Godard's 'Weekend' at the Cinefamily

This is an occasional feature called Blind Spots. It gives me a chance to write about movies or albums or whatever that I missed during their initial run. Ideally, this exercise of going back will help me fill in some gaps. I'll write these whenever the spirit moves me.

Two film critic colleagues' comments about Jean-Luc Godard are useful to suggest the wide gap in opinion about the iconic French New Wave filmmaker:

Film Critic Colleague Number 1: "Nobody really likes Godard. He's a guy you're supposed to like, but nobody really does -- they just say they do."

Film Critic Colleague Number 2: "The problem with most filmmakers is that they don't challenge you. But when you watch a Godard film, you think, 'You're a [expletive]. And you're such a [expletive] that I'm gonna sit here and watch your movie and prove that you're a [expletive].'"

(By the way, Film Critic Colleague Number 2 loves Godard: He was saying this to prove his point about what a genius Godard is.)

I'm somewhere in between my two colleagues. I'm still working my way through Godard's immense oeuvre, but there isn't a single film of his that I've seen that I haven't been inordinately impressed by. (Of course, I've yet to see his King Lear.) At the same time, there isn't one I haven't had major reservations about. For me, he's a filmmaker to admire deeply but who's hard to love. His shadow is so large and his influence so wide that it's simply ridiculous to dismiss what he's accomplished. (If you're someone who gets all sappy about Hollywood's maverick '70s, you'd better recognize that just about every film of that era was directly inspired by something Godard did in the '60s.) But even if no Godard film has fully, wholly, completely connected with me, I keep going through his catalog, preferably on the big screen if I can help it.

The latest opportunity presented itself Friday night at the Cinefamily, which is doing a retrospective of Godard's work (including the much-belated L.A. run of his latest, Film Socialisme.) The long story short is that his 1967 film Weekend, which is being presented in a brand new 35mm print, was supposed to play at the Nuart around Thanksgiving of last year, but instead it got pulled for another week of Melancholia. So the Cinefamily got to play host to the revival screening instead, although it is funny to think how similar Godard's and Von Trier's movies are in some ways. Though their approaches couldn't be more different, both films are about the end of the world.

Tight narrative is rarely a major component of a Godard film, so let's dispense with Weekend's as quickly as possible. The married couple Corinne and Roland (Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne), who are both engaged in adulterous affairs, head off on a car trip one weekend to see her gravely ill father. Their reasons are purely selfish -- they want their inheritance, and they're hoping the old man will croak quickly -- and they have no qualms whatsoever about their motives. But as we quickly learn, these two have no qualms whatsoever about any of their consumerist, self-centered actions. Almost 40 years before the funny series of Jason Sudeikis and Kristen Wiig sketches on Saturday Night Live, Weekend's central characters were the original Two A-Holes.

This was hardly new territory for Godard, of course: Starting with Breathless, he'd very happily populated his movies with protagonists you're pretty sure you're not entirely supposed to like. But what made Weekend such a watershed for me was how superbly complete its dislike for modern life was. Godard has never had the rosiest view of humanity, but Weekend might be his bleakest portrait -- and yet it's also probably his funniest.

The couple's car trip does not go as planned, resulting in many run-ins with various strange characters, some real, some seemingly figments of fiction (including a few castaways from Lewis Carroll). But what becomes clear rather quickly -- once the couple escape a seemingly endless traffic jam near the film's opening -- is that these two are really journeying into Hell. Or, more accurately, another version of Hell. Weekend is not one of those films that equates city life with civilization and the countryside with barbarism: The city is filled with jerks in cars who keep crashing into one another, resorting to violence in a moment's notice -- or, at the very least, leaning on their horns with obnoxious frequency. Meanwhile, the countryside in Weekend is filled with radicals who enjoy a little raping, savagery and cannibalism. And Corinne and Roland aren't innocents trying to make their way: They're spoiled and obnoxious and seemly wholly indicative of the sort of nightmarish reality Godard is decrying in his film.

This should be a movie in which there's no rooting interest -- and, hence, no viewer interest at all -- but I have to say I found the whole thing rather riveting. Part of that is because Darc and Yanne are so good at being so shallow. Their short-sighted rudeness in the face of the fiery overturned cars on the highway has a sort of deadpan wit to it. There's a dark, apocalyptic undercurrent humming throughout Weekend -- almost a surreal sci-fi edge -- and yet these two nitwits, these two complete wastes of space, just keep merrily rolling along, mostly annoyed that it's taking a lot longer to get to Corinne's dad's home than they were hoping. That was the genius of the "Two A-Holes" sketches as well: Not only didn't Sudeikis and Wiig care that they were horrible people, they seem irritated that more people weren't like them.

