At long last...?

Love it or hate it, you have to admit it’s a curiousity…ISHTAR is finally getting a DVD release in the US (early 2011)…

First of all, it’s not as bad as its reputation leads you to believe. Hoffman & Beatty, perhaps too old for their parts, are nonetheless amusing. Charles Grodin steals his scenes and, while it might seem odd or even wasted on a comedy, Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography is stunning.

I DON’T liken it to a Hope/Crosby “road picture.” I think it’s a lot more fun than one of those mugfests.

THOUGHTS??

I think it’s not nearly as good as Mikey and Nicky or The Heartbreak Kid

I think it is also hilarious and that it’s bad reception may have something to do with it hitting too close to home on the subject of the American intelligence community.

I think it’s a shame Elaine May didn’t make more movies and Mike Nichols did.

ISHTAR on DVD—-

MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, HOUSEKEEPING, Gance’s NAPOLEON still waiting.

I CANNOT believe nobody’s put together a MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS release!!!! You’re right for bringing that up Roscoe…if anything screams CRITERION THIS MOVIE, it’s this film.

I believe Warner has been working on a Magnificent Ambersons release to either come out with the Citizen Kane Blu-ray or in 2012 since that will be its 70th anniversary. It is a shame that there are no decent R1 releases of it.

I had a drama teacher who spoke to about Ishtar in class at one point.

He told us run away if it was ever brought up.

I thought it was great. I haven’t seen it since I was a lot younger, but I still have fond memories of it. I’ll pick up the DVD for sure.

It’s one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1000 films in his book Essential Cinema (see Scorpiorising’s list in the Lists section); i’d be interested to give it another try, to make sense of that selection. No film with Storaro and Isabelle Adjani can be all bad

I gave it another try 2 years ago. it’s bad. first 30 mins is ok then after that it goes downhill fast and never recovers.

cool that it’s finally getting released though.

It certainly deserves a release. It is a modest and amusing comedy; it should not cost as much as it did. Had it been a low budget film it would have made a nice profit and people would think fondly of it.

dp

I DVRed this off TCM a week or two back & haven’t gotten to it yet. I’d figured I ought to see it for myself.

They All Laughed seems to have it’s partisans. Is that worth hunting down?

Mikey & Nicky is pretty good. It’s very ugly & very honest.

They All Laughed is the best film of Bogdanovich imo

I confused They All Laughed with Ms May’s A New Leaf for some reason. i’ve seen neither & been meaning to hunt both down.

It could be the thread title, as At Long Last Love is another reputed dog I’ve been meaning to catch up to.

yes At Long Last Love is terrible. Peter Bogdanovich had better luck using the Reynold’s persona in Nickelodeon (it helped that Cybil Sherpard was not involved in that one)

Rosenbaum put Ishtar on the list to provoke. As much as I enjoy his writing and his reasoning I have to say he likes to provoke on occassion and it’s easy to see right through it. Ishtar is not essential in any way. Lightly entertaining, maybe.

^^i watched At Long Last Love just recently. it was a bad copy i found online. truly terrible movie.

I don’t think so, Matt. Rosenbaum is fond of May as a filmmaker in general, and he’s written about the film as prescient as a satire of American policy blundering in the Middle East. Incidentally, I wonder if Rosenbaum will end up contributing to this release . . . a while back in his regular “Globabl Discoveries” column in Cinema Scope, he mentioned being contacted by someone at Columbia/Tristar regarding doing so for a DVD release, and accepted, only to have the project cancelled a few days later.

A few weeks back or a few months or so ago when At The Movies was on with A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, they had their weekly overrated/underrated segment of the show and they touched upon films of the 80’s. I’m pretty sure that Scott mentioned that he said that Ishtar was an underrated film of the 80’s. I’ve never seen the film itself, probably due to the fact that it has got such bad press.

I watched ishtar tonight; the first half wasn’t that bad, & was actually pretty funny, but once Beatty & Hoffman got lost in the desert, it got pretty damn rough. It’s not as bad as the reputation, but I can’t call it really good. I’m thinking the reputation it’s developing for being underrated may be viewers finally seeing the film & having expected worse from it. It’s definitely a mess, and when one reads about the production, it’s lack of cohesion and sputtering narrative make some sense.

I don’t know if I’d call Ishtar’s humor a predecessor to current awkward/no-laugh-funny humor. A lot of the funnier stuff is pretty dry, but the movie does seem to try for big, broad belly laffs as well. It consistently fails at those.

The political satire is a bit sharper. I’m not so sure that Americans have ever been able to laugh at our foreign policy foibles, or that they like being reminded of them when they expect laughter or entertainment. Even if Ishtar worked, the political satire may have been a hard sell. I can see how that might have rankled audiences, especially in the 80s (or, sadly, the present.)

So . . . official release date is January 4th, 2011.

I may buy it

any extras

Still TBA

An honest commentary or documentary would be good. i’d settle for a soundtrack.