Reviews

I think I enjoyed watching this...Did I? I'm really not sure. I love this musical. I think the original cast recording is a masterpiece. Obviously the film is going to be different. Obviously a lot of the double entendres are going to be taken out. But what they did to the shape! And adding From This Moment On! After a while I just started counting what they left in and what they took out. That was silly. Howard Keel was good, although no one can top Alfred Drake in this role. Ann Miller is incredibly talented, whatever you think of her suitability. Any change to the orchestration is pretty much a minus. I should have recorded it, because after a while I lost focus. But anyway, TCM, thanks again for filling in all necessary gaps and lacunae. PS: Somehow Coriolanus made the cut...

I've read so many good reviews here - I mean bad reviews, but well - written bad reviews. So there's not much left to say that hasn't already been said. So I'll just add a couple of things from the perspective of 1983: if you went to see a movie then and said it was "television", that was clearly a bad thing. Not like now, where many television shows are more nuanced than most current films. In those days this meant it was a big budget soap opera. Which is what this is: a barely - nuanced big budget soap opera. With stars. Lots of big stars.

In the big Times Square theater where we saw this film when it first came out, my ex-wife and I could not help laughing at the cynicism of how much and how hard they pushed the tearjerking at the end of the film. We were both huge fans of Douglas Sirk, and thus we knew how much intelligence and craft could go into this genre of filmmaking. Many members of the audience (some of whom were crying) turned around and glared at us. But what could we do? This movie was ridiculous, and worthy of our scorn. Anyway, we weren't laughing out loud - more like snickering. What we should've done was to have proclaimed, following in the footsteps of Senator Bentsen, "Bad movie, we knew Imitation of Life - you're no Imitation of Life!" (Or perhaps, at best, a cheap made - for TV imitation of Imitation of Life - LOL, like they say nowadays). Well, if it's OK to cry at a movie, it should be OK to laugh at one...I guess this is part of a much longer discussion about appropriate public behavior.

In any case, thanks once again to TCM for not making me have to waste any more time than is necessary to revisit movies from my youth and see whether my initial impressions were correct or not. This one definitely didn't get better with age.

This film is actually quite bad. But that really isn't so important. It's also fascinating, and that's much more important. The whole concept of Misreading, as it has been developed by Harold Bloom, is really important to me, and this film is like a certain kind of textbook. If you have a big American car in a French film, that means one thing. If you have a couple of French guys driving a big American car in New York, the meaning is totally different. Now, of course, we can take this line of inquiry to some absurd places: if an American director would have directed French actors in a French film, shot in New York (driving a big American car)...But, anyway - so much post - Breathless French style is derived from American style. But a lot of American style is derived from misreadings of French misreadings of American style - have you seen Jarmusch's The Limits of Control? Impossible without Melville...

What else should I talk about? The Jazz? Solal's Jazz in Breathless. Perfection. Here? Not really. Again, it's French Jazz, and doesn't really fit NY perfectly. But that's OK - maybe if it was worse, it would be better, like the Jazz in Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska!

In any case, I really want to collate scenes from movies from the late '50s and note how many times certain things reoccur - little portable record players with records strewn all over the floor, cool scenes of cigarettes being lit, gas stations - the scene in the recording studio so much like the one in Masculin/Feminin. What would we get out of such lists? Something...something about zeitgeist. Something about transmission. Something about cross - pollination and its relationship to influence, something about modern myths.

So if the experience of making this film helped him to know what to do and what not to do in his later masterpieces, then, you know what? It's a beautiful thing. Godard once famously said "It's not blood, it's red". Melville found out some kind of similar thing about the difference between America and...American - isms? Something like that.

Ambition is such a tricky thing. Without ambition, Allen would never have made either Annie Hall or Manhattan. He really stretched. And I just saw Manhattan again, for the first time in years, and I found it nearly pitch perfect. Everything flows. Well, it's understandable that this level of achievement would embolden Allen to go deeper into Auteurism and Personal Cinema. But scenes like the Three Sister Luncheon in this film set the bar really high. Really high. Too high.

It's not like all the characters sound like little Woody Allens. That would come later. But their dialogue is such empty Upper New York chit - chat that reveals so little about inner life. I admit it is an amazing gift, the ability to reveal and expose the inner life of superficial characters. Few filmmakers have been able to do it - I'm thinking of Renoir and The Rules of the Game. But if you're gonna go there, you'd better be READY to go there! And...well, this film is fatally infected with Toxic Middlebrow - ism, and so you can't really tell whether Woody thinks their conversations are deep and revealing or pseudo - deep and pseudo - revealing. He's good, but not good enough to make a thing like that clear.

There's one scene I love: the one where Woody and Diane Wiest go on a date. She takes him to a Punk show. He retorts with Bobby Short. Bobby Short at the Carlyle equaling "Good Music" or "Real Music" tells me all I need to know about why I respect and appreciate this movie, but will never love it. The way that different kinds of Art can describe the gulf that exists between people - that is truth. And that's the same gulf I feel between this Ersatz Masterpiece and the Films in my Pantheon.

