Tag Archives: film criticism

Made in U.S.A. [1966)

Primary colors.  Walt Disney with blood.  Bogart as a woman.  Bing!  Machine gun………———–.-.-.-.-.-.-.–.–.  No no no.

It’s like it never existed.  Why steal the plot from a pulp novel?  There is no plot.  Mise-en-scène translated as charade.  Bing!  Rat-a-tat-tata-a-a–a-a-a–a-a-a-!

We remember Robert Strange McNamara.  No no no.

Everything dies…baby that’s a fact.

No, it doesn’t matter the pop art.  It doesn’t matter the palette.

She wants to write a book about Oswald…and the 17 murdered after J.F.K.’s assassination.  The witnesses.  As reported in P—- ——.  Honk honk!  Zoooooom!  Swoosh!!!

Why pump the little guy full of lead when you can use a shoe?  Stiletto.  ^^^

The author, who is not the author (who is not the author [who is not the author]), is killed.

Stop making sense.

Anna Karina’s last movie with Godard.  They both live.  That’s it.  And so long to Marianne…captured for a moment in time.

She doesn’t fit the color scheme.  She is all pastel rose.  Ochre.  Light, watery hues.  She is a reflection.  She doesn’t fit.  Please:  take inventory of my bar.  One pop singer?  The song is singing the singer.

No.  It is much more likely that it never happened.  Remember:  use Ockham’s Razors for that manly-close shave!

Yes.  You’re trying to find out what I know without telling me what you know, eh?  Whaddaya know?  Dontcha know?

No, it was shown.  It is contradictory in such a short expanse.

All my lovers, backstage, hungry for men…about Sally and Annette.  The girls were willing.  A called honey.  B mercenaries.  So summer…virgin wife next door.  Sinner me, passion plaything.  Brother and sister (off limits).  Young, innocent campus doll killing time.  Strange McNamara.  361.  Strange killy hunter affair.  Lovers prowl sin.  Getaway face score the mourner outfit.  Pity the fugitive pigeon afterwards.  AH!!!

Here we are:  The Jugger!

No, nothing to do with that.

You want a real film review???

Better to talk of Florestan und Eusebius.  Fidelio.

OK.  We shall try again.

Take 2!!!  Quiet on the laptop!!!  (Quiet!)  Quiet please!! [Quiet everyone!]

Roll thoughts…and:  criticize!

Ok, yes…well…this is worse, but even better.  It’s not LOL starring Miley Cyrus.  Kevin Costner is not in the film.  It’s not American Pie:  Band Camp.  It’s not Wild Wild West with Will Smith.

There’s only two Dalmatians because the other 99 weren’t available. The Backstreet Boys did not make a cameo.

Yes, but there is an American flag burning.  Not in the film, you understand.

Ummm…  That guy from Ray…Jamie Foxx.  He is also not in this.  Lara Croft:  Tomb Raider?  I don’t know.

Yes, ok.  We like Clint Eastwood.  John Waters for New Balance.

Oh!  OK, yes:  the staged photo of the situation room…where they are “watching” “Osama bin Laden” get killed…but they’re actually not watching anything at all.  Right.  Getting warmer.  LOL.

Hot Tub…Time Machine…2?

Chuck Norris Planet of the Apes Wizard of Oz.  Patrick Swayze and Obama.  eBay.  G.I. Joe and Yoda.  Getting warmer.  Warmer.  Burning.

Liz Taylor G.I. Blues Ron Howard with wrinkles.  Colder.  South Pole.

Chaplin porn Kodak.  What would Nixon do?  Warmer.  The Hobbit Bud Light Black Dynamite Smurfs miniskirts rock and roll?

That may be as close as you ever get.  The static cling of foreign intrigue.  View Master red MGM lion Technicolor beef sirloin top butt.

-PD

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Une Femme mariee [1964)

I want to write about the weirdest scene in Godard’s filmography up till this point, but I don’t.  It’s not a pleasant scene.  It is uncomfortable.  Unnerving.  I want to write about the pointy bras which figure visually into so much of this film, but I feel silly.  Pointy bras.

I want to talk about Macha Méril‘s hair and how once again Godard evokes Louise Brooks, but I…what?

The title.  It had to get more vague.  No.

There’s really no way of talking about this movie other than in its own language.  I often do that.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  But many times it is the only way.  Here.

It slips through the fingers so quickly.  If you do not write immediately, it is gone.  I take a break.  I charge my computer.  It has escaped.

Truth be told, I never had that good a grasp on it.

I have to get worked up to talk about a film like this.  I can’t check the news headlines for ten minutes on waynemadsenreport.com and then come back to it.

She is married.  Unhappy.  Every day she pretends.  She is an actor dating an actor.  Not the same.  The theater and its double.

Artaud is on the tip of his tongue.  Godard.  What is he driving at?

This is elusive film.  A cubist film.  Fragments.  If I stop to pause, it leaves me again.

I cannot give this treatise any ground.  Yes, a treatise like Debord.  In little mini-paragraphs.  Theses.  Something.  I don’t know.  Je’n s’pas.

It’s quick.  Before she’s said it [bam!] it’s gone.  He cuts.  Montage.  Gone.

Roger Leenhardt.  I did not know.  We don’t know.  Barnes & Ignoble.  Ig Nobel.  Banana peels.  Friction.  Slippery slip slopery.  Splits.

Does she say Thalidomide?  It moves so fast.  You are not French.  You have audible French, visual wordplay, puns everywhere…unfunny puns on soul, angel, sea.  Words in the middle of words.  Treatise.  trEATise.  Focus on a part.  How does the part tell a different story than the whole?  Passage.  Pas sage.  Unwise.  Not wise.  No sagacity.

