Slaughterhouse-Five [DVD]

The late, great Ron Leibman (Auto Focus, Where's Poppa) passed away on the date of this release. His performance here is unparalleled. He will be missed. So it goes...One quibble: too bad Arrow couldn't include the soundtrack CD, by the great (and Hannibal Lector's favorite) Glenn Gould - complete with a facsimile of the original LP art. Would've been cool! Oh, well, wishful thinking. So it goes. However, it's on Prime Music - an amazing work of art. Stream or download here: ASIN# B012JM95RA.This realization of this glimpse into the mind's eye of a man unstuck in time is brilliant to behold. Yes, the book is a brilliant work in its own right, and open to interpretation, as a truly complex work must be. The movie is not the book. It is Hill's interpretation of the book, and a brilliant and viable one it is. Indeed, Kurt Vonnegut was very pleased with it - not very common position for an author in regards to movie adaptations.Hill won the best Director Oscar the next year with "The Sting". He later filmed the similarly "unfilmable" World According To Garp and also did a brilliant job with it, partially by letting go of John Irving's more depressing side. Other notable credits include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Slapshot.Michael Sacks, in his first movie, and only starring role at the tender age of 24, is completely convincing and natural. He is equally effective, compelling, and believable at the six distinct stages of Pilgrim's life memorialized herein. If he weren't up to the six-in-one role, the film wouldn't work, but he is, and it does. (Sacks would later appear in Steven Spielberg's theatrical debut, The Sugarland Express and Wes Craven's best film, Split Image - criminally unreleased to DVD or bluray - before retiring from acting and becoming a Wall Street Master of the Universe. So it goes.)Famed editor, Dede Allen (Dog Day Afternoon, Bonnie and Clyde and dozens of other classics) does an amazing job - despite the jumping around in time and place (and space), the viewer is never confused. Indeed, this film is way ahead of its time: it would be decades before Inception (the movie), Tarantino and the ilk. What is a cliché now (the gratuitous and pretentious Looper, for example) must have been off-putting to a 70s audience.70s sex kitten, Valerie Perrine (Honey Bruce in Bob Fosses's biopic, Lenny, and Lex Luther's lady friend in Superman) is great as Montana Wildhack. The other characters are all played for maximum irony and effect, and the cast delivers beautifully, without exception. Eugene Roche is the epitome of kindness as "Poor Edgar Derby" (whose death is still one of the most shocking scenes in filmdom - even if you've read/watched novel/film 127 times) the yin, to Ron (The Hot Rock) Liebman's yang, a twisted ball of anger named Paul Lazaro. John Dehner is brilliant as a war-hawk professor upset at the Vietnam protesters. His character would be as appropriate amidst today's global conflagration as it was in 1966 - the year of the books publication. Roberts Blossom (Deranged, Close Encounters of the First Kind), Lucille Benson, Kevin Conway, Sorrell Booke, Holly Near, Richard Schaal, and in another debut, Perry King (Andy Warhol's Bad, The Choirboys) are the more familiar names in a uniformly excellent cast, including the German/ Czeck actors. (Filmed in Prague - an excellent stand in for bombed-out Germany.)The cinematography by Miroslav Miroslav Ondricik is spectacular: he shot many films for the late Milos Foreman (Amadeus, Ragtime, Cuckoo's Nest) and Lindsay Anderson (O Lucky Man! and If...) as well as Mike Nichols and many more. His vision of dreary Minnesota (the stateside filming location of Vonnegut's fictional Ilium, NY, first mentioned in Vonnegut's first novel, 1952s Player Piano) recalls/predates Fargo - the movie and TV series. He makes Prague glimmer, and his version of "outer space" is truly visionary.The musical score (The aforementioned Glenn Gould) is also perfect, both in tone and substance. Beautiful, really. Vonnegut is a master of superimposing satire over irony over futility. The movie does a marvelous job of blending these contrasts and making its audience feel