Because Godard enjoys didactic digressions -- you could argue that his later films, like Film Socialisme, are nothing but them -- Weekend is weighed down by preachy political commentaries. These tend to stop the film dead in its tracks, but because so much of the movie has a vaguely unhinged quality to it, I found myself more receptive to them than usual. And while Godard's visual aesthetic often mixes between playful and pretentious, Weekend features some of his more arresting moments. The long traffic-jam scene is rightly heralded, but it's just one of several fairly brilliant scenes, each done in a single take (One involves a detailed account of an orgy. The other a bit of Mozart.) Though Godard is clearly on the side of the hippie guerrillas who emerge in the film's second half, he seems to understand the limits of rebellion and antisocial behavior. That's why Weekend doesn't really need its talky stretches: The film's very conception -- a world gone mad that most people are too self-absorbed to notice -- tells you more than any single bit of dialogue. Technically speaking, the world doesn't end in Weekend, but it sure feels like humanity is on its final legs. And Godard seems rather cheered by it.

"Weekend is a prolonged howl of rage at the perceived vanities and cruelties of bourgeois life," Richard Brody wrote in his book Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.  Maybe, but that hardly makes the film a downer. If anything, it's liberating -- almost cheery. As R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe once sang in "Ignoreland":

I know that this is vitriol
No solution, spleen-venting
But I feel better having screamed
Don't you?

Godard sure does.

on the emotionally powerful taking chance

Two key quotes in a February interview with L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas from the filmmakers behind Taking Chance:

From Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, whose memoir inspired the film:

“To me, this is not a movie about Iraq,” Strobl says, “this is a movie about America.”

From director Ross Katz, who wrote the screenplay with Strobl:

“I remember one particular night after reading [Strobl's memoir],” Katz says, “I turned on CNN and yet another roadside bomb had ripped through yet another Baghdad market, and I sat there and I didn’t feel anything. I was extremely angry with myself, because I thought, intellectually I know how tragic this is, but I don’t feel anything, because for years I have been seeing this 24-hour news/cyber/cell-phone footage. I walked out on the street and life was just normal. I thought, there’s a parent who just got a knock on the door, and why does everything look the same? It just didn’t add up to me, and so that was kind of my leaping-off point.”

Taking Chance, which premiered at Sundance before airing on HBO in February, tells the true story of Strobl's journey in 2004 to escort the body of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps, who was killed while stationed in Iraq, to his family.

The film spends most of its short running time revealing the detail-by-detail process that goes in to preparing a dead soldier's body, and the story's emotional restraint (highlighted by a terrifically understated performance from Kevin Bacon) makes the journey both illuminating and almost unbearably poignant.

No speeches, no showy passages, no grand summations -- Taking Chance may be a little too small-screen in its execution, but its formal modesty belies the deep veins of emotion that are pulsing underneath. As Strobl correctly states, this isn't about Iraq -- it's about America and, perhaps more specifically, how difficult a time we have grappling with death. Plus, the movie's clear-eyed respect for the country's military communities -- the small towns where service is passed down from generation to generation and is as ingrained into the fabric of society as the Friday night football game and the senior prom -- is a thing of beauty. All the movie asks is that you feel, and by resisting the story's inherently manipulative elements, Taking Chance accomplishes its mission. It's not an "Iraq War movie," but that's part of the reason it's so terrific.

the king of comedy

This is a newish feature called Blind Spots that I do occasionally on this blog. It'll give me a chance to write about movies or albums or whatever that I missed during their initial run. I'll write them in the style of Consumables and, ideally, this exercise of going back will help me fill in some gaps. I'll write these whenever the spirit moves me.

The King of Comedy
How can you tell that I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool Martin Scorsese fan? The King of Comedy and The Last Waltz are my two favorite movies of his. It's not that I'm opposed to the four Scorsese films everybody else holds up as his masterpieces -- Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas -- but none of them fully works for me. (Their men-are-men pathos can get a little thick for my taste.) Hence, The Last Waltz and The King of Comedy, which are certainly centered around men as well but aren't quite so enthralled with masculinity that it dominates the proceedings. The Last Waltz pops up enough on cable that I feel pretty confident of its greatness, but I haven't seen The King of Comedy in probably 15 years. So I re-watched it, curious how it would hold up...

There's nothing like that uncomfortable feeling of knowing that you initially overrated a movie, but, then again, uncomfortable feelings are this movie's reason for being. There are few films that work so hard to make you actively hate all its characters, particularly its thoroughly unpleasant protagonist: Rupert Pupkin (played by Robert De Niro). But where Taxi Driver (another Scorsese film about a loser driven to take matters into his own hands) always felt like a glorification of nihilism, The King of Comedy seems to know full well that these people (even Jerry Lewis's popular talk-shot host) are all miserable wretches you don't want to emulate. And as opposed to another '70s film I find overrated, Network, The King of Comedy continually grounds its satire of television and celebrity in reality -- frankly, I'd be amazed if some lunatic hasn't tried copying this film's kidnapping ploy to get him- or herself on TV.

