Pandaemonium | | Cast : | Linus Roache, John Hannah | | Director : | Julien Temple | | Studio : | Usa | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Dolby | | Released Date : | January 01, 2000 | | DVD Released Date : | February 12, 2002 | | Language : | English (Dubbed) | | Audience Rating : | PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | October 25, 2004 | | Summary | Great Flick! | Content
 | Although I am biased, I enjoy anything Linus Roache plays in. This is great BBC Film Noir.
This historical appetite in this movie is lacking. The film is great for thinking, and expanding your horizons on the film character. I find the acting to be quiet good, believable, and quirky. The British have a way of making a film that our, "Hollywood," cannot. If you purchase this film be prepared to be amazed at the characters, and their development. I do not give away total plots or more than my feelings in my reviews beacaue I'll not ruin it for future viewers. Interpretation is always as individual as ones tastes! Enjoy this fine BBC offering. The time travel scenes are to make their point well known, and in a timely manner. The flight, and destruction of man is present here. I never knew opium could be such a creative juice for poetry, or anything else. I do like that justice for the betrayer is done in the flick. |
| Rating | | | Date | September 09, 2004 | | Summary | amazing, but why the full frame? | Content
| First of all, no, the movie is not historically accurate, which I assume the filmmakers were well aware of. However it is not a "Hollywood" version of their lives either. What it does capture, quite wonderfully, is an immediacy that most period pieces simply do not achieve. We are brought into the lives of these two poets, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, failings, etc, that a standard historical biography would not have found possible. we are given, instead of a historical timeline put to film, a more revolutionary approach that almost contemporizes Coleridge while remaining firmly entrenched in the period that these men lived, reenvisioning and reawakening the ground-breaking nature of the work that Coleridge and Wordsworth produced, and giving their long-dead poetry a new life of sorts. I would like to see the director do a further film concerning Shelley and Byron, who are pretty much nothing but bit characters in this movie. (And I'm sure it would have to be better than the completely dissatisfying Gothic). The reason only three stars? For some reason, most copies of this film on DVD are full-frame, and the widescreen version, rare at first, has become seemingly impossible to find. A brilliant, though at times fictional, take on the lives of two extraordinary men. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 06, 2004 | | Summary | A Great Movie about Great Poets | Content
| "Pandaemonium" just might be one of the greatest movies ever made about poets. There are very few that I've seen that haven't been superficial, over the top or boring. This movie is sublime. The story of Samuuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordworth makes grand entertainment and exciting drama. Linus Roche is a bundle of wild energy as Coleridge, with his addiction to opium (laudanum) taking center stage as a symbol of his ups and downs in his creative energy and mental health. John Hannah is very good as Worthsworh, a poet totally different than Coleridge but bound together at first for the common cause of writing great poetry. The cast is uniformly excellent and the story is exciting with great location photography and visionary scenes on how Coleridge composed and got the ideas for his masterpieces, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," and the moving "Frost at Midnight." It is a great movie and great sadness, showing the arc of the two poet's careers. It avoids the stilted language and imagery of former historical epics and is as fresh as if these poets come alive now in the 21st century. A movie to treasure and share. Highly recommended. May it lead its viewers to appreciate poetry and poets more and elavate them to a high place where great words and visions are created and cherished. |
| Rating | | | Date | January 31, 2004 | | Summary | Pandaemonium--Dumb and Dumber | Content
| This movie is stunning in its stupidity. The writers are obviously incapable of even the dimmest understanding of the work of either Wordsworth or Coleridge. In their ignorance they must fall back upon a stereotypical pastiche bearing virtually no resemblance to the history or character of either poet. The legacy of these two literary giants offers a rich tapestry to exploit. Yet here we have an offering which might be summed up in one sentence as follows. "Drugs--wow, man cool, no drugs?--bummer." |
| Rating | | | Date | September 28, 2003 | | Summary | A Study in the Ways of the Imagination | Content
| Pandaemonium is one of the better films I've seen in a long time. Some of its themes are much like the ideas (ala Hassan i Sabbah & assassins & hunger for paradise) that have attracted me lately. It is about the poets Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who wrote "Kubla Khan"). The exploration of the creative force, mingled with the desire to see deep into reality is amazing (Coleridge tried to do it with opium, and both succeeded and kind of destroyed himself in the process). The movie is based on real history but I think it took some liberties to make it a more powerful story. Coleridge also wrote "The Ancient Mariner," and that poem is incredible, I've even more taken by it to see it so lushly explored in a visual sense in how the idea and language came to Coleridge. There's some really funny parts too, like a time when they eat datura and almost fall up off the world (or their perceptions convince them they are about to, and then they start playing with it, realizing the joke, but still pretending that they can fall up.) There's a scholarly literary study on Coleridge published in 1927 called "The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination" by John Livingstone Lowes, a brilliant book, and I wonder if the filmmakers got many of their ideas and details from that extraordinary book. |
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