Rating: 
Summary: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
Review: Ever since I first saw this movie in the late 60's, it seemed clear to me that the whole picture was not really about the veracity of the crime that the photographer supposedly shot, but rather about the unreality of the life of the mod world, and by extension of the pop world as a whole. The two different chromatic tones used by Antonioni to depict the real life, as represented by the flop house, and the illusory pop world, the main theme of the movie, are indicative of the contrasting realities portrayed in the film. Hunger, poverty, old age, diseases, and dead are painted in subdued mate tones. On the other hand, the harlequins, mimes, drugs parties, rock concerts and other happenings populated by those zombies that represent the pop culture, their unreality notwithstanding, are filmed with bright fluorescent colors. These specimens of what now is considered the "beautiful people", are empty of true emotions. And just by chance, to one of its members, the photographer, the opportunity to escape from that unreal world is offered in the form of the photographing of a murder, without meaning to. Confronted with the absolute truth, death, this superficial human being does not know how to behave. That surreal world to which he belongs has ingrained so deeply into his soul, that instead of behaving like a normal person would do by going to the police, he instead unconsciously invents as many circuitous, roundabouts ways as possible to avoid the confrontation of that most real of truths: death. So that is why, after realizing that the corpse has disappeared, he circumambulates aimlessly by the park. And when asked by the mime to return the illusory tennis ball (that is, to reinsert himself anew in the illusory mod or fashion world) he decides to comply, having lost for ever the opportunity to be a true human being. And that is why the unreal tennis ball starts to sound in the final seconds of the movie.
What makes this film a classical masterpiece, besides the formal and structural techniques employed by "el maestro" Antonioni, is his depiction of the banal, sophomoric reality of the mod and pop world. And all banality of that world depicted in the film is as true today as in the 60's (just take a look at the frantic and pathetic lives of all those soulless Hollywood stars).
To say that the film has not aged well just because the white jeans that Hemmings wears are today demodé, is like saying that Battleship Potemkin is an anachronism because the Odessa steps scene sequence has been surpassed by Brian De Palma in The Untouchables. Simply put, classics by definition can not be dated. By the way, Blow-Up is based in a short history by Julio Cortazar("Las babas del diablo"), and has nothing to do with the Zapruder film, whatsoever.
As to some resemblance to the Austin Power movies I can not attest one way or the other, because life is too short to spend two hours seeing such stupid, silly movies (or Titanic, or Gladiator, or Shakespeare In Love, or Pearl Harbor, for that matter).
The jazz score throughout the most appealing scenes and the ominous wind in the park are employed in a masterly way. If any film deserves to be edited in DVD, this is it.
Rating: 
Summary: superb
Review: Blowup contains so many perfectly executed details I hesitate to focus on one. Superb! The amateur should be apprised of the fact that this film doesn't deliver so-called "closure" and, in this way, it approaches verisimilitude.This is a sixties pop-art film, made by an Italian realist whose approach was thought to be very different than the one he expressed at the time. The end is chaotic. The violence in this film is temporally and physically located elsewhere (an experiment in existentialism . . . or surrealism?). The detective work is, in every sense, irrelevant. I have to admit there is certain amount of nostalgia that infects my critical regard for this film. 85% is "cool" through-and-through, by the standards of its day: fashion in all its glory, and a life-style that is nihilistically bohemian in a peculiarly mid-sixties manner. The other 15% is the "titillation factor." By this I mean that Antoinini suggests his sympathy (with which I happen to participate despite my youth) with a protagonist who looks to the past for grounding objects, but who lives purely and unabashedly in the present.
Rating: 
Summary: Context is everything.