enriched. The music underscores all of these contrasts. The audio on this disc is excellent.Searching desperately for something to say to show that the movie cannot be 100% perfect, the only thing I can come up with is that the pacing of the movie drags slightly when the soldiers leave the first camp for Dresden until their new Kommandant gives his "welcoming" speech. It might have played better with about three minutes cut from that sequence...but, hey, so it goes.The specs and extras:The video is 1.85:1 anamorphic. The 1080p resolution brings out both the life in the POW camp and on the surface of Tralfamadore. The audio is Original lossless mono audio which still makes Glenn Gould’s piano playing sound so sharp. The movie is (optional) subtitled in English.Audio Commentary by author and critic Troy Howarth which is interesting since I’m used to him mainly speaking about Giallo films. He is well informed about how the movie came about and the talent on the screen.Video appreciation with author and critic (also known for horror and exploitation films) Kim Newman (21:05) has him talk about the book, film and George Roy Hill. He goes into how Hill gets into the time shifting.Pilgrim’s Progress: Playing Slaughterhouse-Five (14:07) is a new video interview with actor Perry King. He talks about going to Yale for acting school. He got into Yale even telling them he was only going there to be in Yale. While he was in school, they did a preview of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Robert Redford, Paul Newman and George Roy Hill. Three years later, he’s auditioning for George Roy Hill to play Billy Pilgrim’s son. John Houseman as his mentor at Julliard. He talks about the time Hill didn’t even let him speak during a scene because he knew a reaction shot covered everything that he would have said. He also identifies the voice on Tralfamadore - a nifty piece of trivia!Only on Earth: Presenting Slaughterhouse-Five (8:41) interviews Rocky Lang, son of executive producer Jennings Lang, about the film’s distribution. Jennings worked his way up from publicity to starting Universal’s TV department to producing films. Slaughterhouse-Five was his favorite film to produce. He says Universal bungled the release so that even though it won a major prize at Cannes, the studio didn’t get behind it for the Oscars. His father went on to make the blockbuster disaster epic Earthquake and Clint Eastwood's directorial debut, Play Misty For Me.Unstuck in Time: Documenting Slaughterhouse-Five (14:38) meets up with behind-the-scenes filmmaker/producer Robert Crawford, Jr. He had acted in a TV movie with George Roy Hill and turned into be a fly on the wall for the production of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The piece won an Emmy and he brought back Crawford to make another one. George liked the book, but had no idea how to make it a film. So they brought him the screenplay by Stephen Geller and he saw how it could be done. There are clips from the behind the scenes footage.Eternally Connected: Composing Slaughterhouse-Five (11:36) interviews film music historian Daniel Schweiger. He speaks of the musical selections and Glenn Gould’s work used in the film.All of the "presenters" in the above extras very insightful, a pleasure to watch.Theatrical trailer (4:32) really gives you a sense of the film.

A fantastic book made into a movie I never knew existed. I've read every Vonnegut novel and have read Slaughterhouse at least 10 times. This movie was a fairly good representation of a classic novel written by a master of satire and his creativity never disappoints. If you're a fan of Mr. Vonnegut this movie is a must have.

Fabulous story based on actual event of da firebombing of a civilian population during WWII by da USAF ( Kurt Vonnegut survived da firestorm dat destroyed most of Dresden, because he was housed as a prisoner in and underground slaughterhouse. Even da main character’s “problem”, being unstuck in time, is being validated by Quatum Mechanics today….”time is an illusion “

Great acting, such a crazy and creative story. Watching this it feels like this could premire tomorrow (with modern effects and film and such) and it would still be a hit.

