to be. I looked it up on Amazon and discovered the real plot, and decided to watch it anyway.
The frozen time nude artistry was mostly contained to a single throwaway scene (the time freezing was also initially presented as a time-passing fantasy rather than a real ability, though the film does play fast and loose with that line as the movie progresses), but it still made me hesitate because of the "recently watched" list.
I have no idea how I'll get away with watching Barbarella.