The greatest movie ever!

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Rambling, pointless movie.Pier Paulo Pasolini's previous two movies, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, were collections of short stories. The stories were not connected and were mostly dull, anti-climatic and pointless.Arabian Nights sort of ends up that way too. The stories are longer, and there's less of them, but it's pretty much the same. The stories go nowhere and are even more absurd and perverse than before.Performances, as in The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, often leave a lot to be desired. Some are okay, but there are also some absolute shockers.

Resembling something out of an obscure dream, the characters from the ancient tales of the 1,001 Nights come to life in a dizzying spectacle of natural beauty, natural light, and the most breathtaking landscapes ever committed to film. Sumptously filmed throughout the exotic locales of Yemen, Ethiopia,Iran, and as far as Nepal, we are introduced to the story's hero, the sweet and innocent Nur Ed Din, played by the exotically beautiful Franco Merli, (Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.) While in the marketplace, Nur Ed Din encounters the enchanting Zumurrud, a feisty slave girl, being sold at auction. The girl has a spirit of her own and is given permission to choose who her next master shall be. Turning down generous offers from rich old men, she instead selects the young shepherd boy, Nur Ed Din, who is delighted to bring his new slave back to his home. He has not one dinar, but this matters not to Zumurud, who shows the boy the mysteries of eroticism. Of course Zumurud is stolen away after he ignores a prophetic warning from his slave, not to do business with a blue-eyed Christian. A greatly heart-broken Nur Ed Din embarks on an adventure to find his lost love, and this adventure is the centerpiece of this enormous, sweeping film. During his travels he meets many people, who all have their own tales to tell, thus taking the boy on still further adventures, where he encounters genies, giants, Princes, and heart-broken men in search of their lost loves. There are sequences in this film that are so beautiful that they induce chills, such as when Zumurud comes upon the kingdom in the desert, and is greeted by a brigade who name her 'King' of their castle, thinking that she is a man. Or when Nur Ed Din encounters the lion in the desert, and is led by the beast to an enchanted city where his beloved awaits. Featuring a minimal but beautiful score from Ennio Morricone, the predominant sounds are the desert winds, and innocent laughter of children. Rather than employ professional actors, Pasolini wisely uses locals, many who possess the most natural and innocent kind of beauty imaginable. Natural performers who can hardly resist giggling shyly when doing a nude scene. This is a world where sex is portrayed completely without Western guilt, and Pasolini even veers away from the rigid sexual codes of Islam, to bring these magic tales to life, suggesting perhaps that these tales are older even than religion itself. Erotic scenes that come across as playful, some even featuring erect penises, (a rarity in mainstream cinema,) and yet it all still comes off as strangely innocent and utterly pure. If the fantastic tales don't dazzle the viewer, than certainly the cinematography and the beautiful, lush costumes will surely boggle the mind. This is what cinema is really about; a creation of a fantasy world so real, and glorious enough to take one out of reality, and on a great adventure. This must truly have been something to behold on the big screen. "Arabian Nights" was the final film of Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life" collection. A year later he would embark on the first film of his "Trilogy of Death" series. He would not live to see the final editing of his "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom," a film considered by some to be the most offensive and controversial film of all time. Some say that he was murdered because of the contents of that film. But see "Arabian Nights," a true celebration of life and the human spirit.

Exploration of the search. Shadow of way and interior fight, images like footsteps of old time, joy of adventure.For me, not the Oriental myth or the Arabian tale are the subject of movie but Pasolini's hope. The way to kalokagathos is not yet only illusion. The innocence of first age is possibility to discover the essence of human sense like filling's sight." Il Fiore delle mille e una notte" is part of important project, a human life's exploration, a tale about the taste and the limits of innocence, a pledge for dream and childhood values but, in same time, a merciless verdict: this world is only desire, chimera, legend. His touch is ,always,immoral,unavailing, dangerous.In fact, it is a new book of Job version. It is a story, beautiful story, about wantonness. But the only way to survive, only refuge is the dream like imagination fruit. Important is only the way. The target is trifling.A splendid poem-film who explains Pasolini crisis.

Pasolini is a wonderful, wonderful adventure. Welcoming him into your heart is not without cost; he's a friend who is brilliant on one side and captive to banality on the other.The bad? Well, its tolerable for me because it is so flamboyantly obvious. The man has a triple curse: he is outrageously gay, he is insufferably Italian and (perhaps because of these two) he has excessively simpleminded storytelling skills. The stories here in their individual content have juvenile dynamics. The way the emotions are handled is comically simpleminded.That's in the nature of the stories of course, but our man here takes them seriously, so overlain on this is his own sexual nature. These stories are, some of them, erotic in nature and all of them have desire as the driver. Among the various stories, he's chosen these and that's fine enough. The original stories were distributed in places all over the Islamic world, a huge reach, but all of them which included sex joked about the dissonance between Islmac attitudes towards sex and the actual lives of folks within.But its rather interesting actually watching how his own predilections enter the story. Most of the men here are slaves to their own desires. But those desires are all — in the stories — skipping over the most superficial of erotic notions. A teenage boy awakes and finds an unconscious teenage girl next to him. He has sex with her. This is equated to "falling in love." It happens over and over and if you encounter these stories in text, its part of the fun.But see how Pasolini himself enters the story in how he chooses to portray the erotic content. Nudity and youth stand for the erotic, especially the nude boy. When sex is depicted (less than you would expect from the stories) its amazing wooden, mannikins. I suppose if you made some still images of parts of this it would be erotic, but repeatedly seeing the male member of a cartoon tells me that director has the same foibles as the characters we see.The Good? Well there's more than enough of that to make up for the sexual inadequacies of that part of the world.There's the absolute beauty of the thing cinematically. It isn't fully cinematic in motion, since Pasolini has no notion of how things flow, what the rhythms of things are. But each shot is fulfilling and some are absolutely breathtaking. He doesn't have any static tableaux like the striking ones in "Matthew," but the visual elegance is erotic in itself. Its a sort of continuous penis shot of life, and you'll find the beauty of the places erotic in their own ways, And then there's the way the stories are crafted.Yes they are cartoonish. Yes, they have execrable pacing, almost as if they were found objects and put in inappropriate boxes. But the way they are tied one to another is nothing short of brilliant. If we had none of the beauty, and none of the amusement of watching an Italian fop struggle on screen, we'd still have this. And its great.There isn't any one mechanism that links the stories; there may be a dozen. There isn't any sense to about half of them, and that's part of the miracle. Sometimes they are inside one another, but sometimes they walk through each other. Sometimes it is the same place of extras. Sometimes a repeated situation; "don't eat from that plate." Sometimes it is simply a segue that has no narrative connection at all but just seems nested or siblinged in some way. Its "Sarogossa Manuscript" with fun and beauty.I must say that one story really is perfect. It alone has two really beautiful women acting erotically. It has expert pacing. It is funny: laugh out loud funny. And it has a punishment that is one of the most arresting images you'll see — if you are a guy. Plus it has a framing story that makes me think it was the first one adapted and filmed.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.