I'm slowly working my way through the films I saw as a teenager in the early '70s, and buying these on Blu-Ray and DVD. What's been startling me is that so many of the movies I sought out in theaters at such an impressionable and unformed age have turned out to be so eminently re-watchable. Most have vividly and happily reconfirmed my adolescent impressions of long ago as to cinematic artistry and quality, upon revisiting them."Slaughterhouse-Five" was one of the first R-rated movies I saw. I can't remember if I watched it in the theater and then read the book, or vice-versa. Regardless, I'd forgotten much of it, so it was like experiencing it with renewed wonder to be able to acquire it on amazon for my film collection first on DVD, and now on Blu-ray. It was tragic for a while that there was no Region 1 Blu-Ray out there to do this proper justice, because the DVD was really only about the image quality of VHS. Happily, Arrow has stepped up to the plate recently, and done a bang-up job in restoring this unabashed classic in a fitting format.I've often wondered why I'd heard so little acclaim for this movie over the years. It hasn't been mentioned much in various credible critics' lists of all-time great films, while things I've considered to be meretricious have ended up repeatedly on many of these instead. Those with tastes running to linear narrative as opposed to a screenplay that hops around instead of playing sequentially may find "Slaughterhouse Five" taxing and hard to follow, but this is what makes it a wonderment.The actors are uniformly wonderful. Michael Sacks does a particularly impressive job of making so passive a character as Billy Pilgrim both audience-identifiable and likable. Here is a man whose life is literally passing him by, but not in order, and all he can seem to do is watch it eluding him like some phantom butterfly just beyond his grasp, as one would be a spectator to a parade on file.Events lived and not lived play out chaotically and randomly, from his military career in World War II, to his marriage, to his violent death as an old man, to a bizarre abduction by aliens to another planet. Throughout these adventures, Billy's only constant is the relationship he shares with his dog, which poignantly appears to be the only real one he can recognize or handle on Earth until the movie's happy/absurd ending. He watches his son grow from a wild card and troubled youth to a man, his marriage fragment and float by like a wisp of fog, and himself having wild but gentlemanly sex with a vanished softcore starlet named Montana Wildhack in an alien zoo on a distant planet named Tralfamadore, which has an atmosphere of cyanide.This is a magical entertainment, interspersed with many delicately conceived and realized little human moments. I recommend it highly to adult viewers. There is a considerable amount of the F-bomb in a realistic military context throughout, but for a rare change this doesn't seem too incredibly forced to gain a rating or crassly inserted. I wouldn't suggest this for anyone with a child in the room. I was surprised to glimpse Gilmer McCormick from "Godspell" and Sorrell Booke (Boss Hogg from "Dukes Of Hazzard") in small roles.(PS: There are at least two vignettes here which *may* break your heart, unless you're made of anthracite.)

The movie itself garners a 5/5 - I LOVE IT! It is so Kubrickian!The Blu ray telecine: EGADS!!! What a horrifyingly blown-out image. At approximately 22:31 where the night train rolls into the German prisoner of war camp you can barely make out the image because it is overwhelmingly crawling with film grain. I mean crawling so badly that it takes on the shape of some type of digital horror monster almost like it's alive.At the beginning of the film, where Billy Pilgrim is walking through the snow drifts, there are tons of specks and glitches that ruin the whole 'abandoned in nowhere' psych of the presentation. I mean, it interferes greatly with the attempt to enjoy the filmic atmosphere. So, there was absolutely no digital restoration done for this Blu ray.Then, there's the audio which only plays through the center-channel speaker. If you happen to have a pretty kicking center-channel (which I DO have) then it might be tolerable, for you but not for me. I hate companies that do lazy mono transfers and assign them to the center-channel speaker. Give me a BREAK, make it two-channel mono and make sure it gets assigned to the left/right speakers so that it is capable of spatial depth!As stated above, this Blu ray transfer stunk so bad that at 22:31 I ejected the Blu ray and put in the Universal SD DVD that was released in 2004 and is anamorphic. NIGHT and DAY difference, which translates into the following description: I never thought I'd see this happen when an SD DVD blows a Blu ray out of the water!! The 2004 SD DVD also looks near perfect in the opening snow sequence. Not only that, the mono audio is CORRECTLY encoded to go to the left/right speakers.This transfer to Blu ray is complete TRASH. Do yourself a favor and get the Universal 2004 SD DVD.

