Purely Joyful Movie!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The Italian movie I racconti di Canterbury (1972) was shown in the U.S. with the translated title The Canterbury Tales. It was written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who adapted it for the screen from the original work by Geoffrey Chaucer.What this movie has in abundance is male and female full frontal nudity. This was a big deal 45 years ago, but it's not noteworthy now. Once you accept the fact that there's endless full frontal nudity, the rest of the film has very little to offer. Chaucer is one of the greatest English language authors. It's hard to believe that an experienced director couldn't make these stories come alive. However, for me, nothing came alive in the entire two hours.For example, the movie is dubbed, and the dubbing doesn't work. There's no shortage of medieval crowd scenes--pigs, dogs, urchins, beggars, etc., but they are confusing and don't really move the action forward. I have to give credit to Pasolini for using an extraordinary number of extras. (Of course, to a certain extent he saved on costume expenses.) There are also some great shots of Wells Cathedral. Not much else. Chaucer's strength is that he brings the people who tell the tales to life. Here, we just get the tales. Also, Pasolini has added some material, with no obvious purpose. In fact, the last tale looks like something out of a Bosch painting, not something written by Chaucer. Did Pasolini really think The Canterbury Tales needed improvement?We saw this film at the wonderful Dryden Theatre in Rochester's George Eastman Museum. It's the best venue for movies that I know. Not only is the auditorium perfect for films, but the Dryden shows movies that are hard to find and sometimes controversial. The program director knows that not every film will appeal to every person. He takes chances, and that's great. However, that sets up a situation where you win some and lose some. This movie was a loser. Don't waste your time and money on it.

Making a film about the Canterbuy Tales, one that lasts one to two hours, presents one with the decision of how to go about it.The logical approach would be to tell of the pilgrimage itself, and then splice 2 or 3 tales at a time, probably beginning with the joke tales, like the miller's.It would be doubtful that one could get all the stories in, and still have a pilgrimage tale.Here, the pilgrimage is pretty much forgotten, just mentioned at the beginning.The cuts between stories are sometimes straights cuts, and sometimes back to Chaucer writing the tale.The bawdiness is kept, although it is done more Italian style than English. There is a mixture of the two cultures involved here.The stories stay fairly true to form.It would take a huge budget to include the squire's story, and indeed, the squire's story would take some interpretation to finish. Sadly, it is left out.Which leaves the pardoner's story as the "thriller" story. I was very much hoping this story, a natural finale, would be the climax.I wasn't disappointed. The pardoner's tale is the masterpiece in terms of action and adventure. It isn't exactly the very last tale, but close enough to serve as the climax, as there are two very brief joke tales that follow it.Would I piece it together like this? Probably not. I think each person would direct this in a different way, with about a half dozen general methods.However, I liked the way this film was done. It stayed very true to form, in my opinion. Most of the tales are "raunchy humor" tales, showing the mores of what one would expect to be puritan people, most of them professionals in religion. This was well done.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, to my estimation so far from films I've seen (which have been most of his oeuvre), wasn't a genius, at least not entirely. He could fall flat on his face or just stick his pretentious tail out too far into the wind. But he was an artist, and with his subjects he had something to say whether you liked it or not. So is the way with The Canterbury Tales, which I've been told is apart of a "trilogy of life" (along with the good Decameron and the near-masterpiece Arabian Nights), and like those films it's a narrative that is precisely loose and episodic, and the subject matter is like a Monty Python film that takes its craft seriously but still knows when to go in for the bizarre humor. Or sometimes not. Or sometimes it just doesn't work.I never read the Chaucer Tales that are so renown to scholars and school-kids alike, but the stories in the film seem to reflect as much of its filmmaker as it does its author, if not more so. We get stories of lust and adultery and greed and ignorance in medieval, rural England. Not much time for a lot of the mythical aspects (though from time to time they are there), and there's a boatload of time for bawdy and crude comedy. One of the highlights is a scene where a young man has just finished sleeping with a woman (both very nude, it is NC-17 England and all), and the guy's friend is standing outside the window to get a kiss. She decides to give him one, her ass and a big fart right at his face. But he returns with a red hot poker and asks so nicely to get a kiss again, this time his friend's turn to give a fart, and thus get a red hot poker at his private area. So yeah, comedy like that.Some scenes kind of meld into others, as the stories continue on with middle aged fat men who want their women and are joyful and mean in equal measure (one guy sings and amuses his woman, though she'd rather have the company of a younger man), while another man keeps trying to have his way with another maiden, a big phallus sticking right in his pants (again, NC-17). The downside to a lot of the film is that Pasolini, for all of his elegant artistry in composing shots in these rundown and rural places and in the fields of England (with DP Tonini Delli Colli), he can't really direct most of his cast well. Sometimes his use of non-professionals can work, but it doesn't help in this case that a large majority of the cast speak English, and are dubbed (Pasolini's films in general don't have live sound recorded), and some of the actors like the Fool who impresses with his capability of outrunning authorities and spilling eggs that don't break are just smiling idiots that can't act well.That is, with some exceptions. Or rather, a bizarre exception. Tom Baker, who some of you may recall (or love) from his stint as a Doctor Who in the 1970's, appears in one of the stories. It's kind of a shock to even see him; he appears completely naked as a sexually frustrated housewife looks through a peephole, and he appears (we haven't seen his face until then) in a full 70's porno mustache and his usual wide-eyed demeanor. He also gets some other 'pleasure' in a field scene, which is also rather crazy to see, if only from the only former association with him being Doctor Who, and then another scene where he gets to overact reading from a book to the sexually frustrated housewife. It's a remarkably wild story and featuring the actor becomes more than just a curio. Ditto to the finale of the film, where we see Chaucer (who also appears during the film sometimes as the 'author' of these stories) delight in showing Satan and his minions defecating all over the place. It's like the South Park answer to Salo.It's a film that is loaded with creative visuals, some striking Ennio Morricone music, and some really juvenile humor, not to mention the bad dubbing and hit-or-miss "acting" by the mostly non-professionals. But what carries it is the director's dedication to his vision, and the fun he's having with Chaucer and his own view on the decay and rampant sexual energy of the populous.

I'm rather bemused by some of the negative comments above. This film - in my humble opinion - is one of the greatest ever made, and my personal favourite of all P.P. Pasolini's. Pasolini brings life to Chaucer in a way my poor teachers at school could never have dared. In the film, Pasolini casts himself as Chaucer; daydreaming, laughing at his own tales, being berated by his wife. And therein lies the clue to this film. It's not just an interpretation of the Canterbury Tales, it's a portrayal of its author. For all claims of "smut" (see above), I can honestly say that your imagination must be pretty dull not to laugh at certain earthy, dream-like scenes. Absolutely non of the scenes in this movie can be branded as bad-taste. They're absolutely accurate. Pasolini showed deep understanding of the English psyche throughout; the examples are too numerous to mention. If you're looking for an explanation of The Canterbury Tales, you won't find it in this film. But if you're looking for how to go about interpreting it for yourself, you'll find no better. This movie is one that I will keep, and you can bet my kids are going to see it when they get a little older too.