Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

fedor8 How Mark Twain and Danilo Kis would have torn this pretentious nonsense apart in scathing reviews.The first 15 minutes are deceitfully promising, with the mysterious mood and the excellent sets somewhat reminiscent of movies such as "Stalker". Once whassisname gets to the Sanitarium (or whatever the hell it is), HS sets itself up as a Kafkaesque drama, in which some sort of a time-warp seems to be dominating the premises. Or at least it seems to be Kafka-like. It isn't. Soon HS disintegrates into surrealist farce – which is the same as a mainstream farce but devoid of laughs. The hero has dozens of meaningless conversations with real or imagined (irrelevant which) dullards, all of whom babble about obscure or inconsequential piffle. HS is one of those highly ambitious yet intellectually hollow art-fart Euro-trash flicks designed to please critics (and film-students who are forever enslaved by critics), while fully ignoring the needs of any sane viewer – and by that I don't mean people who seek out "Porky's" every time they pick a movie. I'm all for an intelligent story/concept, provided it really IS intelligent, and not just TRYING to appear "deep".HS is one of many such 60s/70s European art-flicks that utilize the ultimate 20th-century art-world hoax, the "Picasso con". You know the charlatan drill: create something pointless and meaningless – yet very importantly ABSTRACT - and then sit and wait for pompous intellectual wannabes to rush into the room, injecting their subjective, ludicrous interpretations into the whole empty mess. The "Picasso con" works precisely because it preys on man's biggest enemy: his own fear. In this case, it is the fear of being thought of as stupid and/or uncultured. In a world in which status means everything (to certain people at least), few people are confident enough to speak out against pretentious drivel they don't understand. Therein lies the catch: there is nothing to understand. The movie is what it appears to be: an almost random collection of scenes and dialogues that are somehow supposed to be profound merely because they are full of fortune-cookie aphorisms, mostly superficial philosophical musings, and historical references.So consumed was the 1974 Cannes Festival jury with this fear that they might look like jackasses for failing to make head or tails of this "grand, poetic work" that they copped out by giving HS the Grand Jury Prize – which is usually awarded to awful movies, I might add. When it comes to those consummate liars and fakers - the movie critics – abstract imagery and endless existentialist gobbledygook is often all you need in your "allegorical" surrealist malarkey to get your thumbs up. As for the film-students, well, they simply "enjoy" whatever critics and their movie professors tell them to; they are mindless sheep, seeking to convince both themselves and their surroundings that they are high-brow intellectuals whose opinions matter and that nobody should ever dare underrate the exquisite depth of reason and imagination one needs in order to be an A-grade film student. In reality, Film Schools are low-brow, more in line with African History Studies, and the like; this explains the strong urge to prove oneself worthy of respect.It is almost scary (but also fascinating and hilarious) to consider that so many film buffies, and other film-studenty type of human debris, have so successfully been brainwashed by the cultural movie establishment that they have actually learned to train themselves to sit through these kinds of two-hour drags and then even boast (lie) later how much they'd enjoyed them. But no amount of pseudo-intellectual BS can hide the roots of these movies, because the roots are showing from all sides.Nor do film-students, film-buffies and film-critics differentiate between quality surrealism ("O Lucky Man!", for example) and low-grade, empty-headed nonsense (this Polish crap). It is all the same to them. It is as though the genre itself – the surrealist allegorical abstract drama (sounds "fancy", doesn't it?) – is enough by definition to give any such film the "official seal of approval for intellectual excellence" from the esteemed, confused, fearful movie community. Many vastly overrated directors (check out my "Overrated Directors" list) have built their entire careers on such obvious charlatanry. Think about it: it's much easier to write a script that has neither a structure not a plot (or at least only a vague one) and to simply glue together a bunch of scenes in which wide-eyed overactors dish out quotes from Nietzsche and Rousseau and make references to greats of literature and art.Surely breasts are art? Nearly every actress in the movie shows her bazookas – in the name of art, naturally. One of the few good things about "surrealist" cinema: if you want tits, you'll find them here.Going back to "Stalker"; perhaps if HS had no buffoonery, especially from its protagonist, and if it had a more eerie, mysterious mood – and a "somewhat" more finely-tuned script (or just A script as opposed to a lack of one), then perhaps this could have been a great movie. As it is, we've got great sets, nice photography, but not much else. Unless you believe that randomly injected philosophical discussions and occasional lines of pretentious poetry can ever possibly serve as a valid replacement for a story.Believe it or not, there is one fart joke here, but in the non-skilled hands of film-critic spin-doctoring, I am sure even this basic bodily function can be interpreted as having vast layers of profundity. The world, after all, is full of false interpretations of riddles, with very few correct or sane interpretations. Trouble is, in order to interpret something you need to have a meaning to begin with, otherwise you're just indulging your own fantasies, making up things as you go along.OK, enough of this rant. I'm off now to get a few laughs by reading the 10-star reviews here.