The movie itself is a 4-Star for me, but this Blu-ray edition quality (or lack thereof) has pulled it down. This is perhaps the worst example of what the Blu-ray format is capable of, and I feel like it was a total waste of my money.In the first place, the print from which the digital transfer was made was probably of a lower quality, perhaps a second- or third-run print, and very noisy throughout, even in the better-lit scenes. Then, the digital processing was so heavy-handed with noise reduction and compression that the final result is a pasty, haloed mess with severely crushed shadows and highlights.I watch my films on a high-quality Sony SXRD projector and 92-inch Da-Lite Matte screen in a lighting-controlled room, and so my expectations are high, but this Blu-ray is more like VHS tape quality. I own an NTSC anamorphic DVD copy of this film which is noticeably better than this Blu-ray, sad because this is a film I like and I long for a more movie theater-like experience for it.Perhaps someday BFI or Criterion will do a proper digital transfer from good film elements.

Slaughterhouse Five is a lament for the human condition. Arguments for and against the destruction of Dresden are moot. Right and wrong are nullified by the destruction itself, engulfed by the fact of the firestorm. The city reduced to rubble, dust, debris and ash in a matter of hours, here one moment, gone the next, remains the salient truth. Dresden is thus emblematic — like Hiroshima and Nagasaki — of what man can do if he puts his mind to it.Eight hundred Allied bombers approached the city on the night of 13 February 1945. The first wave flattened the city, the second — dropping napalm-like incendiary bombs — torched what remained. Thousands burned to death, though most suffocated, oxygen sucked from the air and their lungs by the flames.Vonnegut survived in his air lock, a meat locker buried two stories underground, Schlachthof-fünf by name, or Slaughterhouse five. A fluke, naturally, that he was there, a contingency that he and his lot survived the firestorm when thousands of Germans did not. The moment of panic-fear wiped away all human distinctions when the air-raid sirens sounded, the instinct to survive superseding all else, thus saving him and his comrades.Counterpoint concerning the city is beautifully established in the film. It is first viewed in silhouette along the banks of the Elbe, its gables, turrets and towers dark against a white sky just after dawn. It’s viewed from the barred windows of a cattle car that carries the prisoners into the city. In the novel Vonnegut writes that “the skyline was intricate and voluptuous, enchanted and absurd. It looked like a Sunday school picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim [Everyman protagonist in the story].”From the central station the prisoners are marched through the city to their detention camps. Wide eyes, open faces. Classical music, no dialogue as the film follows them. All this beauty, this Baroque splendour, after what they have seen in this awful war: blood, mud, pain and death. The streets are cobblestone, the buildings ornate. The local people, mostly civilians, watch them on parade, filthy and bedraggled. These locals just look, saying nothing. So this is what we have been fighting? Yes, Dresden was off the beaten track, rather isolated by the war. Thus it was hardly protected, all the big guns elsewhere.Dresden, Florence of the Elbe, famous for its Meissen porcelain miniatures and Renaissance architecture. Loved throughout Germany and Europe. Destroy this? Why? Who would think to? And yet… There is always ‘and yet’ in this life.It is early February 1945. That is when the prisoners arrive. Nobody in Dresden knows it now