Godard's career is a difficult one to summarize or even to get a grasp on. After creating the seminal New Wave films of the Sixties we all know and love him for, Godard took a drastic turn in the late Sixties-early Seventies when he began making film within his "Dziga-Vertov" group, which were a group of didactic films that marked Godard's complete break from narrative film. After that dead-end, Godard made many beautiful and interesting documentary-theoretical films throughout the Seventies (the best being Numero Deux, Ici Et Ailleurs & Tout Va Bien). He returned to more narrative cinema in the 80's beginning with the little-seen "SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE)". I find most of his 80's films to be pretty weak, besides some good ones up until 1985 or so. My whole point with this rant is that Godard seems to have had an artistic re-awakening in the 90's. Starting with "Nouvelle Vague" in 1990, Godard's Nineties films rank up with some of his best work in the early days. Although I prefer his more recent "In Praise of Love" to this, but I love them both and say that they should be essential viewing for any world cinema buffs. GODARD=CINEMA!
Beautiful, difficult, exciting film.
In the theater, it was such a fascinating thing to watch. Particular images and sounds still stick with me three years later! Godard enthusiasts will love it, those who like to think on their own (or so they think) will love it. And I love it, too.
Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the bored,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard DVD Release Date: Released the 23 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Didn't the theater of the absurd project dissolve years ago? Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique is a reminder why Old Europe is in decline. The existential gobbledegook will most assuredly put any normal person to sleep. Was this film suppose to be about war? Wow, that is sure surprising. Ayn Rand would have had a field day criticizing this indulgence in anti-rationality. Why was Dante dragged into this mess? What did he ever do to Godard and his fellow radical leftists? This cinema journey does indeed start in hell and travels through Purgatory---but it never arrives in Heaven. We are obviously meant to suffer eternal damnation. The photography and the accompanying music are the only mildly redeeming aspects of this so-called cinema experience. Sarajevo is a gorgeous city. Alas,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sarah Adler (II) - Nade Dieu - Rony Kramer Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard DVD Release Date: Released the 17 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Robert Bresson always claimed his films are about hope and redemption, but so many end in death or suicide that it's a struggle to reconcile the statement with his films. His final film, based on Leo Tolstoy's story The Counterfeit Note, is no different. It's the harrowing tale of an innocent man, Yvon (Christian Patey), whose victimization at the hands of an arrogant upper-class delinquent and a greedy shop owner sends him on a downward spiral into a life of crime. The once-happy husband and father turns bitter, angry, self-pitying, and ultimately coldly brutal in the chilling conclusion. It's Bresson's most expansive film and biggest canvas, weaving the paths of numerous characters across Yvon's journey, but he edits with jackrabbit jumps, running headlong through the story with... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Christian Patey - Sylvie Van den Elsen Director(s): Robert Bresson DVD Release Date: Released the 24 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Un Chien Andalou remains a startling artifact suggesting ways in which film can express the subconscious. The result of Luis Bunuel's collaboration with Salvador Dali, the 17-minute, 1929 film was designed expressly to shock and provoke. Opening with the canonical eyeball-slashing sequence and divided into baffling "chapters", this is a work of art obsessed with religion, lust, decay, violence, and death. Un Chien Andalou isn't simply one of the great works of the surrealist movement, but a segment of cinematic DNA that irrevocably altered the aesthetics of film. In its tangled corridors you find the seeds to the disappearing-mouth bit in The Matrix, the carcasses strewn through Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and pretty much the entire oeuvre of David... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Simone Mareuil - Pierre Batcheff Director(s): Luis Buñuel DVD Release Date: Released the 28 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Samuel Fuller came up with one of his gutsiest "headline shots" for House of Bamboo: Mount Fuji, in CinemaScope, framed between the boots of a U.S. soldier lying murdered on a snowy Japanese embankment. Happily, the movie that follows is no letdown. This brutal gangster film was the first American production to shoot in Japan, and Fuller exploits his locations to the max, up to and including a climactic gun battle around a Tokyo rooftop facsimile of the turning Earth. Officially the screenplay is credited to Harry Kleiner, with Fuller cited for "additional dialogue"; in actuality, the 20th Century-Fox movie transplants the basic premise of the Kleiner-scripted Street with No Name (1948) from an American Midwest town to Tokyo, but otherwise the picture is unmistakably... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robert Ryan - Robert Stack Director(s): Samuel Fuller DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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