Musing About Movies

It's Oscar day, after all.

from occasional contributor Cosmo:

...after the literal car-wreck that was "weekend." I've moved (Jean-Luc Godard's) Notre Musique down, down, down my Netflix queue and have moved The Killing Fields up as a replacement.

The clincher was the critique in the special features where Mike Figgis offers his commentary on the film. He claims that every scene has so many ideas, that this is what elevates goddard for him. He never elucidates what ideas those might be, and there's a good reason for this... long monologues that sound like they are taken from an editorial or direct from Das Kapital certainly involve ideas, but whether they are the director's or merely a reflection of the dialogue of the times is up for grabs. They also show a distinct misunderstanding of cinema. I really feel like the only "original" spectacle of the film is done much better, with much more wit, with clever undercutting of narrative expectations that nevertheless only add to the pleasure of viewing the film and a much better understanding of cinema can be found in (Luis Bunuel's) The Discrete Charms of the Bourgeoisie.

I am slowly creeping back to my initial gut instinct of 10 years ago that the best thing that ever happened to goddard was casting Jean Seberg in Breathless.

To be sure Notre Musique has plenty of demagogy; after all, the lead character is pretty much Godard himself, and through a lot of it he's teaching a class (the best is when he holds up a picture of a burned-out set of buildings, and asks "where is this?" and everyone guesses Sarajevo or Baghdad and he says "Richmond, 1864."). The Israeli writer/Palestinian writer exchanges didn't exactly ring true either. But I do think there's more to the film than that. There are some passages of unbridled beauty, for instance the wordless sequence with the Native American dancing in the old monastery, or the depiction of Heaven at the end. Godard hasn't totally given up on the crash of images to convey ideas. He has completely disavowed the stylistic tricks of the New Wave that largely brought his cinematic vision to prominence in the first place. And in the absence of that, you do get a lot of speechifying.

Speaking of Crash, I'd say that was the worst movie to get an Oscar nomination since Pretty Woman. It's such a horrendous piece of shit. It gives liberal guilt a bad name. It's an imagined landscape of eternal racism in every single aspect of human existence that could only be written by someone who's never been off the Hollywood Hills. The problem of race is this country is structural and institutional; it's not what happens when you're buying a toothbrush.

Capote was my favorite film of the year, and Enron: The Smartest Guy In the Room my favorite documentary. Both got nominated, so I'm happy.