Arabian Nights: Volume 1 - The Restless One

Took me a while to understand what the director was aiming to do. Still didn't. After the first 30 min, I was hesitant to watch vol 2 and 3 but the last bit changed my mind. Let's see if vol 2 will make me want to finish the trilogy.

If it could have somehow been edited down to only The Men with Hard-Ons and The Tears of the Judge (and maybe with Scheherazade thrown in just to stretch it to feature length and to strengthen the otherwise tenuous thematic conceit), this would probably be my favorite thing that Gomes has done. But as it stands at six hours, it's a bloated, excessive endurance test of uneven artistic and political pretensions. I sort of admire the audacity, but it's also tedious and exhausting.

I'm sure there is a relevance here, just not for me. The first part of this trilogy felt to me like a mishmash of ideas stumbling along unable to find it's footing.

I appreciate the effort but I just couldn't get into it. It was way too inconsistent.

Not like anything that has been released this year, hell it's not like anything released this decade. Isn't that what we watch movies for? *ranked as one movie