Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!
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Pierrot le Fou 1965
CRITERION CHALLENGE 2021: 3. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Progress: 21/52
"Come on—we've played Jules Verne long enough; let's get back to our detective novel, with fast cars and guns and nightclubs."
Cerebral ass Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) whimsically abandons his moneyed, overbearing Italian wife and daughter when the stand-in babysitter turns out to be erstwhile flame Marianne (Anna Karina), an elusive sensualist with murky ties to right-wing paramilitary types. This unshakable association leads the reunited couple to flee Paris for the…
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Vivre Sa Vie 1962
"I'm telling you my life story—how awful."
I apologize in advance not only for the lengthiness but also for the scattershot nature of this review. My best excuse is that Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie is as elliptical as anything by Pound or Eliot and thus makes for a slippery target. Nevertheless I'm given to ramble, and this is my favorite of the twenty Godard films I've seen so far. Many thanks are due for vital contextual assistance from Richard…
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La Dolce Vita 1960
“Our parties are famous for being first-class funerals.”
A disloyal tabloid journalist desiderates a life as a man of letters but instead further degrades himself by becoming a press agent (shades of Sidney Falco) upon the realization that he is incapable of moral or intellectual progress.
Imagine an utterly despairing foreign language film shot in black and white that runs for nearly three hours and elides classical three-act structure in favor of episodic revelation of character (non)development being released theatrically…
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Dog Day Afternoon 1975
"See I'm with a guy who don't know where Wyoming is. You think you got problems?"
On the 22nd of August in 1972, John Wojtowicz, Salvatore Naturile and (briefly) Robert Westenberg strove to rob a Chase Manhattan bank branch in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Antsy from the onset, Westenberg fled the holdup in its initial stage after seeing a police car drive by. While Wojtowicz had some background working as a teller and Naturile (though barely an adult) was a repeat criminal…
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Nashville 1975
"This isn't Dallas!"
What ended up becoming my favorite film began life in its amoeba form as Greatest Showman-style pap intended as a vehicle for Welsh crooner Tom Jones. This is what United Artists had in mind when they approached Robert Altman to direct the project (then titled The Great Southern Amusement Company) in 1972. Altman had no interest in the script or in country music and had never visited Nashville, but he agreed to make a different film about…