You have to be on your toes with Godard…even to this day.  His mind is the quickest, slickest, oiled mechanism.  The actor…just a mechanism.  Is that a good translation?  It matters.  Are you reading the subtitles?

Some nights maybe you don’t feel like subtitles.  You want to watch National Lampoon’s Vacation…

My queue.  It is the same.  Juxtaposition.  Beethoven.  No accident.  Accidentals.  We reach like bad Joyces.  James…

The Holocaust comes into the oeuvre.  Why the barbers?  Indeed, she says…

Memory.  For him, integral.  For her, rien.  Give me ten more pointy bras.  Let me measure my breasts…nipple to nipple.  The world turns on the tips of tits.  No truer words ever spoken.  Into the arms of Venus de Milo.

Her laughing is like a rodent…a squirrel perhaps.  And then a woodpecker.  It is almost indistinguishable from sobbing.  Laugh tears.  Oh James…

Ingmar got nothing out of it, he says.  Godard took the long shot (extended take) and perverted it.  Torture.  Orgasmic laughs meant to liven up a marriage.  The couple sit and fidget.  Will they put on the Cal Tjader?

And then the husband threatens to rape his own wife.  Is that translation correct?  A significant line.  Vital.  Play acting?  I don’t think so.

Truth in jokes.  Expressed nowhere else.  Why the barbers?

If you sought an insular review, you have found it.  Only a cryptologist would claim spoilers.  And thus we can justify that this is indeed film criticism.  Mere reviews…

If you could double the size of your breasts with a Peruvian serum, would your husband blue you and make you Jell-O-sated?

All the brunettes are neutron blondes in the negative print.  Hitchcock has sensors under your seats to know when your butt has arisen.  Orly.

And the doctor cannot explain love.  Where does sex end and love begin, or vice versa?  Science still compares.  Love is neurochemically like OCD.  Quitting Facebook brings on symptoms akin to drug withdrawal.  Which drug?  How addictive?

It’s over.

-PD

2 Comments

Les Carabiniers [1963)

Iskra.  И́скра.  Spark.  Good film criticism requires a spark…something which separates it from run-of-the-mill recounting.  Our society is so impoverished.  Apparently Wikipedia didn’t put any of its recent fundraising money towards their article on The Caribineers [sic].  Nay, I had to stray to the rival IMDb to find what I was looking for.  I know how Wiki works (more or less).  People contribute information, at various levels of veracity and artfulness, to topical articles about which they feel at least an interest if not an expertise.  Perhaps IMDb works the same way.  I’m not sure.  One thing is sure in my book:  Wikipedia is the more powerful tool and, just as importantly, it is artfully austere–the Bauhaus of digi-pedias.  IMDb is not lacking in breadth (as concerns film), but it is clunky and feels like a really shitty version of amazon.com.

Business.  Amazon has owned IMDb since 1998.  I’ve gotten some great stuff from Amazon…some of it at a good price.  But Wikipedia does has a different feel, and for that it is to be commended.  It is the utopia ideal at work.  And that tangent brings me to the name.

Odile Geoffroy.  IMDb claims she was in Vivre sa vie as well as Les Carabiniers.  Perhaps.  It appears to have been quite a small role.  I do not recall it.  But at least IMDb (Amazon) gave me her name.  The same cannot be said for the woeful, woeful Wikipedia article titled The Caribineers.

Why Ms. Geoffroy?  Because her part in Les Carabiniers is anything but trivial.  Iskra.  Spark.  Из искры возгорится пламя.  From a spark a fire will flare up.  Yes, the brutes of Les Carabiniers really have a tough time offing Ms. Geoffrey’s character…even with a white handkerchief over her perfect, blond visage.  It’s the only way.  Her beauty is too strong for the base, lecherous soldiers tasked with shutting her up.  And then she begins to speak…

Yes, she has a mind.  She is not a mindless Venus–nor a venal Cleopatra.  But they shoot her anyway.  In fact, it takes a magazine full of bullets to finally keep her synapses from firing; her limbs from moving.

And so we have another political film from Jean-Luc Godard.  Again, like Le Petit soldat which preceded it by release but not creation, the political slant is not really towards a particular faction (as far as I can tell).  In other words, the Marxist-Leninist spark is just that:  a quick, tentative reference to something which was perhaps still taking hold in Godard’s mind.

What we do get is an anti-war film along the lines of Renoir’s La Grand illusion, but with the gritty realism of Rossellini’s first post-war films.  Roberto’s spirit is inextricably woven into the fabric of Les Carabiniers.  Albert Juross portrays the idiocy of war as well as Catharine Ribeiro portrays the pretty spoils of mo-bil-i-za-tion.  The latter (Ribeiro) would enjoy a long career as an iconoclastic singer.  Which brings up another point:

where was Anna Karina?  Belmondo?  It might have seemed at the time that the Karina-Godard synergy had abated.  Nothing could have been further from the truth of what followed.  Some of her best starring turns for Godard lay ahead of her, but this strange film served as a bit of punctuation for Godard…almost a continuance of Le Petit soldat.  It bears mentioning that of his first five features, only Une Femme est une femme had been in color.  This from the auteur who was to yet shortly give the world Pierrot le Fou and Le Mépris.

Les Carabiniers is really rather a dense film to dissect.  I think Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag would be aghast at having been cited on such a paltry Wikipedia article as The Caribineers.  It is to Godard’s credit that this seldom-mentioned classic from his oeuvre poses a problem in breadth for being even beyond the scope of a time-on-my-hands blogger like me.

-PD

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