It's Twilight Zone. With all that implies, both good and bad. That style of the '50s, where this little cabal of oh - so - smart Liberal screenplay writers impose their critiques of Big Business and Madison Avenue on any consistency of created characters. So it becomes a kind of soapbox. I might agree with all of it - why not? But it's not good cinema - everything is just way too spelled out. Liberalism has failed - it degenerated into Neoliberalism. And yet,we all need to watch this film. It presages the Trump era brilliantly (not that he was the first, by any means, to work the liminal space between Show Biz and Politics). So it's a great document. And it's also an episode of the Zone expanded into 2 hours. But part of the greatness of, say, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street is its 1/2 hour length.

Andy Griffith is good here. But, you know me...I would've preferred Claude Akins.

Walter Matthau's monologue about Marcia and about his book - in fact, that whole section of the film - is dreadful. Overwritten and tin - eared. Patricia Neal starts the film out so beautifully - somebody else here called her performance "luminous" - and as the writing goes down the drain, so does her performance. Down, down, into pseudo - Tennessee Williams territory:

"Marcia!"

Watch the first hour with both eyes on the screen. And for the second one, keep one eye on the film while perusing, say, a Huey Long biography with the other eye.

The ending? King Lear meets The Obsolete Man. That says what it says.

I wonder what would've happened if those Kazans and Schulbergs and Chayefskys, etc. could've interrogated and implicated their own Liberal Allrightnik sensibilities? Then Auto - Derision wouldn't be a term only used in French.

Best Line I've Read Recently: "Just because this film was booed at Cannes doesn't mean it was good enough to be part of the 'Booed at Cannes' festival."

Piece of Advice: It doesn't matter if you're trying to make a modern Horror movie. It doesn't matter if you love Hitchcock and those classic cross - cutting sequences. Text messaging will NEVER be suspenseful. No matter how you do it. No matter who does it. The big text messaging sequence reads like parody - Slackers on a Train...

Thought(s) for the Day: Why SHOULDN'T Intellectuals (or Pseudo - Intellectuals) have their own Horror Movie? But...couldn't it happen - at least ONE time in my life - that when a hip iconic artist is used as a plot point, her work could CONTINUE to inform the film, in something other than an embellishmental way?

This film is not terrible. But it throws a bunch of ideas against the wall. And none of them really stick. Or stick together. And poor Paris! All those cafés and motorcycles and boulevards that used to really be such great backdrops for such great movies. Now they're pretty good backdrops for OK movies.O tempora! O mores!

And Kristen Stewart should have made at least SOME attempt to speak French

I really don't know what to do with the reviews here. They treat this film like a Masterpiece. Or like it's boring and worthless. It's neither. But this is 2016, and every truly Independent film is haunted by the specter of the incipient End of Cinema As We Have Known It. So some of us feel that we must cheer a film that has a sense of art, of smallness, of observation, of epiphany.

And this film contains all of these things. But Poetry...I actually don't know what Poetry is supposed to do. But it seems to me that its use of chains of images should sneak up on you and reveal themselves over several readings, and not bang you over the head: Poem about Waterfalls - Waterfalls. Discussion of Twins - Twins - More Twins. Iranian Girlfriend - Decorations all over the House which look like Black and White Persian Iconography - finishing with a Farsi T - shirt. Black Rapper (remember, it's POETRY) channeling Paul Laurence Dunbar, and even saying that he wears the mask. Paterson - William Carlos Williams. Japanese Guy comes to discover American Poetics = Mystery Train. Wonderful Old - School African - American Bar Owner = Lester Young on the Juke Box/the Classic Blue Collar Intellectual Bar Chess Players. I'm sure Jarmusch read Cotton Goes to Harlem, with its centrally important Lester Young scene...

All this is OK. Even nostalgia for the time when one regularly encountered Blue Collar Intellectuals as part of the Urban Landscape is OK. I just find it all so pathetically obvious and sentimental. I feel like we honor real film poets like Ozu, Bresson,Renoir, Ford, etc. by not reifying "Film Poetry", nodding and winking to the audience each time we link something to something else. But I think it's a sign of the times: "Art Films" are desperate to hold on to their audience - or their Market Share, if I can put it like that. We can analyze the crisis in cinema more clearly by looking at what is considered a good or well - made film nowadays than by talking about "Junk". Even though Junk was probably better made at one time. But it was still junk.

I want to finish by quoting James Agee, talking about John Ford's The Fugitive: "I dislike allegory and symbolism which are imposed on and denature reality as deeply as I love both when they bloom from and exalt reality". And what would Frank O'Hara say? Nothing very positive, I am sure...He hated Poetic Pretension, in all of its forms. And Paterson's unpretentiousness is pretentious indeed.

