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Paris, Texas

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German New Wave pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the efforts of the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape of its own) to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:

* New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Wim Wenders, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
* Audio commentary featuring Wenders
* Interview with Wenders by German journalist Roger Willemsen
* Excerpts from the 1990 film Motion and Emotion: The Road to “Paris, Texas,” featuring interviews with Wenders, actors Harry Dean Stanton, Hanns Zischler, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Falk, composer Ry Cooder, cinematographer Robby Müller, novelist Patricia Highsmith, and filmmaker Samuel Fuller
* New interviews with filmmakers Allison Anders and Claire Denis
* Cinéma cinémas: “Wim Wenders Hollywood April ’84,” with Wenders and Cooder working on the score
* Deleted scenes and Super 8 home movies
* Gallery of Wenders’s location-scouting photos, from his book Written in the West
* Behind-the-scenes photos by Robin Holland
* Theatrical trailer
* PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Nick Roddick and interviews with Stanton, writer Sam Shepard, and actors Nastassja Kinski and Dean Stockwell

ALSO AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY

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Sold.

This is far from my favourite Wenders, and I was quite happy with the existing (cheap!) disc, but they certainly seem to have done this right. Nice work.

I didn't want to put in any poo-pooing for what essentially was a nice save of a month for CC... but yeah, I'm not the most frequent visitor to the land of Wendersia. Nice treatment though.

HerrSchreck wrote:I didn't want to put in any poo-pooing for what essentially was a nice save of a month for CC... but yeah, I'm not the most frequent visitor to the land of Wendersia. Nice treatment though.

Not a fan of this movie, Schreck?

It's not my favorite Wenders, but as I said earlier today in another thread, it certainly features two of the best monologues in film history back to back

domino harvey wrote:It's not my favorite Wenders, but as I said earlier today in another thread, it certainly features two of the best monologues in film history back to back

While it does have a few unnecessarily long stretches...those monologues are so emotional. The sadness expressed in those are devastating.

The only Wenders I've seen is Land of Plenty, so I'm a bit cautious.

david hare wrote:What are the beefs with this?

I'm a major fan, but I do admit that it is too long, especially after a first viewing. In particular the first half meanders and could definitely use a little tightening. This is quite surprising considering that Wenders says in the commentary that it was this half that was scripted, while the second was improvised.

Regardless, I still love the movie to death, and when I first saw it I was certain it was the best film I had ever seen. It jelled completely with my sensibility and many of my idiosyncratic tastes. What moves me about the film is how unabashedly it roots itself in a tradition of American art, extending back to the colonial era and represented best by figures like Walt Whitman and Winslow Homer. Wenders approaches his story with the kind of Yankee sincerity that you see in those two great artists, and in so doing, I feel a true sense of renewal, as though he were breathing new life into traditions that Americans today are largely ignorant of. The film achieves this best with Robbie Müller's monumentalizing of the Western American landscape, rural and urban.

That said, I can easily see how many would dislike it and find much of the movie--the slide guitar score, the pickup truck, etc.--to be total cheese.

How on Earth could anyone find slide guitar cheesy?

kaujot wrote:How on Earth could anyone find slide guitar cheesy?

Maybe I'm just burdened with a family with bad musical taste because when I showed them Paris, Texas my cousins bitched about the score, one going as far as to rant about what an overrated hack Ry Cooder is.

I have to sell my newly bought Axiom release, if the blu-rays are as good as the previous Criterion ones.

david hare wrote:Honey, divorce your fucking family.

I'm with David on this one.

kaujot wrote:

david hare wrote:Honey, divorce your fucking family.

I'm with David on this one.

Tell me about it. I know I posted this a while back in the thread about date movie disasters and other bad viewings, but my family's reaction to this movie was that it was "too beautiful" and featured characters who were "too articulate," the latter criticism of course referring to the monologues that Domino and others have praised. It was after this that I adopted the terribly cynical position that I would never show any classic or art house film to friends or family again.

david hare wrote:What are the beefs with this? I like it at least as much as American Friend and more than everything after Wings of Desire.

It rightly belongs on a permanently screening double bill, in a "private" booth with One from the Heart

It's been years since I watched it, so in order to be fair I pulled it out for a spin. I am just not the biggest fan of Wings of Desire, which after all the hoo-hah for that movie pretty much killed Wenderism for me at a young age. But Paris T is quite a different movie so I'm giving it a whirl today. Haven't seen it practically since it came out, when I was quite a younger man.

Highway 61 wrote:It was after this that I adopted the terribly cynical position that I would never show any classic or art house film to friends or family again.

