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Just perfect...

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Absolutely Brilliant!

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A year ago, I decided to watch Ken Russell's Lisztomania with Dominika because we wanted to see a movie that was so incredibly bad and idiotic that it was funny. Lisztomania - which presents the life of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt as a farce - sometimes works on that level, but more often than not it's an embarrassment and a disgrace to filmmaking. The problem is not with the actors, but with the screenplay. One scene has Franz Liszt (played by the charismatic Richard Daltry from the Who) visiting a duchess and coming on the receiving porcelain bottoms breaking wind. Yes, you heard that right. Then the duchess has a bunch of women encourage the erection of Liszt's phallus to an unrealistic size so that it can be guillotined. In another scene, Richard Wagner armed with an electric guitar starts his own Nazi party with a bunch of loyal schools who throw grenades everywhere. I showed a youtube clip of Wagner telling these school girls, "I am his prophet. She is his handmaiden... Through her you will perform the ritual. Through me you will serve the superman. You will be the master race." The girls reply, "We will be the master race" as if they were in some distasteful production of an elementary school play. Then they all do the Nazi salute and walk off. When I showed this clip to my friend who lives in Saudi Arabia, her rejection was perfect: "wtf!" Then there is that unbelievable scene at the end where Liszt flies a space ship that fires laser beams to kill Wagner who now looks a lot like Hitler. The big mystery is that given how bad these scenes and others like them look on paper, what made Ken Russell think that "Lisztomania" was a film-able concept? I honestly have no idea.

Pure escapism! This film is fantastic. It contains farce, humour, nudity and crudity along with lots of laughs and many cringes. It's ludicrous, hilarious and colourful with great music and costumes. I like the music and also the paradox of some of the scenes. My daughter and I love it, and happy to watch it time and time again, but everyone we've loaned the video to can't get past the first 20 minutes, and think we are weird, so maybe we are off-the-wall like the film. I haven't seen the film Tommy and would like to do so now I've seen this. Don't watch Lisztomania if you are easily offended. Sit back, relax, take it all with a pinch of salt and you'll be grinning all night.

Ken Russell has great fun presenting distant times in modern terms.Were the great composers more like characters out of Merchant / Ivory films, or more like Tom Hulce's Mozart in "Amadeus." Ken Russell would suggest the latter. A costume drama with big name rockers as famous composers, and barely pubescent fan-girls throwing themselves at their feet. What's not love? Who can know how true it all is? It is great fun to see Roger Daltry of the Who tickling the Ivories playing Liszt tunes, while the teenage girls swoon.Regardless, you may someday see this film on DVD, a rare situation in 2005 for all Ken Russel films.

This film is brilliant! Casting Roger Daltry (a rock star of his day) as Franz Liszt (a rock star of HIS day) was a master stroke (though Russell seemed to always like working with the same people again and again and he had done Tommy with Daltry). Ringo star in a cameo as the Pope was a crack-up and Wagner as a vampire stealing themes from Liszt was a trip as well. There is a wonderful "silent movie" section with Daltry doing a Chaplinesque sequence which covers several years in Switzerland and incredible sequences of him as a performer dazzling teeny-bopper girls in crinolines and bonnets--all screaming and swooning to whatever he plays. The piece-de-resistance is the sequence at the end with Liszt in a rocket ship "powered" by several former loves swooping down to destroy a Naziesque Wagnerian Frankenstein Monster who is laying waste to the world with an electric guitar/tommy-gun. This film is so over-the-top I had to have a copy for my collection!