but in less than two weeks the city, founded in the 12th century, will be gone.How can Vonnegut (and George Roy Hill, director of the film) tell such a story? How does art compete with napalm? Wisely, they acknowledge it cannot. They let the destruction speak for itself.As for us, humanity, victims of ourselves and our devices, we react as expected, traumatised by the damage. We time trip, lose our minds, have nervous breakdowns. Or we would as Billy does. The film is about this journey, the journey of the pilgrim called Pilgrim to save his sanity and humanity in the aftermath of Armageddon.Billy’s PTSD will time trip him through all sorts of dark burlesque that parodies normality. This includes the postwar middle-class American family Billy is tangentially a part of, a normality made by conformity, consumption and patriotism. Billy as war hero, husband, father, home and dog owner, Lions Club president, successful optometrist. Red-white-and-blue middle American — especially white. The land of the Midwest, doubtlessly, Trump country in the making. Having survived Dresden, he’s now asked to survive this. How can he? By time tripping, his shell-shock nightmares refusing to release him. What is real and what’s a dream? Dresden or this? — the family dog, corpulent wife, spoiled children, big lawn and big cars.He’s saved, it seems, by Montana Wildhack, a buxom starlet who likes to take her clothes off in film. Billy fantasizes about her. So does his teenage son Robert who sits wild-eyed on the toilet with magazines featuring her nudity. Father and son seem united in aesthetic taste, as we see in one family scene at a drive-in movie. Flashing her wares on the big screen, Montana shares a Roman bath with a callow young centurion, soon to be made a man. Outraged, mum and daughter avert their eyes. Not so father and son. Both gape and salivate.This being Vonnegut, of course Billy and Montana will have to meet. They do so, but not here on Earth where most people meet. They meet on Tralfamadore, a planet in a distant star system. Billy and dog Spot are abducted by aliens — Tralfamadorians — to be studied. Billy and Spot live in a glass dome on the planet. The atmosphere is noxious, largely composed of cyanide, so walking the dog outside the dome is not an option. Billy’s masters (whom we hear but don’t see) want him to be comfortable, but he is not. Though he loves Spot, he feels isolated and lonely. The aliens read his thoughts and teleport Montana Wildhack to the planet and dome. She arrives shrieking, panicked and topless, her only raiment a thin G-string. Billy smiles upon her arrival, pleased with both the courtesy of his hosts and Montana’s contours.They get to know one another rather quickly, become affectionate, mate (beneath the ‘night canopy’, which Billy routinely requests for privacy when they copulate, which is frequent). Time passes and they sire a child — a little boy, the first human being not born on Earth.Curiously, Billy is able to revisit Earth but when his daughter and her husband refuse to believe his claims about Tralfamadore, Montana and the baby he decides to permanently relocate to the other planet. Apparently.Maybe that’s what Vonnegut really wants to say. Maybe any planet that can perpetuate and countenance the destruction of Dresden forfeits its status as a pleasure dome. Billy will take his chances elsewhere, isolation, cyanide and other negativities be damned. Back home in the dome loyal dog, sexy mate and healthy son await him. Also, it should be noted that Tralfamadore’s temporal make-up does not include past and future. The present is the be-all and end-all on that planet.So in the end Montana with her top off becomes Billy’s call to sanity. Survivor indeed.