If this movie could have lived up to all of the ideas it flirts with and all of the things it proposes, it could have been a masterpiece. But it didn't, so it isn't. But, look, I actually don't care so much. Why not? Because Isabelle Huppert is incredible. I don't really follow actors much. I'm more of a classic "Auteurist", trained by Sarris' American Cinema. But Isabelle...She is a phenomenon. You can feel her intelligence in every shot; you can feel her thinking. And she maintains a remarkable girlishness, even in her sixties. Isabelle...OK, enough of that!

But a film which engages with the desperate search for new paradigms of Resistance and Revolution...A film which brings in a Zizek reference right on cue, in a non - name dropping kind of way. This is a film which matters - or which could matter, if the look was not so French Lifetime Channel. I mean, I know I'm showing my age if I say that I would like a film which engages with ideas to also engage with them on the level of Film Grammar. I mean, Adorno's Minima Moralia (referenced several times) is Adorno for Beginners - the film coulda reflected that work on some kind of structural level, at least a LITTLE bit, without losing the audience. At least I think so! Or hope so...

I would've hoped for something on the level of Godard's La Chinoise, but the film is closer to Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. But, for 2016, that's pretty good...pretty good. Anyway, it's hip for French directors to turn their backs on Godard now - I heard Desplechin announce (with pride) that he had moved from Godard to Truffaut. Well, if My Golden Years is any indication, it's not a good move...

Things to Come is not a great film. But it is filled with lots of Little Beauties. I loved the Woody Guthrie scene. Especially how actor Roman Kolinka really nails Woody's nuances, albeit with a Gallic lilt. All of the references - literary, musical - are note - perfect and done with excellent taste. But - (Tl;dr) - all this really proves is that French Middlebrow Culture is closer to Highbrow Culture than American Middlebrow Culture is.

I think this film is a Masterpiece. But I am somewhat uncomfortable with this thought - why? This is a truly great movie - films like this have everything to do with why I fell in love with the idea of living in France. The frankness about love and sex, and about all of the similarities and differences between the two. That still seems so audacious. And the A Team brought its A Game: Carné, Prevert, Alexander Trauner, Maurice Jaubert, Gabin, Arletty, Jules Berry...all killing it. When Gabin puts on the leather jacket and goes through all that torture with a cigarette - it is perfection. Pre - War Existentialism at its finest! The shot of Françoise carrying the flowers down the alley by the factory - this is the kind of poetry that cinema alone is capable of.

So what's my problem? Something a bit unacknowledged - ly "pulpy" in its heart? Ultimately, is it a "real" Work of Art? How many films really are? Does this matter, in any way?

Carné's reputation is complicated. The younger generation - the Nouvelle Vague - really denigrated him, it seems. How much did this have to do with his being seen as a collaborator during the Nazi Occupation, and how much did this actually have to do with his style? He needed Prévert, that seems clear. Prévert - how does he do it? Screenplays with such a deeply poetic quality, still managing to move and inflect. Genius. Gabin - my favorite screen actor. What he doesn't know about screen acting isn't worth knowing. His poise. His coiled energy - that voice that, at the drop of a hat, can modulate from silence and repose into a vicious growl. Arletty - when I first saw her in Children of Paradise I was mesmerized. Every time I've heard someone say "But I don't understand why people fall all over her - she's not really THAT hot!" it has felt like a friendship dealbreaker. At the very least, it evokes Andrew Sarris' great line that anyone who resists Children of Paradise's charm deserves never to see Paris.

Maybe I see through this film a little bit. Maybe some of its gravitas seems not quite earned. But look at that set! That street! The crowds! All those fantastic details - the bored coat - check girl plunged into her book during the dog show. And that ending, with its brilliant pile - up of several key images, one at a time...which makes me think of what we lost when we lost Maurice Jaubert, not just a great film composer, but also a brilliant critic of film music and its meaning:

"In The Lost Patrol - -otherwise an admirable film- - the director was apparently alarmed by the silence of the desert in which the story was laid. He might well have realized the dramatic possibilities of silence, but instead he assaulted the ear -without a moment's pause- with a gratuitous orchestral accompaniment which nearly destroyed the reality of the visuals."

Well, Jaubert practiced what he preached - so much of this film is underscored by little more than subtle and ominous low - register percussion (tympani, but not only, I think...). Are those the storm clouds looming over Europe when this film was made? Or is that reading too much into it all?

And, after that question - one more question: how can the man who made Hôtel du Nord, Quai des Brumes. Le Jour Se Lève and Les Enfants du Paradis be considered more - or - less a Tradition de Qualité hack? These are the mysteries...Subjects for further study and reflection.

We were having one of those parlor - game conversations, and we decided that Last Year In Marienbad was the "Worst Great Film of All Time". Maybe I should start this on IMDb, as a list...It would be interesting to see if people can stick with that as the concept - not overrated, or anything like that. Definitely great, definitely bad. What about Resnais makes this possible? He is gifted, he has things to say, he understands film form. He's not a pseudo - intellectual, but he might be a SHALLOW intellectual. Dropping names, connecting jejune scenes to major historical or cultural events, doing the "life is theater" thing until you're ready to strangle yourself. We know Claridge is a fancy hotel - why do we have to see the marquée as an establishing shot every time it shows up? Belmondo has lost his feral beauty, unreplaced by any particular depth. This film makes me miss '80s French TV with its intellectual surface and its hemming and hawing: "well, yes...Baudelaire...but, still...Girardoux...and, then, also...Trotsky!"

