Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

ma-cortes Surrealism and sour attack upon religion by the Spanish master , the great Luis Buñuel .This is a typical Buñuel film , as there are a lot of symbolism and surrealism , including mockery or wholesale review upon religion, especially Catholicism . This film opens with a documentary on scorpions (this was an actual film made in 1912 which Luis Buñuel added commentary) ; later on , a man (Gaston Modot) and a woman (Lyla Lys) are passionately in love with one another, but their attempts to consummate that passion are constantly interrupted by their families, the Church and bourgeois society.This is a strange and surrealist tale of a couple who are passionately in love , but their attempts to consummate it are constantly thwarted ; it is an absurd , abstract picture that was banned for over 50 years. This is the most scandalous of all Buñuel's pictures . It is packed with surreal moments , criticism , absurd situations and religious elements about Catholic Church ; furthermore Buñuel satirizes and he carries out outright attacks to religious lifestyle and Christian liturgy . Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both subversive behavior and religion , issues well shown in ¨Age of Gold¨. Here Buñuel makes an implacable attack to the Catholic church , theme that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career . It is surreal , dreamlike , and deliberately pornographically blasphemous . Buñuel made his first film , a 17-minute longtime short film titled "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its disturbing images and surrealist plot , the following year , sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first picture , this scabrous witty and violent "Age of Gold" (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes . Buñuel's first picture has more of a script than ¨Un Chien Andalou¨ , but it's still a pure Surrealist flick . For various legal reasons, this film was withdrawn from circulation in 1934 by the producers who had financed the film and the US premiere was on 1 November 1979 . This film was granted a screening permit after being presented to the Board of Censors as the dream of a madman . However , on the evening of 3 December 1930, the fascist League of Patriots and other groups began to throw purple ink at the screen, then rushed out into the lobby of the theater, slashing paintings by Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Man Ray . This is an avant-garde collaboration with fellow surrealist Salvador Dali in which Buñuel explores his characteristic themes of lust , social criticism , cruelty, anti-religion , bizarre content , hypocrisy and corruption . This is an ordinary Buñuel film , here there are symbolism , surrealism , being prohibited on the grounds of blasphemy .The motion picture was compellingly directed by Luis Buñuel who was voted the 14th Greatest Director of all time . This Buñuel's strange film belongs to his first French period ; he subsequently emigrated to Mexico and back to France where filmed other excellent movies . After moving to Paris , at the beginning Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs , including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein . With financial help from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film , this 17-minute "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and subsequently ¨Age of Gold¨ . His career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War , where he made ¨Las Hurdes¨ , as Luis emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros . He subsequently went on his Mexican period he teamed up with producer Óscar Dancigers and after a couple of unmemorable efforts shot back to international attention , reappearing at Cannes with ¨Los Olvidados¨ in 1951 , a lacerating study of Mexican street urchins , winning him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. But despite this new-found acclaim, Buñuel spent much of the next decade working on a variety of ultra-low-budget films, few of which made much impact outside Spanish-speaking countries , though many of them are well worth seeking out . As he went on filming "The Great Madcap" , ¨The brute¨, "Wuthering Heights", ¨El¨ , ¨Susana¨ , "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De la Cruz" , ¨Robinson Crusoe¨ , ¨Death in the garden¨ and many others . His mostly little-known Mexican films , rough-hewn , low-budget melodramas for the most part , are always thought-provoking and interesting ; being ordinary screenwriter Julio Alejandro and Luis Alcoriza . He continued working there until re-establishing himself in Europe in the 1960s as one of the great directors . And finally his French-Spanish period in collaboration with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carrière with notorious as well as polemic films such as ¨Viridiana¨ ¨Tristana¨ , ¨The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" , of course , ¨ ¨Belle Du Jour¨ , with all the kinky French sex and his last picture , "That Obscure Object of Desire" .

