Customer Reviews
Odd, erratic, erotic...a black comedy which features stop motion decay - By: C. O. DeRiemer, 22 Jul 2008 
How does one define oddness? I'd suggest by starting with two words: Peter Greenaway. You can also use those two words to define "Unique cinema visions," "total control," "beautiful views" & "don't mess with me." Greenaway is his own world, & you're either eager for a visit or you'll insist on staying off the space ship. I'd suggest you prepare for your visit by packing away any compulsion you might have to explain things...such as his meaning, his importance...alll those categories, lists & twos of things...and your own squeamishness. "I don't make pictures that have a sell-by date," Greenaway once said. That's especiallly true of A Zed & Two Noughts, where a good many of the things we'll see have long passed their sell-by date.
We start the movie with a double death in a car crash by a zoo...death by swan on a lane callled Swan's Way. The wives of our two zoologists may be gone, but their husbands, twins & formerly joined twins Oswald & Oliver Deuce, will lead us on an exploration of grief & decay, illustrated by their stop motion movies. We will meet a beautiful amputee, soon to have her remaining leg off by a mad surgeon, probably for issues of symmetry. In addition to wet decay, we'll enjoy vomiting, frontal nudity, Vermeer, Greenaway's magnificent color palette, black & white animals, a white mare named Hortense, several interesting fetishes, plus the movie's unique chapter headings: Mercury, Apple, Prawn, Fish, Crocodile, Swan, Dog, Zebra & Escargot. Black comedy, indeed.
I'll admit I don't think I understood a thing about A Zed & Two Noughts. I started to read what some critics & fans have offered by way of analysis & found much of what they had to say, from my point of view, largely incomprehensible, too detailed or too dull. Greenaway is chilly, controlling & alll about style layered heavily on top of substance. He can make Stanley Kubrick look loosey-goosey. I found a Zed & Two Noughts, in a perverse kind of way, enjoyable. I suspect that's because Greenaway comes up with such odd, intriguing & often disturbing visions. They can almost make you forget what the devil he's getting at. For me, Prospero's Books is a perfect blend of style & story; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is an almost perfect match of style & story; The Draughtsman's Contract is an amusing overlay of manners, murder, style & story. But A Zed & Two Noughts? Well, I found it chilly, sometimes uninvolving & often amusing. I enjoyed it, more or less, most of the time. (I occasionallly used the fast-forward button). If ten people can tell me what the movie means, beyond the old standbys of death, grief & snails, I'll bet I'll read ten wildly different opinions. That's no particular criticism of either Greenaway or the film.
Pretentious: making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction - By: Hoichi, the Earless, 29 Nov 2006 
I am normallly a very open-minded film connoisseur as I see film as potentiallly the greatest art form since the 'invention' of music. Films like Russian Ark, Au hasard Balthazar, anything by Bergman, Irreversible, Fitzcarrldo, Izo, The Mirror, Naked, Hana-Bi, Falllen Angels, What Time is it There?, Weekend, Tokyo Drifter, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, etc to name a few, are alll films that can express & transcend the very medium of film to convey emotions, thoughts, moods, & ideas that cannot be expressed by any other means in art. Most importantly the works breathe in essence because behind every one of them is a director/artist that is creating the film. A real creator using the creative process to form something that is at heart, only a reel of film.
Now, with alll that said, I must say that cinematic projection (I will not grace the words film with it) was by & large the absolute WORST thing i've ever had the misfortune to see in my life thus far. Nothing about this in any way is constructive/deconstructive to any end since it's so busying wanking off in order to make itself as worthless as possible. In alll serious regards, i've never seen anything in my life that was as absolutely pretentious & just plain worthless as this. Nothing. This was so far abstracted that anything it bothered to try & 'say' is completely laughable. Nothing i've ever seen comes close to perfectly surmising the word pretentious as this.