Sometimes I think I've seen every great film I'm ever going to see, and that it is only my love for FILM and not for FILMS that keeps me going. But then I saw Visconti's "Ossessione"...

It was interesting to hear a score by Stephen Sondheim. It had its thing - some feeling for the period. Not a classic film score, but not bad. The look of the film reminded me of Bertolucci's Conformist which is, however, a much greater movie. What were all the little animals about? If they were about the fact that Stavisky was ultimately a trapped animal, then that's terrible.And Resnais is too obvious with the flowers - he should've studied Douglas Sirk more.

I think this has to be my last Resnais film.

It's a bubbe meise...LIU.

I have a friend who thinks this is a great movie. Or that there is something great about it. The progression from the tropics of Ile de la Réunion to freezing snowy Switzerland - or should we call that a degeneration? Well, in either case, I got to read up on Environmental Determinism - read IMDb and you can learn things! Well, at least sometimes...

Where was I? Oh yeah, I have a friend who thinks this is a great movie. Or that there are great things about it. Well, I guess there are some. I mean, I'm a real sucker for Nouvelle Vague referencing: Arizona Jim, Johnny Guitar, Renoir's La Marseillaise...that kind of stuff. And the shape - shifting blonde. Like in Vertigo. The Environmental thing is audacious - L'Amour Fou, in spades! Lots of efficiency, scenes doing double - duty in a jump - cut kind of way. Ridiculously French Movie Elegance, rivaling Ava Gardner movies and things like that, but with its own cultural specificity.

But ultimately, I feel like the elegance and the directorial interjections don't really speak to each other, and don't really add up to so much. The film feels strenuous, and not in a way that I find so rewarding. I think that one of the ideas is that, underneath all of the movie conceits, there is a kernel of painful truth about the anarchic craziness of love and passion. Well, that might be so. But I think there are many films that make that point - can I say "better"? OK, I will! I'd like to say "more artistically", or "in a more penetrating way", or "more clearly", etc...But "better" will do for now.

All right, it was fun, I'll admit it...Lino Ventura doing his thing, a Simonin adaptation (like Touchez Pas au Grisbi, one of my favorite films), lots of Culture Clash between "high" and "low" language - illustrated brilliantly in Michel Audiard's script. A classic "modern composer" scene (I collect those), some funny music cues (especially the church organ playing the movie's theme as the wedding processional). But it ain't a great movie. Another reviewer here called it something like "the worst - directed French classic", and that sounds about right. It's a movie of bits and moments. The more serious and sustained the action scene is supposed to be, the more unsuccessful the movie is. I fell asleep trying to watch it on DVD. But it works in the theater - pretty much...

Late at night...when your standards are low, you may be impressed by a movie where some characters talk as though they are actually intelligent and capable of thought. Where kids are bratty and lovable in turns, just like real kids. Where being some kind of artist is neither denigrated nor raised up to some kind of quasi - Godlike status. Where there is low - key, experiential understanding of what happens when people who have little or nothing in common are stuck into a crowded space for hours and are forced to interact. Where understated care has been put into lighting and set design.

Please pay attention to the way avant - garde designer Clifton Webb interacts with normal chairs. It's a wonderfully observed throwaway running gag.

This film is a remote cousin to Bunuel's Mexican Bus Ride. Some of it looks like it could have been directed by Edgar Ulmer. The story is what it is and the romantic leads are not that compelling (although Anne Francis is of course very pretty). Turn off the lights and let it happen. There's a nicely - filmed sunrise...

I've been waiting for the right time to watch this again. The outsized scale of everything looms large in my memory. We all reshape films in our mind and sometimes we make better films than the real film...such is the case here, to some extent. The Telephone Hour, with its Kitsch - Camp - Schlock Quasi - Eisensteinian cutting and framing. That has always been the Masterpiece scene for me. And the family up in heaven, with their saccharine smiles and their cassocks, and Paul Lynne's lightly transgressive "Ed? I love you!" and the Pseudo - Renaissance melismas. Equally genius.

Watching it now (I think I was 8 when I first saw it, when it came out), I find that many things don't really work. I filtered those out. But I forgot how great "Honestly Sincere" was. And how wild and sexy "I've Got a Lot of Living to Do" gets.

I once read an article that discussed the style of George Sidney. The writer did a great job of not going too tongue - in - cheek, although Sidney's style seems like what Douglas Sirk would do if he didn't have a brain in his head. I looked for this article, but no luck...