The film begins by showing us Billy typing a letter to a newspaper, explaining that he is 'unstuck in time', travelling backwards and forwards through his own life. This is quite an effective short-cut, though unlike in the book it's not really expanded on later to show why Billy had decided to make his story public. In the book, we are told Billy's story by a narrator who makes us aware that it's a fable, a form he is using because he feels he wants to say something profound about the bombing of Dresden. This isn't mentioned in the film, so that the viewer is put in the position of having to assume that Billy's life is “real”, which in turn means that the events perhaps take precedence over the meaning – the reverse of what happens in the book.Then the film starts to move through Billy's life, concentrating on his experiences in WW2 as a prisoner of war first in the camps and then later in Dresden before and after the bombing of the city. Although it shifts in time, the film feels as if it takes a more linear approach to Billy's life – more or less starting at the beginning and ending at the end, but with detours along the way. The book seems more jumbled, more fragmented, and therefore gives, I feel, a clearer picture of Billy's disorientation.When I look at the notes I took while watching, it turns out it's primarily a list of things the film misses out. This is a pity, since I'd say it's a brave and partially successful attempt to bring a complex and difficult book to the screen. Michael Sacks as Billy gives a good performance though I felt that somehow he made film Billy fit his life better than the Billy in the book did. He doesn't seem as scared in his early army career, nor as disconnected in the later scenes, and he's played a little more for laughs – and is perhaps more likeable, in fact. For example, in the book we know he doesn't ever really love his wife – the major reason for him marrying her is that she happens to be the daughter of his boss. I didn't feel that came across much in the film – she is made rather annoying, but we don't get inside Billy's head to know how he feels about her. I'm not normally a fan of having a narrator doing a voiceover in a film, but with a book that is so concerned with what's happening inside the main character's head, I began to feel it would have helped to fill some of the gaps.While I don't think the book is really science fiction, nonetheless Billy's visits to the planet Tralfamadore are central, and I was surprised at how underplayed this aspect is in the film. For a start, Hill has wimped out of showing the odd-looking Tralfamadorians, turning them into an invisible species instead. And, rather annoyingly and completely in line with '70s cinema (my unfavourite decade of film), Billy turns up on the planet in his night wear, whereas the girl turns up nicely naked and with plenty of pert chest jiggling, so that the lascivious males in the audience have something to drool over while the lascivious females have to make do with their imaginations, unless they happen to have a dressing gown fetish. And then they wonder why we became feminists...The science fiction author from the book doesn't appear either, though I didn't feel this was a great loss since he seemed a bit extraneous anyway. Much more oddly, the phrase “So it goes” is entirely missing from the film. Anyone who has read the book will know that it's used as a sort of chorus every time a death occurs, as a sort of semaphore to mark both the inevitability and futility of war. I can see that, without a voiceover, it would have been quite difficult to shoehorn this in, but without it, I felt the point was left rather unclear. In fact, the film seems to send another message, focussing on a small (and rather trite) part of the Tralfamadorian philosophy, that life is made up of moments and we should concentrate on the good ones. Very little is made of the, to me, deeper part of their philosophy – the part that draws Billy into this particular delusion – that if one can travel backwards in one's life, one can in a sense keep people alive by visiting them in the past, thus reducing the finality of death. Part of this message comes from another scene that's also missing – where Billy sees old war movies running in reverse, so that it appears that the dead come back to life, and that the Germans, rather than shooting planes down, are in fact lifting them back into the sky. The omission of this central and moving scene is a strange decision indeed.Unfortunately the film left me entirely unmoved in the end. While it's quite entertaining in parts, and has its shocking moments, overall it lacks the depth and power of the book. It's too linear, we don't get a real idea of what's going on in Billy's mind, and I felt that some of the major points in the book were either omitted entirely or weren't sufficiently explored. The rather odd “happy ending” that is tacked on therefore came as less of a surprise than it should have done. So in the Book v. Film Battle the winner is clear... the Book!

This movie which is based upon the book of the same name, and it helps to debunk the idea that any human being has any form of superior right to exert authority over any other human being. The result of such thinking is always negative. God never speaks and therefore human frustration results in might makes right. The victors in battle always claim that God was on their side, but reality shows that human life is nothing more than an illusion that is carved out of ignorance and fear. It is then manifest by the brute force ideology of might makes right. Confused? See this movie or read the book and the penny may drop that there is no such thing as victory of right triumphing over wrong, because in the end the victors also perish. No human being has any inside knowledge of what we are doing on this Planet, and it might be a good idea to quit the pretense. In the meantime, yes in the meantime, well, in the meantime if we can't get along with other human beings, then I guess we will continue to deceive ourselves as a species in an effort to make the next war, the last war. But it won't be the last because the moment dictates our responses to life, and that means in the absence of a note from God, we just have to kill or be killed, as senseless as that seems. On the other hand, all of Nature just gets on with the business of killing and never bothers to try and make sense out of it. See this movie (or read the book) to get my point.