501 Paris, Texas

[Tommaso]

Highway 61: Well, laughably inferior is only true of very few of them, but the two I specifically pointed out, "The End of Violence" and "Palermo Shooting", should really be avoided by everyone who isn't a die-hard Wenders fan (and while not die-hard, I still consider myself a Wenders devotee to some degree).

To answer your question, and although I don't have any idea whether they're all out in R1-land, the following post-"Wings" films can surely be recommended:

- "Lisbon Story" - a fascinating film about the city and the even more fascinating band Madredeus; a small, but extremely lovely film about filmmaking. Perhaps my favourite Wenders, if only because I love Teresa Salgueiro.

- "Notebook on Cities and Clothes" - an equally fascinating portrait of the fashion designer Yoji Yamamoto, who later designed the costumes for Kitano's "Dolls", for instance. Almost a companion piece to "Tokyo-Ga", but much more stylish and, curiously, less pretentious.

- "A trick of the light" (aka "Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky") - part fiction/part documentary, a must see for anyone interested in the beginnings of film in the mid 1890s. The Skladanowskys were rivals of Lumiere, but their film-system lost in the end. The film might have the longest end credit sequence in film history, btw.

- "Until the end of the world" - as said before, there are many problems with this film, but nevertheless it manages for the most part to be quite captivating and is certainly Wenders' most ambitious project ever. Gorgeous visuals all around.

I would start with these four, probably in this order. If you like them, there's no reason to avoid "Far away, so close!" either; it's not as bad as many say, in my view. I also quite like his 1992 short "Arisha, der Bär, und der steinerne Ring", a nice, quiet, melancholic Christmas story. It's out as an extra on one of the German Wenders discs, though I can't recall which one at the moment.

[flyonthewall2983]

...the film, despite of its length and the gorgeous land- and cityscapes, still feels private and intimate enough to be believable and directly touching.

Couldn't have put it better myself. I can't imagine a trickier concept for a filmmaker than making something with such vast visuals, so personal and so one-on-one. But Wim certainly did it here, and it's all over the place. I'm really looking forward to this release and glad it's being put out. I saw it only once and was immediately effected and in awe of it once it finished.

[Wood Tick]

I have to say, Tommaso, I didn't find The End of Violence an incoherent mess at all. Situated around what might have been a plot-driven tale, the movie hovers just outside of what could have been a good thriller but instead chooses to veer in and out of the lives of the characters, obliquely but compellingly. I found it to be hypnotizing.

I also have to say that The Million Dollar Hotel, though not his best, is worthwhile, albeit in the school of self-consciously quirky cinema.

Don't Come Knocking I thought was the epitome of a half-baked idea brought to a state of thorough wretchedness.

[domino harvey]

Criterion has this listed as being 1.66. It's been a while since I've seen it, but isn't it closer to 1.85?

[zedz]

Criterion has this listed as being 1.66. It's been a while since I've seen it, but isn't it closer to 1.85?

Maybe Wenders decided to swap aspect ratios with Kings of the Road (which he revised from 1.66 for the recent Axiom release)?

For what it's worth (nothing, I know), imdb goes with 1.66, and since this was a European production that seems consistent with the practice of the time. Though chances are that if you saw it in the US it would have been projected at 1.85, since this was the regular fate of 'European widescreen' (something Wenders pointedly drew attention to at the start of the original-ratio Kings of the Road).

[Cronenfly]

Beaver on the Blu.

[perkizitore]

While it's clear that Criterion beats all the previous DVDs in terms of extras, the Axiom UK DVD is not that far behind in the video presentation department.

[LightBulbFilm]

Got the blu ray in the mail today, it is fucking gorgeous.

[Ashirg]

DVD Savant

[scotty2]

I've had Music by Ry Cooder, a compilation of his film music, since it came out in 1995. I just noticed that Harry Dean Stanton sings on "Cancion Mixteca", the ballad heard on an off again during the film. You all probably knew this already. He does a beautiful job.

[AquaNarc]

While it's clear that Criterion beats all the previous DVDs in terms of extras, the Axiom UK DVD is not that far behind in the video presentation department.

When talking a about a BD done well, as this one is, is this even possible?

[HistoryProf]

I've seen a few Wenders and Alice in the Cities is probably the one I enjoyed the most. In Paris the monologues and the scenes where

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Stanton is at the strip club and reunites with Kinski

are among my favorite scenes of the decade.

But everything that came before those scenes I found uncompelling, and really just build-up for what occurs in the final act.

Pretty much a ditto on this end. Not a bad film by any stretch. But, after another spin, again, I found it just a nice film that takes way too much time getting to the payoff at the very end. Whether or not you think the extended journey is worth it, I guess has much to do with how what's being doled out along the slow, measured tempo registers inside you. (The kid, incidentally, is simply magnificent.)

