I've been trolling the web a lot, looking for other people who are
enthusiastic fans of Ishtar, to ask them to join this list. I've been
reading a lot of opinions of the movie... they diverge so wildly that
I sometimes wonder if there weren't several different movies called
"Ishtar," and the whole thing was some sort of sociological
experiment.
I remember hearing (from more than one source) about the obvious
bloopers involving the vultures in the desert... how you could see
that the bored and disinterested vultures were being tossed into the
scene by handlers just outside the frame.
When I finally saw the movie, I expected to see footprints, a person's
shadow coming into the frame, perhaps even a hand... but I didn't see
any of these things, and in fact, no evidence at all that the vultures
were being tossed in. I felt stupid, unobservant - I was an unworthy
movie watcher. Did anybody else on this list experience anything
similar?
Anyway, this is what they NY Times reviewer said about that scene in a
review that came out on the film's release:
"The film's budget may well be a matter of outtakes and overtime,
since the huge expense doesn't show up on the screen. Did it take Miss
May, for one desert scene, 50 attempts to get the right shot of big,
fat, patient-looking vultures flopping down next to her stars? If it
did, it was worth it, because she got scene-stealing vulture behavior
in the end. ''No, no, no - not dead, just resting!'' Lyle angrily
tells them, while Chuck voices some memorable disbelief at the way
these birds do business. Miss May has a way of letting the same basic
attitudes carry over to anyone, feathered or otherwise, anywhere."
This is the version of this scene that I saw, and this was reported in
the NY Times when that still meant something.
It's interesting, overall it was a reasonable review, so the piling on
about "worst movie ever made" must have started elsewhere. Later the
Times clearly joined in the chorus.
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