cynthiahost This movie is a very exotic and beautiful film, from the master film maker Pasolini,I kiss his feet. He's better than Orson Wells.Shot in the beautiful locales of Yemen,Nepal,Africa and Iran.Beautiful? A big poverty stricken region!filled with unemployment.Pier saved the day when he came to that country.This film has a lot of nudity,especially the emphasis of the male body as well as the female body.It also has some less explicit simulated sex.like the yoga position sex act scene between Aziz ,played by Ninetto Davoli and Budur,played by Luigina Rocchi.There's a mild gay story in it too.When an Ethiopian king is peeping ,from the bushes, a naked women cleaning herself,until she catches him,he later ask his gay poet to write a poem about it.Later on this old fart of a poet pick up three hot young Ethiopian black studs,with 1974 Afros.They end up having a suggested four way.Although the 3rd remake in 1978 and it's sequel in 1986 had real sex in it,this story is very complex.What should I say? The blond blue eyed Christian ,stolen Nur Ed Din, played by Franco Merli, slave Zumurud,played Ines Pellegrini.Now as he's searching for her .This is when some of the stories are told.Like when one of the prince's survives a gang attack in the desert and he gets rescued by a man who offers him his home,He,the prince eventually meets this women who is in hostage by this man ,who plays a demon,played by Franco Citti.Once he finds out about the two lovers,he chops the women and send the prince to a desert and the demon turns him into monkey.Until some one rescue him ,the monkey and the kings daughter turns the prince back into human.But he turns the kings jobs down chooses to be a truth seeker.The kings son want to take a trip on his father ship.He does and a curse hits the ship causing a wreck.He end sup on a island and discover a 15 year old boy who live their.They both like each other Platonic level ,but,the second prince ends up being put under a hypnotic spell and stabs the boy to death while the boys a sleep.the father rescues the prince but he too become a truth seeker.The Cinema photography is great.The movie was shot silent and the dialog and sound effects were looped in.This movie was as good As Piers version of Canterbury tales.which I saw at the Forrest hill 4theater in 1980 04/12/13

Falconeer Resembling something out of an obscure dream, the characters from the ancient tales of the 1,001 Nights come to life in a dizzying spectacle of natural beauty, natural light, and the most breathtaking landscapes ever committed to film. Sumptously filmed throughout the exotic locales of Yemen, Ethiopia,Iran, and as far as Nepal, we are introduced to the story's hero, the sweet and innocent Nur Ed Din, played by the exotically beautiful Franco Merli, (Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.) While in the marketplace, Nur Ed Din encounters the enchanting Zumurrud, a feisty slave girl, being sold at auction. The girl has a spirit of her own and is given permission to choose who her next master shall be. Turning down generous offers from rich old men, she instead selects the young shepherd boy, Nur Ed Din, who is delighted to bring his new slave back to his home. He has not one dinar, but this matters not to Zumurud, who shows the boy the mysteries of eroticism. Of course Zumurud is stolen away after he ignores a prophetic warning from his slave, not to do business with a blue-eyed Christian. A greatly heart-broken Nur Ed Din embarks on an adventure to find his lost love, and this adventure is the centerpiece of this enormous, sweeping film. During his travels he meets many people, who all have their own tales to tell, thus taking the boy on still further adventures, where he encounters genies, giants, Princes, and heart-broken men in search of their lost loves. There are sequences in this film that are so beautiful that they induce chills, such as when Zumurud comes upon the kingdom in the desert, and is greeted by a brigade who name her 'King' of their castle, thinking that she is a man. Or when Nur Ed Din encounters the lion in the desert, and is led by the beast to an enchanted city where his beloved awaits. Featuring a minimal but beautiful score from Ennio Morricone, the predominant sounds are the desert winds, and innocent laughter of children. Rather than employ professional actors, Pasolini wisely uses locals, many who possess the most natural and innocent kind of beauty imaginable. Natural performers who can hardly resist giggling shyly when doing a nude scene. This is a world where sex is portrayed completely without Western guilt, and Pasolini even veers away from the rigid sexual codes of Islam, to bring these magic tales to life, suggesting perhaps that these tales are older even than religion itself. Erotic scenes that come across as playful, some even featuring erect penises, (a rarity in mainstream cinema,) and yet it all still comes off as strangely innocent and utterly pure. If the fantastic tales don't dazzle the viewer, than certainly the cinematography and the beautiful, lush costumes will surely boggle the mind. This is what cinema is really about; a creation of a fantasy world so real, and glorious enough to take one out of reality, and on a great adventure. This must truly have been something to behold on the big screen. "Arabian Nights" was the final film of Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life" collection. A year later he would embark on the first film of his "Trilogy of Death" series. He would not live to see the final editing of his "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom," a film considered by some to be the most offensive and controversial film of all time. Some say that he was murdered because of the contents of that film. But see "Arabian Nights," a true celebration of life and the human spirit.