Until I read stuff in these last days, I had no idea Rosie was supposed to be Hispanic. That would have added all kinds of nuances to the relationship between her and Maureen Stapleton's character. It would've added some punch to the Mother's resistance to her son's potential marriage. Instead we get this one - note Pseudo - Oedipal riff that has been woefully denatured. Would I have preferred more obvious "Jewish Mother" stereotypes? Well...it's not really that. It just would've all felt more "motivated". And it would've added a funny meta - riff to the usual Jewish Mother trope where whatever the son decides to do, it's inferior to the choice of becoming a Doctor. This mother wants her son to be a songwriter rather than a scientist!

The Russian Ballet stuff is forced and unfunny, with a typically American "anti - High Art" bias that annoys me. Conversely, listening to all of these old Broadway and Hollywood musical professionals having to wrap their minds around the 3 - chord vocabulary of Rock and Roll is sad, touching, and hilarious. Hey Johnny Green, "We Love You, Conrad" is a long way from "Body and Soul", no?

I notice I haven't said anything about Ann - Margret. She is hot. The opening and closing of this movie is surreal, existing in that Movieland which is everywhere and nowhere. She owns that space. They hit the jackpot with her in this way, but I think I would love to read (or maybe ever write) a detailed post - Mulvey - esque analysis of what she represents, both in this scene and in the film in general.

While I was wearing out my first copy of Sarris's American Cinema, checking off his top films for each year, most people I know were calling films like this one a "Great Movie!". I was confused. How can a film like this - acknowledged "Great Movie" - rank so low chez Sarris? Meanwhile, I guess I became a cinema snob. Watched hundreds and hundreds of films, but never saw most of those "AFI Classics". Well, thank you Turner Classic Movies - you're like one big mopping - up operation! Checking 'em off, one by one...

This one? A classic Ersatz Masterpiece. If Iconic Acting equals Great Movie, then it's Great Movie. But it doesn't - not really...However, as Auteurism recedes into history, you can love those Suffering Stonefaces for the icons that they are. The Gravitas of Burt Lancaster. It's downright operatic.The Pained Intensity of Montgomery Clift. You know he was in the closet! Did you hear that? And he messed up his face!

The photography is yummy, too.

This movie isn't about anything. Even people who like it a lot admit that it doesn't really have much directorial POV. And the thing in the surf is really short. But maybe that's actually genius: having a two - second shot that becomes so classic. Maybe that's "restraint". Is it?

Was I entertained? Sort of...I guess. I'm actually not so sure what that even means anymore. If I'm engaged I'm entertained. I stuck through it, so...who knows. OK TCM and AFI List, bring on Shane and A Place In The Sun!

The commodity is empty; it has no exchange value any longer. Everybody knows this, but nothing has come along as a symbol of value to replace it (the commodity), so everybody keeps helplessly and hopelessly following it.

"Only if we are able to disentangle the future (the perception of the future, the concept of the future, and the very production of the future) from the traps of growth and investment will we find a way out of the vicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure to the financial abstraction of semiocapital. The key to this disentanglement can be found in a new form of wisdom: harmonizing with exhaustion." - Franco Berardi Bifo, The Uprising

Alexander Payne knows all of this, but he dropped the ball. Was he scared? Did he not realize (this is a special pyrrhic victory of the late Capitalist system) that the secret to making transgressive ideas taboo is to give the impression that they belong to outmoded dialectical thinking and are just "too 60's" in their nature to be taken seriously? In other words, to defang them rather than ban them, as other totalitarian systems do, did and have done?

Payne was able to show how the symbology of American Exceptionalism (Manifest Destiny, the Frontier, Mt. Rushmore, Regionalism, etc.) has become exhausted and used up. When John Ford, at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence showed how Shinbone's peacefulness and modernity had been bought at the cost of authenticity and aura, he was in deep exploration of the dialectic of enlightenment and all of the problematic around notions of "progress". Payne's town of Hawthorne is like Shinbone more than a hundred years later, with its dismal bars, and its Coors Light, and its Nail Salon.

So why don't I really like this film? Because it's overladen with sad little over - telegraphed "Epiphanies", almost none of which are believable...Epiphanies are happy accidents. The artist is in a rough position: he or she must "create" them, but, at the same time, must polish and work them to the point where they seem to just ARISE. But this film is full of ersatz little moments - ersatz the way that the sentimental, uncritical use of such weighted signifiers as Black and White photography and refracted Roots Music are ersatz. This little kiss. That little glance. Someone babbles away ironically - then stops all of a sudden. The camera holds on that moment. And we realize "oh, this is LOSS - real LOSS. With nothing left that can cover it up". Man, we're banged over the head with that point before the movie is over. And all this does is to take a film that could have had something beautiful and hard in it, that could've said something real and important about the death of a dream and the grasping at empty talismans and turn it into Goyishe Schmaltz.

And the ending! The victory of appearances, again! Well, at least it's consistent...

I really wanted to love this film. I still want to like it a lot. I am a big fan of any kind of obstruction or limitation. I really enjoy formal precepts. Oulipo is an amazing thing. Did it produce "masterpieces"? By extension...It cleared the air. It revealed the machinery and "made" nature of literary production. It de - reified "inspiration" and/or "emotion" in art. These things are great...The reflexivity in Godard...amazing. OK, the artificiality in Dogville! Also amazing.

