GodeonWay
Joined Mar 2018
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Ratings787
GodeonWay's rating
Reviews16
GodeonWay's rating
Much of the time, if you profess to not like Breathless, a few New Wave devotees kind of sniff and intimate that, obviously, you didn't understand it.
The hell I didn't. I was a teenager when the New Wave (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, et. al) erupted. I saw ALL the key films when they came out. I tried very hard to be impressed, to string along with the huge number of critics who oohed with delight about cinema verité, hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue. But I couldn't do it then, and I still can't.
I've watched Breathless twice completely and half a dozen times incompletely, over the past 50+ years.
Yes, I understand it's a milestone. Yes, the film was a radical departure from standard studio-produced fare. Yes, it broke many so-called 'rules' of feature film-making.
But sorry. All that doesn't make for a movie that's good. It bores. It rambles. It irritates by its ineptness. The images are very uneven in quality. The sound is pretty bad. In truth, one is expected, even urged, to admire it for its defects.
Jean-Luc Godard (who is Swiss, though considered one of the pillars of the French New Wave) still makes movies today in 2018, at 87 years of age. Still does the festival circuit. And his movies are much improved technically. Almost all have a few pretty good scenes. But by and large, they're not meant to entertain. They're supposed to make you think. To react and reflect on the images and ideas he's throwing out at you.
Now, back to Breathless (which a poor translation of the original French title 'A bout de souffle' that really means 'out of steam, out of energy, near the end of the line'.)
If you've never seen it, by all means do so, simply for its reputation. And if like me, you were lucky enough to visit Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, you'll be rewarded by once again seeing the city as it really was. Complete with a girl (the late, beloved Jean Seberg) on foot, hawking the late, beloved International Herald Tribune to American tourists. Just for those delights, my rating is 4/10 - about two points higher than it might otherwise receive from soft-hearted me.
PS: If you find New Wave really hard to get through, stick with Truffaut. He rarely bores the way Godard and Resnais do. And how he evolved, year by year, into a master film craftsman is a story in itself.
The hell I didn't. I was a teenager when the New Wave (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, et. al) erupted. I saw ALL the key films when they came out. I tried very hard to be impressed, to string along with the huge number of critics who oohed with delight about cinema verité, hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue. But I couldn't do it then, and I still can't.
I've watched Breathless twice completely and half a dozen times incompletely, over the past 50+ years.
Yes, I understand it's a milestone. Yes, the film was a radical departure from standard studio-produced fare. Yes, it broke many so-called 'rules' of feature film-making.
But sorry. All that doesn't make for a movie that's good. It bores. It rambles. It irritates by its ineptness. The images are very uneven in quality. The sound is pretty bad. In truth, one is expected, even urged, to admire it for its defects.
Jean-Luc Godard (who is Swiss, though considered one of the pillars of the French New Wave) still makes movies today in 2018, at 87 years of age. Still does the festival circuit. And his movies are much improved technically. Almost all have a few pretty good scenes. But by and large, they're not meant to entertain. They're supposed to make you think. To react and reflect on the images and ideas he's throwing out at you.
Now, back to Breathless (which a poor translation of the original French title 'A bout de souffle' that really means 'out of steam, out of energy, near the end of the line'.)
If you've never seen it, by all means do so, simply for its reputation. And if like me, you were lucky enough to visit Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, you'll be rewarded by once again seeing the city as it really was. Complete with a girl (the late, beloved Jean Seberg) on foot, hawking the late, beloved International Herald Tribune to American tourists. Just for those delights, my rating is 4/10 - about two points higher than it might otherwise receive from soft-hearted me.
PS: If you find New Wave really hard to get through, stick with Truffaut. He rarely bores the way Godard and Resnais do. And how he evolved, year by year, into a master film craftsman is a story in itself.
No need for me to give an in-depth review of this terrible, boring, clumsily-made turkey. Just check out the multitude of one star reviews it's gotten and you'll see what I mean.
Watched it last night with the family, confident that the many glowing 10 and 9 star reviews meant that Silent Running would be at least a fairly good, reasonably interesting sci-fi outing.
But everyone in my sci-fi loving family started groaning about two minutes into the film. Nevertheless, we watched it, from boring beginning to boring end, mainly hoping it was going to get good at some point.
But it never did.
So the real and extremely valuable lesson here is simply this: be skeptical. Don't rely just on the glowing user reviews to decide what you'll watch tonight. Take the trouble to sort the reviews by negative rating first (i.e. after sorting by review rating, just reverse the order by clicking on the little arrow).
Really wish I had done that last night.
Watched it last night with the family, confident that the many glowing 10 and 9 star reviews meant that Silent Running would be at least a fairly good, reasonably interesting sci-fi outing.
But everyone in my sci-fi loving family started groaning about two minutes into the film. Nevertheless, we watched it, from boring beginning to boring end, mainly hoping it was going to get good at some point.
But it never did.
So the real and extremely valuable lesson here is simply this: be skeptical. Don't rely just on the glowing user reviews to decide what you'll watch tonight. Take the trouble to sort the reviews by negative rating first (i.e. after sorting by review rating, just reverse the order by clicking on the little arrow).
Really wish I had done that last night.
Let me start by saying I'm a HUGE Barbara Stanwyck devotee. But the role she is given in this hapless movie is so phony that nobody could have played it successfully. The story is of course, the stuff that vintage weepies are made from. And I have nothing against weepies: as long as the characters move me, I'll happily string along, no matter how ridiculous the story.
But the characters in Always Goodbye are uniformly made of paper-maché. The actors seem to know it: Ian Hunter and Herbert Marshall give mechanical performances, and Cesar Romero bounces through his role as if he's anxious to quickly get off the set.
Special note: if you detest obnoxious Hollywood child actors, little Johnny Russell's performance as Stanwyck's little boy is about as excruciating as they come. Don't say I didn't warn you.
But the characters in Always Goodbye are uniformly made of paper-maché. The actors seem to know it: Ian Hunter and Herbert Marshall give mechanical performances, and Cesar Romero bounces through his role as if he's anxious to quickly get off the set.
Special note: if you detest obnoxious Hollywood child actors, little Johnny Russell's performance as Stanwyck's little boy is about as excruciating as they come. Don't say I didn't warn you.