druid333-2 Luis Bunuel was certainly a film maker who's films were a lightning rod for controversy. His first silent short, 'Une Chien Andelou'(with a screenplay written with Salvadore Dali)from 1929 was both a hit for audiences,as well as for psychologists who had a field day picking the Fraudien images apart. Despite a falling out with Dali during the screenplay writing phase for their next project (resulting in the two never talking to one another for the rest of their collective lives),Bunuel still,none the less,kept Dali's name on the credits (Dali also kept distance from the film,as well). The results were 'L'Age d'or',from 1930,which was an obvious attack on the ruling class,and it's tight moral structure, regarding sexuality. The film also took a number of pot shots at religion,family values,and other material that enraged French audiences so that in it's premiere,a full tilt riot broke out at the cinema that screened it in Paris. Because of this,the film was banned for over 50 years. To look at it now,it still packs a bit of a punch. The images are very surreal & dream like (i.e.it begins with what looks like a documentary of scorpions,and cuts to a totally unrelated series of short stories). This is a film that historians should see, as just what ticked off audiences back then. Besides the film's mostly French cast,it also features fellow surrealist artist,Max Ernst,in a small role as a bandit chieftain. Spoken in French with English subtitles. Not rated,this film does serve up some material that by today's standards would land it little more than a PG rating today (a few brief flashes of semi nudity,various sexual goings on,etc.),but shocked many back in the day.

christopher-underwood So easy to watch but rather more difficult to write about. I first saw this with 'Un Chien Andalou' in the 60s and was an overnight Bunuel fan, gradually getting to see most of his subsequent films. The exception was some of the earliest Mexican ones, which just recently I have seen, thanks to DVD releases. Once a director only seen in film societies and art galleries, now available to all. Of course there were later films that got reasonable releases but rarely to your local Odeon. I have never understood why. I admit that watching this film nearly 80 years after it was made a few allowances have to be made, but it is still shocking, it is still disturbing and it is still funny and at the same time uplifting. It is something that seems to run through all of Bunuel's work, this sunny disposition. At one with the earth. This is despite his fury bordering on hatred of authority and the church in particular and this certainly shows here, whether it's shooting a child, pushing over a blind man, tipping a cardinal out of a window. Just to add to this potent mix there is of course the sexual angle and this film contains one of the most erotic sequences in all of cinema, complete with Wagner's, Tristan und Isolde soaring on the soundtrack. I've just realised I haven't even mentioned the surrealism!

jzappa L'Age D'Or is pure cinema, as silent films were, and despite how difficult it may be to feel absorbed in it, it really is a great work. It consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most prolonged of which tells the goofy satirical story of a man and a woman who are keenly in love. Their efforts to have sex are always obstructed by their families, by the Church and the bourgeoisie. In one attention-grabbing moment in the film, the woman passionately sucks on the toe of a religious statue as if it were a phallus, the iconoclasm of which is remarkable considering the time at which this movie was made, and consequently banned.Salvador Dali, the hugely amusing surrealist painter, co-directed this film with Luis Bunuel, and the tone of many of his paintings is captured in many moments of the film but in the appropriate manner for its medium, such as the scalps of the women flapping in the wind on a crucifix accompanied by cheerful music, or the twisted black humor of the final vignette, which uses comic-strip-like symbolism and details to tell of a Marquis de Sade-style orgy, the survivors (!) of which emerge, one of them reminiscent of the most conventional image of Jesus.Upon viewing, I was muddled by all of this. I laughed a bit, my eyebrows curled, and I didn't quite understand, perhaps because I'm not accustomed to the proper manner in which one views a a silent film from 1929, but I did reflect upon it and it grew on me, because I do believe that if this film were not banned by the ever-predictable church and the governments they still influence, it would have moved the viewers of its era to open its eyes a bit more to sexual repression, whether propagated by civil bourgeois society or by the church, and ponder the film's most plausible implication, which is that repression generates violence, which is very true. The fiendish gag is in the look of dog-tired depravity as Christ emerges like a De Mille figure staggering of De Sade's party.