But I didn't feel the tension between the "Obstructions" and their products. The game was obvious, but what was learned? Leth made a few movies, and they all circled around The Perfect Human, his film from 1967. But did they land? He remade it in Bombay. He made it into a cartoon. He made it in Cuba. He made it as a classic "Three Colors: Whatever" Eurotrash film (in Brussels).

Maybe the moral is you can never make a (former) mentor into a student, and if you think you really want to, you probably should start teaching. Get 'em while they're young, while they're really impressionable. Talk about restrictions as a kind of craft; make the students aware of the need to work and explore rather than to sit around and wait for "inspiration". This is surely useful. But for Leth? He seems happy enough self - medicating in his little quasi - retirement paradise in Haiti...what has he done since this film?

The Perfect Human is not really a Masterpiece, IMHO. But it has in incredible "look". Sometimes I really think that the sixties were really the highpoint of filmmaking. The look of films from that time is so etched - lifelike and artificial, both at the same time. The screen image, the chiaroscuro...the clothes, the manner. Far away from the thirties "Dream Factory", but still aware that the film is an object, a thing...The Five Obstructions has that shiny, sweaty video look. It looks too casual. I can't take leave, not at all. I want to find the object that it is compelling. But I don't.

I am really afraid to say anything negative about this film, given the incredibly low level of critique demonstrated by the people here who didn't like it, but...

I have never thought that this was anywhere near the best of his '60s films. But I jumped at the chance to see it on the big screen again yesterday. I hoped to revise my opinion. Which I did not.

People who do not understand why the Paris of the moment when the film was made is used to represent a future dystopia should be condemned to never watching a film outside of the Mainstream ever again. The point is blindingly obvious: dystopia is all around us. Using music and lighting and camera movement to represent that, rather than relying on triumphantly gaudy and expensive production design, shows that Godard is a filmmaker down to the tips of his toes. He learned so much from the American directors who had no recourse to expensive sets and had to use shadows and fog...I'm thinking of Lang on Man Hunt, Mann on G - Men. Of course, Ulmer on Detour, etc.

All this is amazing. And there are great set pieces (the swimming pool, for example). And the use of the same couple of bars of music, over and over, is great, too.

Look, I don't need to believe in the relationships and the ideas in Godard films in order to enjoy them. Karina and Constantine was perhaps a very inspired mismatch. And I've read and studied lots of Brecht. But Alphaville just doesn't SWING for me the way most of the others from this time do. But, you know what? I'm going to watch it again.

Yikes, indeed! I fly every week...

It's like those horror stories of restaurants: what's actually going on back there?

What's going on up in the cockpit?

I had an emergency landing last year - en route for Istanbul, diverted to St. John's, Newfoundland. 2 hours on the ground before takeoff, bumpy start, turbulence...The flight attendants got edgier and edgier. Soon they were practically barking instructions.

I did the only sane thing - fell asleep. Woke on the descent into St. John's.

What must have been going on in the cockpit? After seeing this film, I have some idea.

TMI? Well, no.

I really admire artists who come up with some kind of unique or wacky conceit or concept. And then, rather than leave it by the barstool, follow it through, in a clear - headed, not overly overstated kind of way.

6 Black Box stories. 3 - D glasses. A cockpit. A few sound effects. Some very effective editing - only when it's needed.

You want to laugh at the geese chapter. Just because it's really short and ridiculous. But it ain't funny. At all.

Those people on the last flight, the Sioux City, Iowa one, were incredible. Their professionalism can truly be called touching. They reminded me of some of the soldiers in Ford's Fort Apache (certainly NOT the Henry Fonda character!). There's actually a lot of available documentation about that one.

An amazing film. Recommend it? Well...Best to know what you're getting into.

I'm looking forward to Stranger by the Lake. Saw the preview, looks like Guiraudie learned something in the last 10 years. Focus, focus! Doesn't matter what you focus on so much. Just focus. Lots of propositions in this movie. Some of them are sexy. Some (not many) of them are funny. Some are yummy - the Golden Hour seemed to show up a lot, and the lighting in general was pretty cool. But to talk about Magical Realism or Surrealism in terms of this film seems to overstate the case. It's more like an active but unruly imagination in love with cinema, and all of its coolest moments - can we make the frogs rain down like they did in Magnolia?

He thinks he's making Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but he's really making The President's Analyst.

