Weekend
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Movie Reviews of Weekend
Movie Review: Passe...
Summary: 2 Stars
It's been 4 decades and viewing the political notions in Weekend had for me the feel of the stale dialogue that comes from aging activists who have built a lifetime's ethos and idealogy constructed around insights and ideas they had when they were 19 years old. No matter that history may have demonstrated how wrong-headed and downright misinformed they may have been, they remain true believers. Mind you, I have no idea what Jean Luc Godard believes today, but I believe he was part of that French intellectual class that embraced some, if not all, of the "revolutionary" rubbish of the 60's and 70's that passed for brilliance in its day.
This film is a product of the late 60's when intellectual France, much as intellectual America, was being galvanized into action by opposition to the Viet Nam War and by a romantic notion of the Youth Generation as torch bearers for a new age of enlightenment. Godard distances himself from the nonsense his young revolutionaries spout, so I don't know what part, if any, he embraces or rejects. Godard specialists can guide you there.
What I see on film, is how tired hot-button political issues become with time and the perspective of history. Likewise, how utterly mundane what once might have been shocking or "revolutionary" becomes with that same time and distance.
I always brace myself when I hear the word "absurdist" applied to any work of art. That term can cover the range of the razor sharp satire of a Voltaire to the inane shenanigans of the Three Stooges. At least the Stooges are straightforward and un-pretentious. What we get in a much absurdist art is a lot of muck thrown against a wall to see if any sticks. But with the pretense! Artsy fartsy stoogery.
Director Mike Figgis in the extras says Godard's films inspired because they were "full of ideas". Yep. You will have to judge whether any of them are worth your time to sort out as you follow this meandering tale.
The film starts out well, when after a pornographic monologue (no doubt shocking in 1967) we are introduced to a despicable bourgeois couple, intent on murder of rich relatives and unbeknownst to themselves, each other. They are vile and amusing, and yes there soon comes the famous endless traffic jam, and it is a nice conceit. What follows after that, I must confess, increasingly bored and irritated me. An occasional aside or moment was fine, but most of it was about as interesting as having an insurance policy explained, or the subtleties of Gallic political theory.
Godard is an acquired taste apparently. I have tried. I find some interest in Breathless, Le Petit Soldad, and several others, but the deep regard some have for his work is lost on me. He may have broken new ground, no doubt. But there is a certain French existential ennui that breathes beneath his films that just doesn't appeal to me. It may be a perfecly valid viewpoint, but it cloys. His embrace of film history while questioning its relevance gets old fast. I must try some of his later works, because what I have sampled from the early stuff seems terribly dated and trivial today.
Movie Review: A Flawed Experiment
Summary: 2 Stars
The extreme reviews here are very misleading; people either say it's the worst film ever made or Godard's best film. Don't believe either camp. If you're not an expert on Godard and/or 1960s avant-garde cinema, I could definitely see a person writing off this movie as "sheer pretentious crap", but that opinion would derive from a mixture of shock and ignorance. On the other hand, those who say this is Godard's finest work must be riding high on acid and Marxism themselves. The truth of the matter is that "Weekend", like every one of Godard's post-Anna Karina films, is more a flawed experiment than anything else: On occasion, interesting and thought-provoking, but more often static and didactic to the point of alienating the viewer rather than converting them. I respect Godard's attempt to create a new cinema built on "ideas" rather than "emotion", but in my opinion, he went too far in this direction. A piece of art devoid of any emotion is a hollow experience and don't we have enough of that in our crude, consumerist society? And as far as experiments go, much of what he was doing in "Weekend", he had already done and with vastly better results in "Pierrot le Fou". That film was a perfect balance between Godard the political-scientist and Godard the post-modern film-maker. Plus, "Pierrot le Fou" benefited by having Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. They brought heart and humor to Godard's abstract explosion of ideas; a perfect symbiotic relationship between director and actor(s) that he never achieved again. "Weekend" starts off very promising with the sex dialogue and the long tracking shot of the traffic-jam, leading to a car-crash...but then it descends into a grating mess of dated ideology and too much dead space. You really wish Belmondo and Karina would pop in and show the cast they don't have to be mere nails to Godard's hammer.Movie Review: Are there O stars?
Summary: 1 Stars
I am SOOOOOOOO mad. I've just wasted almost two hours of my life watching this "movie." And why? Because of the reviewers that gave this piece of sh** 5 and 4 star ratings. What exactly are you people on that you would even remotely like this film? Maybe it's that pretentious, high-brow snobbery that the best pseudo-intellectuals are versed in. I like alot of French films: Betty Blue, Amelie, etc., but this is sheer garbarge couched in "let's see how much I can piss off my audience before they claim I'm a genius." The next time someone wants to make a movie like this, PLEASE, give the money and the camera to 12-year old with a 70 IQ. I guarantee it will be ALOT better.Movie Review: Warning: will not play on PS2
Summary: 1 Stars
If you're like many and use a Playstation 2 as your DVD player, BEWARE - this DVD of "Weekend" has serious problems playing on the PS2. Two of the special features do not work, resulting in freezing a still image on the screen before the PS2 finally gives up with an "unable to read disc" message, and the film itself exhibits the same behavior when you get into the later chapters. I waited for "Weekend" to come out on DVD for years and was majorly bummed by this. I can understand a few incompatibilities when the PS2 was brand new, but there's simply no excuse for DVD's being released that don't work on the system these days.