I adopted this policy a long time ago.

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

Spoiler

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.

I have only seen the two Wenders that Criterion is releasing, but I consider this to be a slow-burning masterpiece. There's so much love, frailty, and sadness imbued in these characters. They come from a past that was no doubt violent and frantic, but at this point in their lives, there is a certain calm and innocence about them that frankly, upon first viewing, I found a little difficult to engage with. But by the time you get to the much praised ending, the film has just slowly bowled you over, and you're left with a wide open glance at the goodness inside the hearts of the best of us. The other hugely impressive thing about this film is its gorgeously saturated color palette, which I can't wait to see done justice in Blu!

+1. I'm very happy this title is being released on Blu.

The Fox disc I got for $5 has one of the most beautiful SD transfer's I'd ever seen. The colors were just amazing to see, and hard to believe that it was "an 80's movie".

Ya, never got to sell this off along with Wings Of Desire, but until reviews come around, I'll see about upgrading (aka doubledipping)

manicsounds wrote:The colors were just amazing to see, and hard to believe that it was "an 80's movie".

Yes! All those lovely unfiltered green fluorescents had me utterly convinced it had to have been made in the 90s.
Greatest remake of The Searchers of all time (with no disrespect meant towards Taxi Driver).
(And I don't mean the above as faint praise. Paris, Texas is probably my favorite American film of the 80s.)

Murdoch wrote: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

Spoiler

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.

There's a similar slowness in many other Wenders films, too, but I can see what you mean about a very conspicuous self-assuredness here; I love "Paris, Texas", but it seems that Wenders himself was so enamoured of his own images that he very much stretches the limits of what is possible in order to keep the film functioning. And he succeeds, but only because the acting and the script are pitch-perfect. I have the feeling that this self-assuredness even grew after the success of this film and of "Wings of Desire", and that after these two films he somehow believed he could pull off anything in terms of narrative and especially of 'message'. He oversteps the limits already with "Until the end of the world", which even in the much better paced director's cut tends to grind in its construction and its hold on the viewer, not to speak of the incoherent messes that "The End of Violence" and especially "Palermo Shooting" are. Wenders too often is over-ambitious and seems to succeed best when he for once settles for 'small films' like "Lisbon Story"; but when he tries to tackle the 'big questions', he is able to fail miserably. "Paris, Texas", however, is perhaps the ideal middle ground: the film, despite of its length and the gorgeous land- and cityscapes, still feels private and intimate enough to be believable and directly touching. Perhaps, as many seem to think, it's really his best film.

You know, I can kind of identify with the complaints about the first part of the movie, but honestly, you could replace the first hour and a half with the entirety of Cannonball Run, and this would still be a masterpiece.

Tommaso wrote:There's a similar slowness in many other Wenders films, too, but I can see what you mean about a very conspicuous self-assuredness here; I love "Paris, Texas", but it seems that Wenders himself was so enamoured of his own images that he very much stretches the limits of what is possible in order to keep the film functioning. And he succeeds, but only because the acting and the script are pitch-perfect. I have the feeling that this self-assuredness even grew after the success of this film and of "Wings of Desire", and that after these two films he somehow believed he could pull off anything in terms of narrative and especially of 'message'. He oversteps the limits already with "Until the end of the world", which even in the much better paced director's cut tends to grind in its construction and its hold on the viewer, not to speak of the incoherent messes that "The End of Violence" and especially "Palermo Shooting" are. Wenders too often is over-ambitious and seems to succeed best when he for once settles for 'small films' like "Lisbon Story"; but when he tries to tackle the 'big questions', he is able to fail miserably. "Paris, Texas", however, is perhaps the ideal middle ground: the film, despite of its length and the gorgeous land- and cityscapes, still feels private and intimate enough to be believable and directly touching. Perhaps, as many seem to think, it's really his best film.

As someone who's never seen any post-Wings Wenders, I'm curious, is there anything worthwhile in the subsequent two decades of his work? I've consciously avoided his films from this time because I love everything he did before so much, and I don't want to ruin my appreciation of him. Normally, I enjoy seeking out the lesser-valued films of great directors to see if there's anything to be rediscovered, but with Wenders it seems as if there's a universal consensus that everything he's done after Wings is not just mediocre, but laughably inferior to his early films.

Very few people agree with me, but Land of Plenty really is a masterpiece. Don't Come Knocking is flawed but has a lot to like. The five hour version of Until the End of the World is an interesting failure and Faraway, So Close! is an uninteresting one.