I will confess it: Godard is "my" filmmaker. My mother took me to see Weekend when it came out - when I was 12. I wasn't really precocious when it came to films, but this one made a big impact on me. It's still, 45 years later, my favorite of his. I started watching films seriously about 10 years later. And I loved pretty much all of Godard's '60s films. But the Dziga Vertov period stuff really left me cold. I was lucky enough to see Sauve Qui Peut when it came out, and it felt like a (slightly feeble) return to form. Well, it's more than 30 years since then, and "my" Godard films really remain the ones from the '60s. I've had hot and cold feelings about most of the post 1980 ones I've seen. But Notre Musique and Film Socialisme have really become important to me. They share that elegiac tone that can be one of the markers of a Late Period style. Godard's investigations into and questions about the nature of Image and Image Making remain as astute and as funny as ever. But the rhythm has changed. Sometimes the tempo is so languid. And the relationship between the intensity with which the intellectual constatations are made and the limited amount of "truth content" they reveal can be frustrating and annoying. All that being said, the first section of this film, Hell (Enfer), is a career highpoint - one of the most brilliant examples of the use of collage/appropriation/new media I've ever seen. The conflation of classic film depictions of war and violence with documentary footage and videos of "real" War is like a whole course on the Simulacra. But what Baudrillard could never do is implicate the viewer the way Godard can - some of the images, even some of the most distorted and degenerated, are so beautiful! We know we are spectators, passive ones, deriving pleasure from scenes of horror. And the film, especially in the second section, displays some sense of outrage about this. But it is a very muted outrage. You can't call it "defeated", because a defeated person could never find the strength to make this film.

What does Sarajevo mean for Godard? Europe as a site - if we can call Europe a site - seemed to be committed to Humanistic Values, chastened forever by World War II and the Holocaust. Sure, there was plenty of European repression, in Algeria, for example. But there hadn't been a real WAR on European soil since 1945. Sarajevo reveals at best, the fragility, at worst, the lie of the Dream of "Europe". A parade of intellectuals is brought on stage to mourn the Sarajevo library and engage in some Disaster Tourism. This section seems to be infected by a certain amount of Western European snobbery and sense of superiority. But there are great moments: one of the best - ever lines in a Godard film - "If anyone understands me, then I wasn't clear". Auto - derision, baby! Gotta love it...And the scene of an exhausted Godard framed by a spectacular Duty Free display at the Sarajevo airport is not only beautiful in itself, but also evocative of many Grand Moments of Conspicuous Commodity Overload from throughout Godard's career (Two Or Three Things I Know About Her being only the most obvious example).

I'm not sure about section three (Paradise). On first viewing, I really didn't like it. It seemed totally anti - climactic. But after reading some commentary, I'm warming up to it. Maybe I'll come back and edit this review after I watch it a couple more times...I've always had mixed feelings about Godard's Girls. They've always seemed hyper - fetishized, without his critiquing that as much as I might like. Olga - and Judith - are both adorable characters. And they're very clever and thoughtful. But there's something twee about their seriousness, as though Godard was being condescending towards the combination of Earnestness and Girliness. Or something like that. This is a quality that perhaps does not gain in attractiveness as one grows older...

Summation: A brilliant and beautiful film from an Old Lion who refuses to give up, either on his ideals or on his idealism, dated and used up as they may seem. All of his world - weariness and his cynicism can't mask that. The site of this film is not the barricades of '68, from the viewpoint of a 38 year old. These are the barricades of 2004, from the viewpoint of a 74 year old. Bless him.

Where is my gift of exegesis? Gone, gone, swept away by my outrage. 4 1/2 hours of my life lost...

The new apologias - they are so clever. Everyone knows you can't say "I was only following orders" anymore. That's become a hoary cliché. So what to do? Study subliminal use of proportions - that does the trick. Show horrible atrocities, and give the feeling you're being unflinching. But at the same time, "balance it out" with equal or greater atrocities from other sides that actually take up more screen time. Hey, it was War, y'know? It was bad...real bad. German soldiers - they were so torn. They loved their country - is that so wrong? If they had Jewish friends, they killed their superior officers to save them. I know a movie is a movie, but is there ANY record of such a thing happening? A big radio star is put to death for fraternization...I know a movie is a movie, but is there ANY record of such a thing happening? She's executed - the only Jew who is an actual character lives! From what I've read (and I've read a lot), Aryan stars who did such things were threatened - that's all.

Was für einen Schund!

PS - people who hate this review. Go ahead, hate it. It's certainly not my best. But check yourselves and ask what is bubbling under the surface of your assumed liberalism. The most pernicious aspect of this series is that it presents the whole period as though it was some kind of bad dream. And it pays lip service to the Holocaust as though (and this we KNOW not to be true) it was just perpetrated by the smallest group of MOST fanatical monsters. Hey, keep that WirtschaftWunder dream alive, homeboys!

Can we choose when our great period is going to be? I don't think so. But for many filmmakers it comes at the right time, right along with the Zeitgeist: Godard in the 60s, Scorsese in the 70s... Kaütner, however, had the great misfortune to have his great period right in the middle of the Third Reich. But the man is a real filmmaker, and this is one of his best.

The camera glides like Ophuls'. It spies, it imposes, it takes a respectful distance. As in the films of the true greats, objects take on so much meaning - almost a life of their own. And Franziska is a really interesting character: a forward, modern woman (she cuts right to the chase as far as spending the night is concerned) and a self - sacrificing perfect Nazi Frau - both at the same time.That first night is so-o-o sexy! And the matching trench coats - so cool! And the farewells at the train station - so epic. Beautiful!