I don't know how else to describe it, but there's a self-assuredness about the time-taking nature of the film, an assumption that every aerated, slow-simmered moment is just perfectly executed, that here and there becomes slightly tiresome to me. It's good, often very good, but at time not anywhere near as good as it thinks it is. I don't know how else to put it. I have nothing against it, but I think it overrates itself at times, if that makes any sense at all. Very VERY subjective and personal, the nature of my critique-- at the same time his technique is quite limpid and delicately beautiful.

I finally got around to watching the Fox disc of this I dug out of the wally world $5 bin a couple of years ago and came to basically say, well, ditto to this post I guess. I hadn't seen it since the early 90s, so came at it completely fresh and remembered my feeling at the time that the first half is about 2x longer than necessary. (A feeling I forgot all about until about an hour in tonight). It's all beautiful to look at, and the Ry Cooder soundtrack is phenomenally well paced - and placed - but it just feels a bit too cumbersome a trip. The final act is one of the more extraordinary in all of filmdom, but I resent that Wenders makes getting there a bit of a chore.

Which is why I chose to quote Schreck on this one...I realize it's a very subjective rendering - which is perhaps what makes Wenders so good at what he does. Seems like everyone gets a little bit different result with Paris, Texas. That it's such a simmering, emotional, gut punch of a finale, that the viewer's own history will color their consumption of it all.

Finally, the real reason I went ahead and watched the fox disc was to see if it was worth shelling out for the upgrade. I'm easily swayed, and a bit of a whore, so it's not like I need a lot of convincing, but this and Days of Heaven are in the "do I REALLY NEED to upgrade this?" category. I could probably go another decade without needing to watch this again, but I am salivating a bit at the idea of this in true 1080p glory - although I was immensely impressed with the fox disc upconverted. Any thoughts on this? is it revelatory or merely a nice upgrade? Did your eyes go all Bugs Bunny and fly out of your head when that dusty Texas vista hit the screen?

[Max von Mayerling]

My personal response is that where this film is strongest for me is in certain images. There's an early one where Stanton is wandering off against a landscape that I practically could not believe was real. That's what stuck with me after this last viewing. I actually don't think I'm forced to wait for the payoff - I think the thing blows its load in the first few minutes w/ the vistas. And that's what really shines in the Blu. So, if you like starin' at it (like I do - sometimes), then the upgrade is worth it.

EDIT - Sorry, I realized my post is probably useless - I don't have the SD, so I can't compare.

EDIT YET AGAIN - But it shore duz look bootyful.

[kaujot]

My eyes went Daffy Duck.

[aox]

Sat down and finally watched this tonight. I have some very mixed feelings about it.

The acting is top notch with the kid stealing every scene he is in. The film is shot incredibly as most have agreed. Wenders nails 1980s Texas (I grew up in Oklahoma, and I felt like I was home.) In opposition to most in this thread, I found the beginning scenes that meander to be the most interesting. The only part of the film that I found somewhat dull were the more domestic scenes in the middle of the film with Travis trying to get to know his son. A lot of this seemed very run-of-the-mill to me and unfortunately my attention waned as the film went on. The scenes in the bordello picked back up for me, but the monologues I think were too much; especially sandwiched together. His was riveting, and I was on the edge of my seat, but I quickly fell out of hers. It was at this point that the film really felt to me very distractingly that it was written by a playwright and not a screenwriter.

I have one weird complaint. And it is one that I thought I could never see myself ever making about a film like this: Sound mixing. And with that, I want to focus on the score. There has been some talk in this thread that the score is cheesy. I don't agree. I found it somewhat suitable given the subject matter. Maybe it is a bit overused, or lacks enough diversity to be used as much as it is. Perhaps Cooder should have written a few more pieces that differed slightly. I kept thinking about this and during the concluding scene I think it finally dawned on me what the problem was: the score was audibly too intrusive. This is a quiet film and the music itself is beautifully subtle, but every time it shows itself it it is glaringly blaring to the point of intrusion. I just wish it wasn't so loud in the mix. It's the kind of score that needs to weave in and out the back door, not pound on the front door and obnoxiously remind you that it is stopping by. I found it to be quite jarring. Weird complaint I am sure to many, but it really took me out of the film at times to the point where I was calling the music cues and clenching my teeth.

[Damien]

Wenders has interesting thoughts in his commentary about the way he would the movie if he had to shoot it once more. He has mixed feelings about the neverending dialogue between Kinski and Stanton at the end. However it is difficult to know if he thinks that his movie is too long or if the moviegoer's impatience is the real problem. Everything has to go fast these days. Well Paris, Texas won in Cannes, so history has not to be redone.

