72/100

For about an hour, Godard's greatest film, achieving a perfect balance between playful dialectics and formal bravado. Even the epigrams don't annoy me as much as usual, perhaps because they so annoy the protagonists (who just keep doggedly asking which way Oinville is, shouting louder and louder over the quotations). In the home stretch, however, watching it starts to resemble what I imagine it was like to see Andy Kaufman stand onstage reading The Great Gatsby aloud—admirable in principle, but tedious to actually endure for any length of time. There's a big difference between the astonishing traffic-jam sequence-shot, with its constant visual dynamism, and (to cite just one late example) an Algerian dude eating a sandwich for several minutes…

The film where Godard expresses possibly his most vehement hatred of humanity I've seen and posits that the behavior of the bourgeois are empty, selfish, meaningless gestures that must be smashed but admits there is no good solution to replace the chaos in its void.

Weekend follows a wealthy couple in a loveless relationship who cheat on each other and wish to murder the other; they also wish to acquire the inheritance of the woman's father and have no qualms about killing him if necessary. The audience is immediately compelled to feel disgust with the leads and feel nothing but contempt for their narcissistic nature.

On the way they encounter a traffic jam, and here is where we get someplace…

Godard is saying, in no uncertain terms, that western consumer society is dying, that cinema is dying, and that the only thing that will come afterwards is a hellish, blackened terrain of cannibalism and inhumanity. He obliterates every rule of narrative storytelling, breaking the fourth wall, grinding the film to a halt to allow characters to spout Marxist rhetoric for minutes on end, almost daring the viewer to stop watching. Godard is telling the audience that every cheap thrill they yearn to experience at the movies is trite and meaningless and the very format of narrative cinema an enabler of exploitation. Then, there are stunning scenes of visceral power, especially that amazing tracking shot of a massive traffic jam in…

Watched Godard's 'Weekend' for the first time in 45 years. One of the great punctuaton marks in film history. I went back, read Pauline Kael's review from 1968. Spot on: "At thirty-seven, he is in something of the position in the world of film that James Joyce was at a considerably later age in the world of literature; that is, he has paralyzed other filmmakers by shaking their confidence (as Joyce did to writers), without ever reaching a large public...Like Joyce, Godard seems to be a great terminal figure. The most gifted younger directors and student filmmakers all over the world recognize his liberation of the movies; they know that he has opened up a new kind of moviemaking, that…

Godard, you motherfucker.

After the past few Godard films I've watched left me either disappointed (Vivre sa Vie, Alphaville) or bored (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Histoire(s) du Cinema), I hesitantly sat down to watch Weekend expecting to further my conclusion that Godard was an overrated hack not worth the credit he's often given.

Well I was wrong.

Very wrong.

Weekend is one of the greatest subversions of cinematic conventions I've seen since WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Godard takes his familiar tropes and flips them on their head while flipping off his audience maniacally in the process.

The savagery within Weekend fascinated me. Whether it was the continual shots of car crashes (most notably the brilliant…

The peculiar nature of the Vietnam War has had its effect on films. Past war propaganda films (pro and con) were like the wars: straight, "us vs. them," goal-oriented cine-journalism with hard-hitting MARCH OF TIME style narration. But Vietnam defies traditional documentary technique: it's anachronistically conventional in a nuclear age, it's without front lines, clear purpose or definite enemy, and is transmitted primarily through television. I have yet to see an effective pro-Vietnam War documentary, because the Armed Forces' WHY WE FIGHT style just does not suit this conflict. TELL ME LIES is best when it is most free-wheeling, when it makes use of all the media available.

We are now beginning to see films which have a definite post-Vietnam…