Product Details

• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Mti Home Video
• VHS Release Date: August 24, 2004
• Run Time: 108 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B0002F6BBK
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #647,009 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 'Ulysses' on Film well done. As good as the DVD, August 31, 2004

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bloom [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This independent, low budget movie `Bloom', produced, directed, and photographed in Dublin by Sean Walsh is based on the James Joyce's story of Leopold Bloom's walk around Dublin one day, loosely recreating the 10 year voyage of Odysseus following the sack of Troy, as told in the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Translating Joyce's novel `Ulysses' into a viewable movie is a task which may make Peter Jackson's enormously successful task of translating `Lord of the Rings' to the screen seem like a walk in the park. Where Tolkien's story is almost all action, Joyce's novel is chocked full of word play, literary allusions, obscure jokes, and introspection. For starters, one has to work very hard to line up the events of the `Odyssey' with `Ulysses'. Bloom's wife, Molly, the replacement for Odysseus' Penelope is visited by potential suitors, but they are certainly not unwelcome. Telemachus, Odysseus' son is `played' by the son of a friend of Bloom whose mother has just died. Bloom has a daughter who plays a very small part in the story and he had a son who died in childbirth, on whose birthday Bloom's Odyssey takes place.

The relation between Bloom and allegorical son, Stephen Daedalus, is complicated further by the fact that Bloom is Jewish and Daedalus is very Roman Catholic. In fact, the `Odyssey' metaphor is overlaid by a second classic image, that of the wandering Jew which do Daedalus and his chum, Mulligan, specifically evoke when their paths cross in the library. A third common theme attached to Daedalus is a connection to Hamlet, on which Daedalus has contrived a theory about Hamlet, the ghost, and Shakespeare's lineage.

Upon watching this movie treatment of the famous novel, one can wonder why it has such a great reputation for being largely unread, as there seem to be as many references to fornication, sexual submission and domination, self gratification, and excretion than you are likely to find in 9 out of 10 R rated movies on the market today. Bloom's fascination with buttocks is especially well satiated here and there throughout the movie in scenes of both actual occurrences and plays of Bloom's imaginings. Some of the more extreme sexual images are also shown in imagined or dreamed scenes. The director seems to have wanted to have his audience remember the book's salacious reputation in the opening teaser scene in which Molly has an encounter with her gentleman friend. I suspect the scenes which originally banned the publication of the book in the United States are so overlaid with oblique language that the intellectual effort necessary to pry the erotic content out of the narrative and dialogue was not worth the effort, let alone the great number of pages of Greek and Shakespearean lore you had to plough through to get to `the good stuff'. Writer / director Walsh has done the job of highlighting all the good parts and has brought them to the foreground with explicit business replacing description. Not that the erotic scenes are as blatantly graphic as most, but they are distinctly uninhibited while being realistic to post-Victorian modesty even during the act of coitus.

Another theme in the story is a fascination with excretion. With Bloom it is with defecation and with Daedalus, it is with urination. What may seem unusual to Americans when Daedalus pisses twice in unhidden locations is perfectly normal to Europeans, as I discovered when I was in Europe, and saw an almost total acceptance of urination in semi-public locations.

The overall effect of the movie is not unlike seeing a Fellini film, except that most of the references to arcane Greek, Catholic, Shakespearean, and Judaic objects, words, and events are likely to be more familiar to the educated English speaker than is the English translation of Fellini's Italian. In fact, this movie provides a pleasure which is truly rare in cinema, that of detecting and tying together spoken and visual images. One subtle recurring theme is the appearance of piers and bridges, opened in Daedalus' classroom when one of his students makes an inadvertent play on words between the Greek name Pyrrus and the English word `piers' which Daedalus extrapolates to mean incomplete bridges. This pleasure is not as arcane as you may think, as it was even done by director Clint Eastwood when he puts the names of mentor directors Don Siegal and Sergio Leone on tombstones in the cemetery seen as Eastwood rides into town in the opening scene.

Unlike a lot of other movies on both VHS and DVD, you will not miss much by seeing only the VHS, as the DVD features do little to increase your understanding of the movie.

The acting is uniformly excellent. For a low budget independent movie, the production values are also excellent, as almost all the scenes they needed were there in Dublin for the taking.

If your only interest is in spicy scenes, you will probably be disappointed. On the other hand, Sean Walsh has done an excellent job of bringing the sense and the spirit of Joyce's work to the screen. If it convinces a few people to tackle the job of reading the book, it will have done literacy a great service.

Highly recommended for those with a taste for literate stories. Ezra Pound said art is achieved by packing the most meaning into the fewest words. The corollary to this is that appreciating this art requires a lot of thought to unravel the package.