Still, this movie isn't as perfect as I remembered. De Niro's string of self-loathing performances with Scorsese continues here, and it's hard at points not to wonder what awful thing he did in his personal life that inspired such a willingness to berate himself in front of the camera. With that said, though, he is playing a character who's an acquired taste, and you have to credit the actor for not worrying about making us love him deep down. Plus, I'd forgotten how well De Niro performs Rupert's big monologue -- you believe that this slimy creep really has some (but not all) of the tools to become a stand-up comedian, if only he could learn to self-edit a little.

Sandra Bernhard in the best of circumstances is a dicey proposition, and a little of her goes a long way here. But Jerry Lewis really is fantastic -- without overdoing it, he conveys the sense of a man who got what he wanted in life and is depressed to realize how unfulfilling a realized dream is. He's only slightly less completely miserable than everybody else in the movie.

And then there's the ending. I'm in the camp that believes that everything after Rupert's arrest at the bar is a fantasy -- it has to be, right? No, in fact it doesn't have to be, which is one of the movie's great strengths -- it makes the case that lowlife freaks become famous all the time for the weirdest of reasons. Just about nothing in Network feels believable in 2009, but The King of Comedy still feels ahead of the curve.

american teen

So, this is a new feature called Blind Spots that I'm going to be doing on this blog. It'll give me a chance to write about movies or albums or whatever that I missed during their initial run. I'll write them in the style of Consumables and, ideally, this exercise of going back will help me fill in some gaps. I'll write these whenever the spirit moves me.

American Teen
Here's a movie that worked on me despite itself. Documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein (who co-directed the equally shallow The Kid Stays in the Picture) journeyed to an Indiana small town to follow a bunch of students over the course of their senior year. American Teen was the result, a deeply slick gloss of all the stereotypes we remember from our adolescence -- the jock, the bitchy popular girl, the cool artistic outsider. The narrative structure is everything you've come to hate from the proliferation of reality TV in the last decade -- every conflict has a resolution, every single second of real life is part of a story arc.

But, as I said, I have to admit that the film touched me. Perhaps not even realizing it, Burstein does her best work when showing her subjects' thought process when it comes to choosing a college. American Teen does a fine job illuminating that most crucial of early decisions in a person's life -- what a momentous decision at such a young age. And while Burstein doesn't tell me anything I don't know about adolescent boys, she seems to have gotten to the root of young women's insecurities. The charge against American Teen that the filmmaker's cameras inspired the students to act out is fair, but there is a benefit -- Burstein's young ladies really open up and seem comfortable around her.

Still, a movie like American Teen irritates me because it's yet another documentary that's more of a documentary-lite. There aren't really that many observations or insights to it -- but, it's, y'know, real life, so that means it's true.

night at the museum

So, this is a new feature called Blind Spots that I'm going to be doing on this blog. It'll give me a chance to write about movies or albums or whatever that I missed during their initial run. I'll write them in the style of Consumables and, ideally, this exercise of going back will help me fill in some gaps. I'll write these whenever the spirit moves me.

Night at the Museum
When this movie came out around Christmas 2006, the critical consensus was something like, "Eh, it's not bad." That's sorta how I feel about it, too -- if the filmmakers had spent just a little more time with the story, they might have really had something. Instead, it's yet another family comedy where too much of the humor comes from frantic action executed at high volumes. Of the cast, Robin Williams gives the best performance -- he dials down his excesses, and he's actually effectively poignant as Teddy Roosevelt. I haven't read the book that the film's based on, so I don't know if the big plot holes are the fault of author Milan Trenc or screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, but I would have given just about anything for the whole film just to be Ben Stiller's interactions with his onscreen son, Jake Cherry. Cherry doesn't act like your typical movie kid, thank god, and Stiller has a real sweetness in those scenes.

Still, this is just another divorced-father family film, although I'm happy there's no forced attempt to get him to reconcile with his former wife (Kim Raver) at the end to make everyone happy. And, yes, it's worth noting that Night at the Museum actually endorses the importance of knowing history -- not just the Civil War but, y'know, the whole world's. But what was most interesting was that the film's setup echoes our current financial crisis in an eerie way. Stiller needs to find a job -- any job -- as quickly as possible or he'll get evicted from his place. Meanwhile, his former wife's new husband, Paul Rudd, is a jerky Master of the Universe. Stiller refers to him as a stockbroker, but Raver corrects him -- he's a bond trader. If the movie came out now, Stiller would seem even more like the noble hero, while Rudd would be set up to inspire boos and hisses from the audience -- isn't he one of the creeps who got us into the mess we're in now?