The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

If the message could have been put more metaphorically, this might have worked. But doing it straight ahead in such a pedantic tone- whilst being just wrong- doesn't cut it. The fact is a gull couldn't do that; humans are one of the few species that could. Pedantic dressed up as cutesy. Lose!And as far as teaching goes, the main thing it has taught three generations is the grammatically incorrect "seagull". There's no such thing people. They're "gulls". Seagull. Right. As opposed to "landgull"?

Here in England, the nearest we get to seagulls (we are an island) are ones who steal our fish and chips from our hands at the seaside, squawk and squall loudly and generally seen as a bit of a seaside urban nuisance. We had the paperback novel in our household when I was young - I never read it but did dip into it every now and then and enjoyed the black & white photographs. So, a few decades on, the film.I did wonder how it was going to be portrayed, how the birds would talk etc and am glad that it wasn't Disneyfied or animatronics grafted on (a bit before that development, I know). Used to some quite excellent wildlife programmes on TV these days, I was often aghast at the beauty of the imagery, that didn't try to be too close up and perfect but convey space, wonderment and awe.Being British I did find the American voice artists not quite to my taste - somehow voices added to seagulls are different to ones added to Pixar cartoons, but I suppose that's because while Pixar is decidedly American, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is nation-less and international at the same time. Like the birds themselves; free to fly anywhere.The story did make some sense but alas, did not grip me. Therefore I was glad that my DVD version didn't go beyond 90 mins or so, rather than the 120mins on some versions. The Neil Diamond soundtrack, alas was mono - how much better if it had been in stereo - was beautiful too, though not quite being able to pick out all the lyrics due to the not brilliant sound quality lessened its impact and enjoyment.There are those that love and swear by their Jonathan Seagull, whatever format it's in. I'm less enamoured by the project but am glad that I watched and enjoyed this film.

1973: Martha, a Californian housewife in her early thirties is married to Peter, CEO of a construction company. When flower power was in full bloom Martha and Peter concentrated on building a home and putting their daughters through private education. With Peter increasingly away on business, a restless Martha begins to feel there's something missing from her life; might those hippies have been onto something? One day, her old schoolfriend Susan drops by for coffee, clutching a copy of Kahil Gibran's 'The Prophet' and 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull', the latest publishing phenomenon."Why don't you take a swim in lake you?" smiles Susan, and leaves the books for Martha to ponder over. Days pass, until out of curiosity, Martha picks up the little blue book with the outline of a seagull on the cover. This Richard Bach fellow's topped the 'New York Times' bestseller lists for 38 weeks - a respectable writer. They've even made a movie of it. And Martha has always enjoyed nature documentaries. Whatever would Peter say? Oh phooey - for the first time in her 27 years, Martha is spreading her wings...Dedicated to "the real Jonathan Livingston Seagull who lives within us all", this is an allegory for living one's life without fear, to "fly for the fun of it" and "learn what perfection really is". It's 'The Little Engine That Could' with feathers. Or Herman Hesse with a mouthful of herring.Although the story was inspired by John H Livingston, a top American pilot of the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Bach (a new age forerunner to the likes of Deepak Chopra and Paulo Coelho) has denied he is the real author of the novel, merely acting as a conduit for some higher power; fortunately, there's not yet a legal precedent for robbing superior beings of their royalty cheques.Whoever the writer, one cannot underestimate the impact the book had on the 'Me' generation, with its hodge-podge of Eastern philosophy and self-empowerment speak, later ridiculed by writer Beverley Byrne as "Horatio Alger doing Antoine De Saint-Exupéry" or "the Qur'an as translated by Bob Dylan".Composed of fewer than 10,000 words, it broke all hardcover sales records (in fiction - and, tellingly, non-fiction) since 'Gone With The Wind', shifting more than a million copies in 1972 alone. 'Reader's Digest' published an abridged version, and Richard Harris won a Grammy in 1973 for his spoken-word album-of-the-book. Naturally, given its earning power, studio execs were inclined to jump all over it.Shot in California (where else) and New Mexico for $1.5 million, and sporting a soundtrack by Neil Diamond, the film version concerns the education of the eponymous seagull, voiced by James Franciscus. Driven by a desire for limitless flight ("There's got to be more to life than fighting for fish heads!") and an embarrassment to his parents and his girlfriend, he is banished by the elder of his flock for flaunting the proscribed rules of speed and altitude.He encounters two other outcasts who teach him to soar to a higher plane of existence, where dwell a flock of enlightened gulls, led by a wise old bird named Chiang who takes him under his wing. Under Chiang's tutelage Jonathan learns how to instantly 'jaunt' to anywhere in the universe. The secret is to "begin by knowing that you have already arrived". As Chiang explains, "Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip is nothing more than your thought itself. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body too." Equipped with his teacher's parting words, "keep working on love", and with the knowledge that the soul can only be free through the ability to forgive and to pass on such wisdom, the beaky Messiah flies back to his flock to spread the word ("Listen, everybody! There's no limit to how high we can fly! We can dive for fish and never have to live on garbage again!") amassing supporters, until he flaps off again to God knows where.As successful as Bach's novel was and is, the movie was a troubled production, which plummeted from the screen a few weeks after release in the face of almost uniformly terrible reviews. The serenely spiritual Bach ended up launching a suit against the producer (who initially wanted to graft Disney-style animated mouths on the seagulls) for not sticking to the letter of his book, and remains a non-fan of the film version.Trouble is, given the sheer volume of philosophising at the expense of narrative, the decision to render everything in disembodied voice-over can become tiresome, and one's appreciation of the film may be fundamentally dictated by how many new age platitudes you can ingest without discomfort (or indeed giggling - "We don't go flying through rock till a little later in the programme"); similarly, how much sub-standard Neil Diamond you can take without feeling the urge to drive pencils deep into your ears.With a melody invoking Elgar's 'Nimrod', and lyrics like "Lost on a painted sky, where the clouds are hung for the poet's eye", Diamond's overwrought title song 'Be' (which on release barely tickled the Top 40) recalls nothing so much as Engelbert Humperdinck's 'Lesbian Seagull' from Beavis And Butt-Head Do America.Diamond, who also launched a suit against the producer, nevertheless saw his soundtrack album go double-platinum; the likes of 'Be' and 'Songbird' ("Seek out your harbour of light!") faring slightly better out of context. On the plus side, the movie's nature photography is sublime - the knowledge that the film employed various radio-controlled gliders (built by one Mark Smith of Escondido, California) standing in for the gulls, in no way detracting from the superb aerobatics on show.Cynicism aside, there's also some pretty sound advice here - why shouldn't we attempt to "fly without limits", or strive to be the greatest seagulls we can possibly be? It's better than a face-full of rotten fish. Keep your beak up.

This painfully boring movie was the worst movie i had ever saw until UFO-Target Earth came out in 1974, i actually fell asleep in my chair at the movie house while trying to watch this..It was cheap made, and really had no kind of plot or storyline whatsoever!! I don't usually walk out of a movie i had paid to see, but this sorry thing was just too much for me...I never read the book this was supposed to be about, but it had to have been better than the movie, in the 33 years since it was made, i have never heard anyone mention it again... so that must very indicitive of just how bad this movie was.