Review: Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) Antonioni's film career, these days, is little more than a footnote in the textbooks of aspiring filmmakers and critics. Most of his movies have already been forgotten less than a half-century after they were made. One of the exceptions is Blow-Up, which was nominated for almost as many awards as O. J. Simpson. Watching it thirty-five years after its release, one wonders why. Much of the film's power probably had to do with its cultural context. Blow-Up, which is ostensibly about a photographer (a very young David Hemming, later to not achieve the great fame he should have for his role in Profondo Rosso, one of the finest films ever made) who may or may not have captured a murder on film without meaning to, was actually full of subtext about the meaning of photography in the modern world. When you realize the infamous Zapruder film was released at around the same time and
viewable by those in the know, the questions get a lot more compelling. At least they did to those who theorized endlessly about a grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963. Removed from that context now, Antonioni's crowning achievement looks a bit more like Thomas' Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs. As the book, which is mediocre at best, was carried to stardom within the context of Jonathan Demme's excellent film, Blow-Up took its cue from Zapruder. However, while Harris' next novel showed the rest of the world that Harris was, in fact, not a writer up to par with Demme's filmmaking, Antonioni's followup (the gloriously vapid, now largely-forgotten Zabriskie Point, a film of interest only to hardcore Pink Floyd fans-and even most of THEM find it insufferable) had no effect on the filmmaker's stature whatsoever. Even time seems to have left Antonioni relatively unscathed, and many still see Blow-Up as a classic. I will continue to wonder what they're thinking. Both Hemming and co-star Vanessa Redgrave seem somewhat lost in their parts, various gratuitous nude scenes are thrown in for what seems to be shock value more than anything, the Yardbirds make a pointless cameo, and what is actually on the roll of film that everyone's so concerned about never captures the viewer's attention nearly as much as it captures the attentions of everyone else. Sometimes this technique works. Here, it doesn't. * ½
Rating:
Summary: Classic, masterpiece
Review: Antonioni's international directorial debut is a gritty, sharp look at the attitudes and mores that prevailed in the London of the Sixties. It was the Swinging Capital of the world and Blow Up captures its essence for the following generations. If you want to know what was happening in the Swinging Sixties, 'Blow Up' makes you feel you were there. Following a trendy fashion photographer's work (based on David Hockney), we view fashions, political demonstrations, pot parties, etc. Blow Up is a masterpiece because unlike lesser works of art, its style can be idealised but not copied and reproduced irreverently. One of a kind.
Rating: 
Summary: Yawn
Review: In the 1950's there was a distinction between art and film. Film was seen a popular entertainment. Antonioni was an Italian film maker who grappled with the problem of making film interlectually respectable. Others tried to do it by making neo realist dramas or by making films with a political message. Antonioni was a stylist who made long basically plotless films without much dialogue. The lack of plot and dialogue allowed audiences to focus on facial expressions and various other minimlist things to come to a symbolic meaning or understanding of the films. The plot of this film is simple. A photographer takes some photos in a park. He sees something and enlarges the prints. (Yes the title) As the prints are enlarged he notices a body under some shrubs. Yes he might have got some evidence of a murder. (Or if someone has had a heart attack, some slow response times from the local ambulence service) An attractive woman comes and takes her top off revealing her naked breasts to get him to hand over the film. The last scence involves him joining in some mime artists. They fake a tenis match and he joins in. Symbolic of the unreality of the world or some such thing. The key to the film of course is that in itself it is so slow moving it is tedious. They key to any enjoyment is to have endless discussions about the meaning of various bits of it to establish its meaning. An of course any meaning is only in the eye of the viewer as the film in reality has no meaning at all. If you like to play these games this is your film, otherwise it is pure tedium like all of his other films.
Rating:
Summary: Overrated.
Review: A pretentious bore. I knew it was going to be trouble the moment I saw the mimes. The two stars are for the great Vanessa Redgrave - who provides the film with almost all of it's watchable moments, and for the many more enjoyable movies this one has inspired. Hemmings dull, spoiled character is impossible to care about. This is intentional, and I personally don't require a sympathetic audience-identifier. But there should at least be something interesting going on. About ten percent of the time there is something engagingly cinematic to watch. The other ninety percent is tedious and self-consciously arty in the worst way. Strictly for film students. (Now that I've trashed another of cinema's enshrined treasures I guess I have only to wait to be told that I didn't "understand" it.)