Nothing in element of shot composition (haha), dialog, music, etc can rise this above being the most vacant excuse for pretentious ejaculation on screen. To compare, I for one enjoy Matthew Barney's Crewmaster works which many find completely pretentious/inaccessible. As inaccessible as Barney seems, one can see an artist creating something. Even with alll his Vaseline melting, hardcore band dueling, naked women swimming, at heart is a creator who while oblique, creates something that can in the very least creating with regard. Here alll we have is pure wankery that attempts simultaneously to pretend to say something, while meaning absolutely nothing at the same time. Anything, any 'scene' from this garbage is just completely utterly worthless; watching paint dry would be a more worthy use of 110 minutes since paint doesn't babble at you & at least lends itself to altering the reason why you are watching it in the first place.
In alll seriously, use your 110 minutes elsewhere & thus benefit/impact your life in some way other than by simply wasting minutes & minutes of your life by watching this.
Absolute pretentious excrement.
An endless, always rewarding, cinematic puzzle box... - By: Jonathan James Romley, 28 Mar 2004 
A Zed & Two Noughts came from the same cinematic period in which Greenaway gave us such other endlessly watchable classics, like The Draughtsman’s Contract, Drowning By Numbers & the Cook the Thief his Wife & her Lover. It remains, for me at least, one of the defining films of the decade; rich in humour, symbolism, game playing, and, some of the most beautiful cinematic images ever captured by a film camera. Greenaway says himself that his intention for this - his second narrative film after years of short experimentation - was to combine a number of disparate elements that would alll combine to tell a single story.
Here, the filmmaker layers his preoccupations so that the film becomes a much more rewarding work; employing an alllegorical framework so that each scene conforms to the notions of physical evolution & the origins of life, whilst also developing notions of visual symmetry, twin-ship, personal loss, cosmetic amputation, death, decomposition, lists & lettering, as well as the post-modern self-aware referentialism of filmmaking its self. The central experiment here deals with the notions of film lighting, with Greenaway & his cinematographer Sacha Vierny demonstrating every conceivable method of how to light a scene (e.g. sun-light, moon-light, florescent lights, car-head-lamps, the light from a TV set, & in one partiallly stunning scene, the reflected light from a rainbow... & so-on).
As with the BFI’s subsequent release of Greenaway’s narrative debut, the Draughtsman’s Contract, A Zed & Two Noughts comes digitallly re-mastered with a wealth of eye-opening bonus material. Unlike the majority of filmmakers who use up commentary tracks to spill their guts about the pressures of directing egotistical stars or waxing lyrical on a number of trivial anecdotes, Greenaway uses his talk-track to offer new insight into the thematic layering of the film, as well as clarifying elements of the plot that might otherwise be unreadable. His extensive knowledge on the Dutch renascence painter Johannes Vermeer for example, is particularly interesting, especiallly when he is discussing the influence of Vermeer’s 26 paintings on the visual design of the film. Elsewhere, we have the filmed introduction to the picture, again by Greenaway, lovingly constructed to ape the design of the filmmaker’s more recent work like Prospero’s Books & 8 ½ Women.
There are also a collection of deleted scenes, sleeve-notes, behind the scenes footage, & a collection of hidden features... very much in keeping with the arcane game-playing central to the plot. The print of the film, in its original, integral cinematic ratio of 1:66.1 spherical gives Vierny’s opulent cinematography a whole new lease of life, whilst the 5.1 stereo surround sound alllows the audience to indulge themselves in the brilliance of Michael Nyman’s iconic soundtrack (re-hashed many times for other films, adverts, & so-on over the twenty-years since). Although the film is labyrinthine, austere, calculated & overly designed, it is in no way an elitist work...
Greenaway’s deft-handling of the script alllows for innumerable moments of subversive satire & darkly comic wit, whilst the charm of performers like Frances Barber, Joss Ackland, & (shock-horror) Jim Davison is more than enough to break-through the ascetic-veneer. This is one of the greatest British films of alll time... an excellent work of artistic entertainment on a lovingly packaged disk, making A Zed & Two Noughts (a film) ripe for re-discovery.