Another matter is the father abandoning his son because broken things cannot be repaired. Totally unbelievable regarding to the extraordinary bond between the two as the film goes by. Wenders had the idea of son and mother reunited right from the beginning and never considered to part from it. The "I love you more than my life" is over the top. The message left is just that small children need their mother more than anything, which is an ok idea if only slighty overdone. The Road has permitted to explore a new path about parenthood which is not just about heroic sense of sacrifice from fathers who know that ultimately they do not need to be there.

[Dragoon En Regalia]

Just watched this last night. I mentioned to my father that, though we had a non-CC release of Wings of Desire, we didn't have Paris, Texas. So he got this for both of us.

It's my first Wenders, and I loved it. The only big flaws I can think of is that there's one-too-many runaway scenes in the first half—not to mention how long the Super 8 footage was. Outside of that, though, the movie captures the American wasteland in such detail, and with such sincerity. I found it refreshing to watch a German director tackle the childish nature of Travis, and how his masculinity and inability to communicate with people formed his self-ruin. Ultimately, the film feels American, because it explains how the open frontier becomes a distraction and a hindrance to certain people.

Aside from the two flaws I mentioned, this was easily a **** of 5 for me. I'm not sure I can add much more to the conversation here, but Paris was a blind buy/watch for me, and it paid off.

[Niale]

Another matter is the father abandoning his son because broken things cannot be repaired. Totally unbelievable regarding to the extraordinary bond between the two as the film goes by.

What about the scene in the bar? He takes his son to the bar and he gets drunk. The son walks away from his father, leaving him to drink while saying something about, how he does not know why he drinks because it smells. That right there shows that travis can not be a father and that his son will turn from him. Wenders constantly seperates them in the film! Showing them walking home on different sides of the same street, the fact that they communicate mostly through walkie talkies, and given that travis leaves his son many times in the film. For example, he has his son scout for his mother alone, leaves him in the car when he goes into his wifes work, leaves him alone in the hotel, leaves him the message explaining his reasons for leaving... and leaves his child in the first place. I don't think they could ever be father and son. And he cant be with his wife either, They dont even really meet at the end of the film! and the fact that all we see of thier "family" is silent super 8mm footage, So maybe they never even "met" in the first place!

[matrixschmatrix]

It's been a while since I watched this, but it moved me pretty deeply when I did- my primary memories of the movie are about alienation, a man so alienated from himself that he relates to his own memories with a sort of third person distance. Stanton's bombed out performance strikes the note perfectly- he is a lovable man, one whom you want desperately to come back to himself, but you can feel whatever it is that happened in the lines of his face, and hear it in his voice. There's a desperate longing to return, too- but he can never get closer than the distance of a pane of glass to becoming a whole man again.

Of course he abandons the kid. It's inherent to the whole structure and purpose of the movie. It makes it something of a parable in some ways, makes it more symbolic and less specific, but I think that's the kind of material where Wenders' style works best- I never find him convincing as a storyteller about people in the real world, but I find his work wonderfully powerful when it's representing places and ideas by situating them in a man's face.

[oh yeah]

I just watched this for maybe the third time the other night, and indeed it remains deeply moving. In a way it's kind of like Antonioni's The Passenger in reverse, but much warmer, for lack of a better word, than that film is. Stanton's character, like Nicholson's in the earlier film, is such a vivid and harrowing depiction of a very specific kind of psychological state that hits close to home for me: namely, the desire to "start anew," to go somewhere "without language" as Travis says, to just cut off all ties with the increasingly burdensome human world and return to a state of innocence; one might say it's a desire to return to the womb, if not non-being itself. It's a very romantic, appealing notion -- but as these two films so devastatingly demonstrate, it's one that can only end in death or a kind of eternal existential malaise.

So even though Travis "does right" by reuniting his son with Jane, in the end it's an extremely melancholy film. I don't think he is much better off as he drives out of Houston to places unknown than he was at the beginning of the film. (This brings up another point: Travis didn't even want to embark on this journey in the first place. If he hadn't collapsed at the rickety saloon while in search of more water, Walt would've never been contacted and he might well have kept wandering in the desert for the rest of his life).

It's a film that leaves one a lot to ponder over, that is for sure.

[ezmbmh]

Watched the BD last night for first time, and was blown away by the landscapes’ filmic depth (more below).

I was lucky enough when I was young to see several of Sam Shepard’s plays in NY, most in tiny off-off Broadway theaters, unlucky enough not to have a clue about much of what he was doing. I found the emotions over the top, the dialogue stagey (fair enough, on stage) and prone to speechifying.