rbverhoef 'Il Fiore delle mille e una notte', or 'Arabian Nights', is Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film from his "trilogy of life" and his second to last film in general. His last of course is 'Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom', the controversial first film from his "trilogy of death".With 'Arabian Nights' Pasolini combines a couple of stories from the book 'A Thousand and One Nights' into one story, although the film itself still feels very episodic. All parts of the story deal with love, or actually I should say lust, ending in sex. Especially the penis gets enough screen time here, it might as well be the leading character. The sex scenes themselves are, in my opinion, not very sensual or erotic (although they admittedly are when you compare them to such scenes in any other Pasolini film) which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes exactly that when more than half the movie exists out of them.On the other hand the film is pretty entertaining, mostly for its oddness. That again, is something we see in almost any other Pasolini film. His distant approach adds to that feeling, especially when he shows violent images. One might not expect them in a film that arguably celebrates love and sex. Another factor for the oddness is the terrible acting, especially from the men. Maybe good acting is impossible for them here since Pasolini presents them as a bunch of whiners who would do anything for love. Of course, once again, with love I mean sex. The Italian language in the Eastern setting is another thing that feels pretty weird as well. All these elements add to the oddness which makes the film more entertaining than it probably should have been.I have to conclude with saying that I sort of admire Pasolini. I think only his 'Il vangelo secundo Matteo' can be considered as a truly great film, mostly since his approach is the distant one. I think that is a good thing when it comes to a religious film like that. that approach in his other films is not always the right one, but it is one aspect of why his films are different, often daring. Even when not much is happening, or when we have no clue what is happening, or when we normally would not care that much, Pasolini keeps it kind of interesting.

tedg Pasolini is a wonderful, wonderful adventure. Welcoming him into your heart is not without cost; he's a friend who is brilliant on one side and captive to banality on the other.The bad? Well, its tolerable for me because it is so flamboyantly obvious. The man has a triple curse: he is outrageously gay, he is insufferably Italian and (perhaps because of these two) he has excessively simpleminded storytelling skills. The stories here in their individual content have juvenile dynamics. The way the emotions are handled is comically simpleminded.That's in the nature of the stories of course, but our man here takes them seriously, so overlain on this is his own sexual nature. These stories are, some of them, erotic in nature and all of them have desire as the driver. Among the various stories, he's chosen these and that's fine enough. The original stories were distributed in places all over the Islamic world, a huge reach, but all of them which included sex joked about the dissonance between Islmac attitudes towards sex and the actual lives of folks within.But its rather interesting actually watching how his own predilections enter the story. Most of the men here are slaves to their own desires. But those desires are all — in the stories — skipping over the most superficial of erotic notions. A teenage boy awakes and finds an unconscious teenage girl next to him. He has sex with her. This is equated to "falling in love." It happens over and over and if you encounter these stories in text, its part of the fun.But see how Pasolini himself enters the story in how he chooses to portray the erotic content. Nudity and youth stand for the erotic, especially the nude boy. When sex is depicted (less than you would expect from the stories) its amazing wooden, mannikins. I suppose if you made some still images of parts of this it would be erotic, but repeatedly seeing the male member of a cartoon tells me that director has the same foibles as the characters we see.The Good? Well there's more than enough of that to make up for the sexual inadequacies of that part of the world.There's the absolute beauty of the thing cinematically. It isn't fully cinematic in motion, since Pasolini has no notion of how things flow, what the rhythms of things are. But each shot is fulfilling and some are absolutely breathtaking. He doesn't have any static tableaux like the striking ones in "Matthew," but the visual elegance is erotic in itself. Its a sort of continuous penis shot of life, and you'll find the beauty of the places erotic in their own ways, And then there's the way the stories are crafted.Yes they are cartoonish. Yes, they have execrable pacing, almost as if they were found objects and put in inappropriate boxes. But the way they are tied one to another is nothing short of brilliant. If we had none of the beauty, and none of the amusement of watching an Italian fop struggle on screen, we'd still have this. And its great.There isn't any one mechanism that links the stories; there may be a dozen. There isn't any sense to about half of them, and that's part of the miracle. Sometimes they are inside one another, but sometimes they walk through each other. Sometimes it is the same place of extras. Sometimes a repeated situation; "don't eat from that plate." Sometimes it is simply a segue that has no narrative connection at all but just seems nested or siblinged in some way. Its "Sarogossa Manuscript" with fun and beauty.I must say that one story really is perfect. It alone has two really beautiful women acting erotically. It has expert pacing. It is funny: laugh out loud funny. And it has a punishment that is one of the most arresting images you'll see — if you are a guy. Plus it has a framing story that makes me think it was the first one adapted and filmed.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.