tieman64 Sandwiched somewhere between David Lynch and Luis Bunuel is Wojciech Has, a little known Polish director responsible for "The Saragossa Manuscript" and "The Hourglass Sanatorium", two rather grand exercises in surrealism."The Hourglass Sanatorium", which might as well be called "Alice in Shoahland", concerns the journey of Jozef, a man who arrives at a derelict sanatorium after an exhausting train journey. Two minutes into the film, and already we're assaulted by a barrage of symbolism. The train represents a shuttle for dead or dying souls. It's a gateway to "the sanatorium", a sort of limbo where life and death commingle before one is shunted permanently off into the afterlife. On another level, the train represents the carriages used to transport Polish Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust.So this is a film which not only deals with a dead Jozef stumbling through the memories, events and fantasies of his life, but a film about the culture of a pre-World War 2 Europe. Or rather, the film mirrors Jozef's mental and bodily disintegration to the way Poland crumbled during and after the Holocaust. As the film progresses Jozef will lose his eyesight whilst the world around him likewise falls apart, objects in the sanatorium becoming increasingly claustrophobic, closed and nailed shut, as if ready to be taken away.But the film offers not only a historical, cultural and personal perspective on death and the passage of time, but a kind of subconscious look at the way Jozef's relationship with his father throughout his life forced him to confront, not only his own mortality, but the perishability of all things.As the film progresses, we're thus treated to an Alice in Wonderland styled journey in which Jozef bumbles from one strange set piece to the next. Only after multiple viewings do these sequences coalesce into meaning, the film serving up episodes in which Jozef re-experiences events from his life in an increasingly psychedelic fashion. Encounters with naked women, dead Jews, Nazi camps, erotic fantasies, Yiddish chants, memories of his mother, his home, his father, his father's textile shop (a meeting place for Jewish men), his marriage, being disciplined as a child, the encroachment of war and an extended sequence filled with mannequins, clockwork dolls and motionless historical figures, are all thoroughly confusing until your brain starts sorting through all the symbolic information.On top of this is a subplot which seems to suggest that Jozef's father was killed by the Nazis for assisting or hiding Jews in some way, but the film's intricately linked web of symbols are so esoteric that it's hard to get a read of things. With audiences so unfamiliar to this kind of filmic language, such a film is likely to only appeal to a very narrow range of people.Adapted from a book by Bruno Shulz, a victim of the Nazis, the film is, at its best, an unconscious (or repressed?) look at the traumas of the Holocaust as well as a journey through the memories of a man who tumbles through time on his deathbed. At its worst, however, this is a film almost opaque in its symbolism. So if you aren't phased by Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain", Tarkovsky's "Nostalghia", Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf", Greenaway's "Prospero's Book" and Lynch's "Inland Empire", then give Wojciech Has a taste. If not, stick to drugs.8/10 – Requires multiple viewings. One has to start with Tarkovsky, Greenaway and Lynch before tackling this beast. See "Night and Fog", "Hotel Terminus" and Melville's "Army of Shadows".

JustApt I didn't even know about existence of this gem, I came across it by chance. Long time ago I've read short story by Polish writer Bruno Schulz named Sanatorium under the Clepsydra and appreciated it greatly so I was lucky to find this excellent film adaptation. A son goes to visit his ill father in some mysterious sanatorium – in reality his father died but in this bizarre sickbay he continues to live due to some shift of time backward. In fact all the times there are merged and he meets himself younger and sees his old dead mother and takes part in all kinds of affairs occurring someplace between nightmare and reverie. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium perfectly opposed the passage of time as if this film itself has been placed into some timeless capsule.

Eumenides_0 Wojciech Has must have created one of the most unique and enigmatic movies I've ever seen. Inspired by Bruno Schulz' novel, Has invites the viewer to journey with Jozef to a decrepit sanatorium where his father is living. But it doesn't take long for the viewer to realise the journey isn't taking place in any definitive place or time. The sanatorium is a cobweb-filled, deserted, wasting place where only a nurse and a doctor work.As Jozef arrives, he finds his father living in a sort of animated suspension. He should be dead, the doctor tells him, but time in the sanatorium works differently. And Jozef soon realises just how differently. The story begins to move from place to place and time to time randomly. Jozef can find himself crawling under a bed in his house only to come out somewhere else.The movie is full of fascinating and creepy imagery. There's a great sequence in which Jozef visits a room full of mannequins that come to live. At another time, he's surrounded by men dressed as birds. The art direction and settings are beautiful throughout the movie, possibly the most intricate ever brought to a movie. Everything has a feeling of decadence, of a world where mankind stopped living a long time ago. In a way it seems Jozef is just a dead soul reliving parts of his life and all time and space are unified in this place of memory. Maybe. This is the type of movie that doesn't offer one single interpretation. But trying to make sense of it is part of the fun.