Watch Just Imagine For Free

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I want Fox to do what they can to make a good restoration to the print of this film, clean up the sound, and release it on DVD so I can buy it and watch it whenever I want to.This movie is incredibly bad, but it is just oh-so entertaining to watch.It was shown on TV Ontario as part of a 'guilty pleasures' theme in 1980. It is the kind of movie you're not supposed to like but I liked it anyway. I would like to see it again. I would like to be able to show it to people who haven't seen it yet.I mentioned to another person that I would like to see this out on DVD. He said, "If that happens then only you and I will have copies of it." I think how well a DVD of this would sell would depend to a very large extent on how it was promoted.

the sad thing is that the odds of seeing JUST iMAGiNE with a respectful or interested audience are pretty much nil. with the theater 80 gone and such movies being relegated to the now-moribund series that the MET used to run, you're left with the filM FORUm - not exactly a ideal venue for anything let alone a movie like JUST ImagiNe that begs to be seen as a camp monstrosity and nothing more. tHE respect or ability to take yourself back to that time is never in over-supply in any audience and the one i saw JUSTi with was quite under-endowed with: respect, intelligence, tolerance, or just a willingness to keep their mouths shut. oddly, the two biggest creeps in the audience had SEEN THE MOVIE BEFORE. IE they knew exactly what they had come for and seem to have come just to laugh. just to make fools of those who had made the movie but i thiNk just made fools of themselves.+sigh+ buT JUST iM is a mixed bag, to say the least, so maybe they had the right idea. come, howl hysterically at the bad props, bad design and esp EL BRENDl, probably correctly described by film forum's program notes as 'CINEMA HISTORY'S MOST IRRITATING COMEDIAN.' i don't know what to say. the scene of the airliner pegasus over future new YORK is among the most glorious ever in an American moviE, THE MARTIAN SCENES ARE AMONG THE WORST. which is the real movie...> - i doubt audiences in l930 knew; let alone creeps with money to waste now. model work for the future megalopolis is astonishing, off-the=scale; and an extremely clear predecessor for CORUSCANT, among other locales. a lot of the rest of the film is dreadful. what to say, what to say...well: the joke about henry FORD is priceless - almost worth the price of admission alone.

"Just Imagine," which I didn't know existed until I caught it this morning, is a strange bird: it anticipates hand driers and "incubator babies," but not zip codes or computer navigation. There don't seem to be any minorities in 1980, either. Oddly enough, it correctly predicts people will still be using pens and fly swatters!It not only takes jabs at anti-Semitism, but at Margaret Sanger's Eugenics movement, which probably inspired the Nazis' Final Solution. For reasons not explained, the government decides who marries whom based on "distinction." LN-18 has been "betrothed" to MT-3, a jerk whose only "distinction" is he runs the paper his father left him. LN-18 loves J-21, who has nothing going for him other than he's a nice guy. His roomie RT-42 loves LN-18's best friend, D-6 (Marjorie White, who nearly steals the show). RT-42 advises J-21 to forget about LN-18, but he is determined to do something to prove he is "distinguished" enough to marry her. A flunky for inventor Z-4 seeks J-21 out for a project guaranteed to blow Paper Boy out of the water: the first trip to Mars! Meanwhile, for reasons also unexplained, scientists have revived a man who died 50 years earlier. In a great jab at how scientific endeavors are often nothing more than exercises in megalomaniacal callousness, once brought back, he is promptly tossed aside like a piece of garbage. J-21 and RT-42 befriend Single O, and he gets blasted on the booze pills they give him!If Roberto Benigni and Fanny Brice mated, they would've had El Brendel. He has Brice's sweetness and Benigni's charm without the self-serving phoniness. You should be offended by a gay joke he cracks at Loko's expense, but he diffuses it with a goofy sincerity. He also had great physicality. Watching him get manhandled by Boko (who can't stop conking him over the head), then dispatching with a Vulcan Grip was a riot!If Ed Wood had a budget, he would have made "Just Imagine." The Mars sequence is a hoot! The natives dress in Caveman-Buck Rogers, worship a bugged-out idol, and dance like Martha Graham on crack! Who knew it took only 2 hours to fly from Earth to the Red Planet? Must be seen to be believed!

Only the truly stupendous art direction of this film saved it from a rating of "1." David Butler directed what was probably supposed to be a star vehicle for El (short for Elmer) Brendel, a long time vaudevillian, but which was more of a testament to the art deco style and the endless quest to imagine a long-distant future. Made in 1930, looking briefly back to 1880, the film pictures a 1980 in which cars have been replaced by personal planes, food and alcohol have been reduced to pill form, babies are purchased from a machine, and the marriage tribunal acts as matchmaker. The clothes are mostly skimpy or see-through for the women and odd lapel-less suits with side buttons for the men (actually not so inappropriate for 1980--they looked like something out of a Human League video).People no longer have names, but rather are identified with a combination of letters and numbers which sounds suspiciously like names (J, RT, LN, D, etc.) In two of the exceptions to this trend, the villain is MT (empty?) and the heroine's father is AK. (Given the poke at Henry Ford's anti-semitism, practically the only funny moment in the film, I couldn't help wonder if AK represented the common abbreviation for the Yiddish expression "alte kake," or "old fart.") The plot, if one can call it that, revolves around the star-crossed love of J and LN, facilitated by Brendel and capped by a phenomenal trip to Mars (take that, Mr. Bush). There we learn that as early as 1930, the tradition of women in space wearing skimpy clothing already was in place.There's no real plot, and not a lot of humor, and the songs aren't even that good. (Better DeSylva, Henderson, and Brown numbers can be heard in their biopic, "The Best Things in Life are Free.") There really isn't anything to watch this for other than the spectacular production design.