Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Yikes !! Have we been HAD ??
First, the good news: Koyaanisqatsi is finally available commercially in DVD format.Next, the bad news: The film image has been CROPPED! "Enhanced", if you will, for widescreen TVs. The disc's case says, "16:9 WIDESCREEN 1.85:1 -- Theatrical release format." Bull ! I've seen Koyaanisqatsi in the theater and was immediately struck by the fact it was being projected in the standard 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio--not widescreen ! I'm no fan of pan-and-scan hatchet-jobs on widescreen films, but neither am I a fan of this equally reprehensible practice of cutting away significant portions of a film's top and bottom just so it will fit comfortably on somebody's new [expensive]16:9 50" plasma wall-set. Just as P&S deprives us of frequently vital side information, here we are deprived of the beauty of Ron Fricke's *full-screen* images. And, man, do things look cramped up there. Do I dare lay the blame on MGM, rather than on the Institute for Regional Education, which owns the film ? In any event, it's a pity, a real pity ! And a shame ! The other bad news is that the 5.1 soundtrack on this new disc is muffled, dull and lacking in definition and depth when compared to the privately-issued disc the IRE made available some time ago. Surround effects that were so obvious in the theater are nowhere to be heard here. I don't know if the IRE is still making their offer, now that this new MGM disc is in stores; but if you're a true Koyaanisqatsi devotee, and can ante up the money for a donation, my advice to you is to give it some *serious* consideration. It's absolutely worth it ! I'd really hoped this new release would be a dream-come-true, but now having viewed it, the only satisfaction I take is that I still have my private copy of the IRE disc...
Rating:  - An incredible film that NEEDS TO BE IN PRINT!
Many years ago I passed up the chance to purchase a copy of KOYAANISQATSI. No money now, I can get it later...well, so I thought. Although seeing this film on video is a far cry from seeing it on the big screen, it is still an extraordinarily powerful and visionary piece of filmmaking. That this marvelous film is not "in print" is in my estimation a crime almost worthy of impeachment. Whoever holds the rights to this motion picture owes it to the viewing public to re-release it. It is too important a film to be kept in the cannister any longer. And now would be the time, with the newly released re-recording of the eerily effective Philip Glass soundtrack. Seeing this movie for the first time fourteen years ago was for me, as a previous reviewer named it, truly "an experience"--one that essentially transcended the very medium it was produced on. My must also express my long overdue thanks and gratitude to Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke, Philip Glass, and to producer Francis Ford Coppola. And to anyone who hasn't seen it, watch it if you have the chance. It is an unforgettable film experience.
Rating: - A Love Letter to Skyscrapers
Koyaanisqatsi opens with stately, wide-angle shots of mesa fields and clouds. The world they depict is vast, uninhabited, almost unearthly. This continues for about a quarter of the movie's length, lulling you into a pastoral reverie. Then suddenly the Philip Glass score becomes more insistent and earthmovers loom up from out of nowhere. Man has arrived, and he's up to no good. What began as ode to unspoiled nature becomes eerie urban dystopia, a montage of slums, factories, and city streets through which hordes of people scuttle in speeded-up motion. (Is "koyaanisqatsi" also the Hopi word for "time-lapse photography"?) In the final sequence a rocket roars off the launch pad only to explode in mid-air, and the camera follows a burning engine as it tumbles Icarus-like back to earth. Then, just in case we've somehow missed the point, the title of the film appears on a black background along with its translation: "a way of life that calls for another way of living".The great thing is, it's entirely possible to miss the point. Director Godfrey Reggio is too inspired a cinematographer for his own good. The sumptuousness of his images keeps undercutting the film's ham-fisted man-as-spoiler message and replacing it with something subtler and more humane. Though the opening landscape shots are beautiful in a National Geographic sort of way, the movie only gets going after it moves into the city. The most distinctive part of Koyaanisqatsi is its time-lapse footage of man-made environments: images of headlights racing down freeways, office building windows blinking on and off, and crowds streaming through Grand Central Station. In the last of these, it seems that all this speed is supposed to be dehumanizing, to make people look like insects, but instead the bustle is jittery and comic, like an old silent film. Crowds that might have been anonymous if filmed at normal speed become individuated as your eye is drawn around, frantically making note of all the faces, gaits, and endearingly bad late-seventies hairstyles. You're literally people watching, and the effect is a humanist one, warm and oddly touching. There's a similar happy misstep in the depiction of technology. Roughly speaking, progress is this bad guy in Reggio's world, with the role of progress played by cities. (As opposed to pristine mesa fields and cloudscapes.) Unfortunately for Reggio, urban settings are stubbornly cinematic. Try to make a beautiful movie about an ugly city and you'll end up making your city look beautiful. (Blade Runner and Metropolis had the same problem.) Though Koyaanisqatsi's official position is a sort of anti-technological moralism, Reggio (like so many moralizers) ends up making the thing he condemns more compelling than the thing he praises. Sprawl has never looked so appealing. Even a side trip into a processed cheese factory is less a swipe at consumer society than a welcome bit of comic relief. Reggio's cityscapes are so strange and vibrant that it seems worth paving over a little nature to have built them. Koyaanisqatsi may have been conceived as an ecological warning, but it ends up being a love letter to skyscrapers.
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