Rating:
Summary: End of the game
Review: David Hemmings plays a bored fashion photographer. Bored because everything he deals with is fleeting and essentially meaningless. He is surrounded by art and artists and lives only through the lens of his camera. People are not important to him, only how they photograph. A book of pictures is his project. That is his contact point with "reality". He earns his living with the fashion photographs but the superfluity of that world leaves him with a wanting for a deeper confrontation with reality. And he gets that one day while taking random photos in a park. Only in the darkroom does he discover what he has found, a corpse. But now that he is confronted with something truly substantial he is uncertain how to act. The body lies in the park but he contacts no one but his agent. He is helpless to exist but as an observer. With the camera he is free to manipulate reality but without the camera(or some other art form serving as interpreter) reality is impenetrable, indefineable, unsolvable. Antonioni uses very little dialogue rather he paints his mysterious picture of the world with sound (while in the art saturated atmosphere of the studio we hear a great Herbie Hancock Jazz Soundtrack) and the abscence of sound (when in the park we hear only the unordered sounds of nature which makes those scenes all the more mysterious). Hemmings lives in the noise and eye pollution of the sixties but seeks his peace and stillness in the quiet park. During the Yardbyrds rock performance the crowd is stone silent giving the film viewer the feeling that the crowd like Hemmings is searching among all the noise for something too. Finally the ultimate creatures of silence, the mime troupe, sum up all human activity as they quietly parody the human comedy. Hemmings lead has gone cold, the corpse has dissappeared. Walking through the park he watches the mimes play a pretend game of tennis and slowly he catches on. The game is allegory for all lifes quests, and the trick is to keep the imaginary ball in the air. Hemmings urge to discover something substantial has led him right back to the surface of things. With the mimes there is a sort of shared recognition of futility but a connection has been made with his fellow artists on some level. In Antonioni's version of the pop world we are all artists chasing a mystery doing our own kind of imaginary dance with "reality". A great and satisfying movie inspired by a great short story writer, Julio Cortazar. The faces in the movie are unforgettable: a young Jane Birken as a want to be model, a young Vanessa Redgrave, Verushka....Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck....And that great Hancock soundtrack, coolest jazz soundtrack I've ever heard. Great London sixties atmospheres from swinging studio to street life to lordly mansion parties. So if you like foreign feeling films(Italian director but made in English) and have a certain affection for the sixties this is your masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: blow up
Review: i was blown away by this movie when i saw it in the sixties amd it has remained one of my all time favorites. Antonioni taught me a valuable lesson with this film, i.e., the indifference of humanity to human suffering. Antonioni's technique of revealing the murder through Hemming's blow ups is masterful and surprising. I couldn't stay out of my dark room after seeing this movie, hoping that my own blow ups would reveal some shocking secret. I highly recommend it....
Rating: 
Summary: Ah - yes - I remember it well..................
Review: Any film which encourages 30 (or more) people to submit a written review has to be just a little bit special. There are more than enough subjective and objective reviews listed here before mine to make any additional comments redundant. However - having been a teenager during most of the 60's - and also having personal knowledge of the films locations gives me perhaps an edge over some other reviewers. The park used in the film is Maryon Park which is located in Charlton - a suburb in the south-east of London. The antique shop was actually a general food store and was owned by the parents of one of my school friends. We used to take walks round the "park" nearly every lunchtime and therefore I know it like the back of my hand. Because of this personal knowledge - I was unable to experience the tense hypnotic effect that the film is supposed to generate for some of its viewers - such as in the night scene in the park. Anyway - I digress - the film attempts to typify the "mod" era and almost succeeds. If you want to see REAL mod fashion and design - take a look at any repeat of the old 60's pop music show "Ready Steady Go" - then compare. Even the Yardbirds (as wonderful as they were) - could have chosen a more appropriate track. I must admit - the film is MUCH more enjoyable than I was expecting - having read most of the reviews before mine I was almost put off buying it - as I had my doubts to its general watchability. I do totally recommend this film/video to anyone who lived through this era - in particuar native Londoners. Todays teenagers/twentysomethings may find it trendy to say they enjoyed it - because of the mod connections - but very few actually will if they were being REALLY honest.
Rating:
Summary: A Question of Reality
Review: "Blow Up" is about questioning reality. The other reviews mention the ending but neither recognized the critical sounds in the last 30 seconds that bring together the message of "what is reality?" You have to listen carefully at the end! It's a great movie because you find yourself interpreting it in several different ways. It hinges on whether the photographer buys into the mime's game, whether the mimes believe there is a tennis ball, and whether or not the murder actually took place. Watch it over again because there's lots of new things to find in every scene. Definitely good for thought/debate. :)
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