Is this a "Nazi movie"? All films are ideological. Germany - in this film - is clearly associated with ROOTEDNESS - all else, everywhere else, with rootlessness. But, while the film critiques this rootless life, can we imagine a disenfranchised segment of a contemporary German audience noticing how attractive this rootlessness is made, what with groovy music, sexy women, lots of drinking and dancing...? Lines to be read between? Kaütner's films seem lightly transgressive, albeit lightly enough that they could be made...

The "Good German" Christoph is such a submissive, weak character - steadfast, OK, but so bloodless! But maybe that's ideological, too: REAL men are wanderers, no matter where they wander. And real women stay put at home. Sounds pretty Nazi to me! It's not that far from Harlan and Opfergang... In the last half hour the film proceeds towards its ending, towards the only overtly Nazi scene. Various possible outcomes arise, especially when, at the fourth train station leave taking, Franziska and Michel keep missing each other. I guess we could quote the great Douglas Sirk: "You don't believe the happy ending, and you're not supposed to". But what other ending could there have been in Germany in 1941, anyway?

I've been watching a lot of Kaütner lately. Fascinating. He is really due for a serious revival. A Criterion box? That would shake some things up. Imagine the great sociological discussions that would barely deal with the films themselves at all! Well, I'd rather not. But there's a lot to talk about.

This is my favorite film.

No way do I think it's the BEST film (although it would be on my Top 100)

But the older I get, the more GRISBI speaks to me, with its portrait of aging, friendship, subculture...

And it touches me - down deep.

I went back and purchased DVDs of some of the great Gabin films of the '30s: Pépé le Moko, Le Jour Se Lève, La Bête Humaine. I believe that the more you know how beautiful and feral Gabin was in the '30s, the more touching it is to see him in his pajamas, brushing his teeth, listening to his favorite harmonica record.

There are millions of "One Last Heist" films if we want to talk about GENRE.

But this film is on a whole other level.

Max/Gabin is exhausted, but this is the only life he knows. He plays the game - flirting, love making, slapping, shooting, escaping...He's still spry - he can still do it. Sometimes he still even seems to enjoy it.

The film is about what it's about, but it can also be seen as an analogy for many things. Gabin himself still doing it, not least of all.

We all have to keep doing it when it's the only life we know.

Another cliché: sex is rushed and provisional, and the real love exists between two men.

But Becker lavishes so much detail and care on the relationship between Max and his friend Riton that the clichés are transcended.

Besides, the relationship between Max and Riton is also based on an inequality. There is a constant assertion of Max's superiority and dominance over Riton:

"What would you do in my place, Max?"

"I'll never be in your place, you poor sot!"

Is sex, in fact, no more than just another DUTY, just another part of the construction of the Tough Guy persona for Max? Look at the scene where he has his afternoon assignation with his classy yet sexy American lover:

(she,from the bedroom)

"Vous m'aimez, Max?"

(he,outside the bedroom,thinks of Riton,lights a cigarette)

"J'arrive..."

(he walks back in)

The economy. The derision.

The film ends with the kind of fatalistic trope that I, rightly or wrongly, associate with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. At least I guess that was the first place where I really encountered it. Everything is risked. Everything is lost.

It has been done. Before and since. But none of that changes the poignancy and power of the way that it's done here.

In the end, in order to keep going in spite of all sorts of losses, Max must continue to perform. All of his roles. A virtuoso performance, in the end as in the beginning.

He goes to the mob hangout restaurant with the American babe, he mingles,he plays his favorite harmonica tune on the jukebox one more time.

La Vie Continue

A virtuoso performance by Max AND by Gabin. And by Jacques Becker.

Gliding...

The inexorable movement - of life.

Why talk about "camera movements" - tracks, dollies, cranes - at all, if we're not going to talk about what they DO - what they MEAN.

Anybody with enough money can fill their film with dolly shots.

The Dance...

Of life

Of death

Trains. Balls and trains.

The circularity of a "white lie"

The elegance of an elegant ensemble each bringing their own life story to bear on the way they inhabit (and do they!) their roles. You don't need to know anything about this, but the more you know the deeper the film gets.

Maybe the key line is when Boyer says to Darrieux "Our relationship is only superficially superficial".

Those who need to "identify" with the characters in a film, and thus find that the social position of these characters makes engagement with this film impossible...Well, I just feel sorry for you. Really.

I think another read through of a concise cinema book - maybe Sarris' American Cinema - is in order.What does he write about Ophuls? "His elegant characters lack nothing and lose everything."

Exactly.

But besides all that...

Composition and the clarity of the arc. Underneath all of the gliding and circularity, an unstoppable forward motion. Carried through and fulfilled like in very,very few films. The word "Masterpiece" - unfortunate word! - must be used.

One word to my fellow IMDb reviewers: I really think the word "boring" should carry the same onus as an unacknowledged spoiler. You are bored? Check yourself.

This review has nearly no content, but it is very hard to write anything about perfection.