Things have changed since then and I’ve come to appreciate Shepard, and his work with Wenders, this film in particular, more and more. I fear overstating this but the hell with it. There’s a feeling I have about Shepard’s work that it hearkens back to the Greek mythic plays, based on savage family damage, wandering atonement, and an eloquence that, beautiful as it may be in itself, only underscores the loss and fractures that can’t be regained or fixed. Sure, it’s long (so’s Oedipus at Colonus), and I can’t argue forcibly with some of the criticisms posted. But Wenders seems to have an acute insight into the American dream of self-idealized ( i.e., -satisfied) destiny and how empty or ineffective it’s become (or always was).

Obvious references to Ford’s use of Monument Valley which I found also oddly moving. In Ford, for all of the assurance of the characters’ ambitions and history’s inevitable tide, the cliffs quietly look on, reducing human endeavors to scale. The way these similar hills are silent behind a newer hollowed-out vision of America,

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replaced later by the emptily beautiful repetitive movements of the airport, and the lurid lighting and faux intimacy of the sex rooms (where no one can see each other and when they might they need to turn their backs to be able to speak at all),

seems equally to display the degradation of our once Manifest view of ourselves, and it still being the stage where we try and fuck up and try again. The intact—sort of—family at the end here is nothing as grandly sweeping as “Let’s go home, Debby”, but the placid, if powerful assumption in the Ford that all will be fine once she’s back home among the white folk was always riddled. This may be where Debby ended up.

Anyway. Anyone else have a video problem in the two scenes with Kinski and Stanton in the sex parlor? Only lasted a minute or so, one time in each scene, a weird pulsing white over the entire screen. Don’t know if there’s technical term for it—just wonder if it’s my disc or eyes.

[mfunk9786]

Before he disappeared from this forum, in perhaps his only somewhat coherent post, Niale hit this one right on the spot - Wenders' handling of Travis and Hunter's father/son relationship is done astonishingly. There is no actual intimacy there, and Travis may as well be a ghost, appearing only to get Hunter's mother back into his life and floating back into the ether. The key line is early in the film, when Dean Stockwell's character (by the way, is there anything more unusual than a bland '80s suburban Dean Stockwell? I hardly recognized him), points out to Travis that four years, while not that long to the average adult, is half of Hunter's life. The length of time that Travis is apart from Jane and Hunter is only four years - for an adult, four years is often not enough to heal emotional wounds completely. One can feel the painful sting when Travis snaps in his first booth visit, so easily sliding back into his role as miserable (and miscreant) husband. Jane and Travis' meeting isn't one between two people who have moved on with their lives - they're both adrift, with their last memory of anything approaching stability being one another. They could have so naturally gone back to being in love, and hate - that fire is still burning. We can smell the singed, exposed flesh as Paris, Texas slowly snuffs itself out.

[LavaLamp]

I first saw Paris, Texas in a college film course about 20 years ago. What a sublime & moving experience; it was especially interesting how a German director could make such a quintisentially American film. Though there isn't much dialogue, the story is compelling & the landscapes are incredible. This is definitely my top Wenders film.

I recently watched the Criterion BD for the first time, and was floored - incredibly sharp picture, especially the open landscapes in the beginning. It was like seeing the film for the first time. The colors are amazing, as is the case with many great Blu-rays: Travis' red baseball hat really stands out as he trudges through the desert; NK's red sweater in the club/window scene is very vivid. Also, the green light in the empty parking lot is very pronounced (as Travis looks up at the hotel room window where Jane & Hunter are reunited).

I also liked how the film showed the diversity of the American landscapes: The wide open TX spaces/blue sky & the drive through the desolate tan Mojave desert; the urban, neon-lit landscape of L.A; the concrete canyons of Houston; the various paintings/graffiti on the buildings in L.A. & Houston.

The last scenes of Travis sadly driving away down the night highway while the Ry Cooder score played is one of favorite film endings of all time.

[miha]

Finally watched it because of the BD rot issue that affects this title. No rot so far, it seems. But the transfer was disappointing. Not bad by any means, but compared to current state of the art transfers from 4K or 2K scans it shows its age. The fine detail of current top transfers is not there, despite the camera negative as source. The effortless analogue film look is not there either. Instead it has the look of somewhat processed video, with ringing and sharpening halos visible. This is not the final transfer for home video, I'd say. There is quite some room for improvement. Since the Wenders oeuvre is currently digitally restored this title will get another scan, I hope. And a superior BD some time, preferably in 4K. Then they can also take care of the density pumping that is evident in several scenes (including Kinski's monologue). Probably baked into the negative.

[lacritfan]

Wasn't sure where to post this. If you're in Southern California Saturday 4/25 Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski are supposed to be at one of those celebrity conventions.
Link.
Not sure how it works, if they're gonna be there a while to sign discs, etc. but thinking of taking a chance and going.