Watch Band of Outsiders For Free

Crappy film

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Two crooks with a fondness for old Hollywood B-movies convince a languages student to help them commit a robbery.Godard described it as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka". That may be suggesting it is a bit stranger than it is. Heck, after watching "Alphaville" this comes across as about as normal as it gets.Although it is not obvious, the dance scene here influenced the dance scene with Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction". Tarantino loved this film so much, in fact, he named his production company after it. (Although a big fan of B-movies and Hong Kong, Tarantino has his finer tastes, too.) Pauline Kael described Bande à part as "a reverie of a gangster movie" and "perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film". A nice compliment. Others have said it is his most accessible. I liked it, but would not call it my favorite.

Apart from perhaps being a satire of gangster movies, the point of this film eludes me. Two guys and a young woman plan a robbery at the Paris house where the young woman lives with her aunt. The young woman is naive and constantly scared. The two young men are seemingly rather ordinary. I didn't find any of these people interesting. We never learn much about them or what motivates them. Yet, given that this is a "New Wave" film I doubt that characterization was all that important to the film's director.The plot starts out okay, but then meanders, and then becomes increasingly silly and unbelievable. Maybe that was intentional. Midway through, the three main characters suddenly, and for no reason, burst into a dance called the "Madison", the steps to which are nothing if not annoyingly repetitive. This bouncy little interlude goes on for some time, yet it has absolutely nothing to do with the story. Again, maybe that's the point.Other gimmicks are inserted gratuitously, evidently to shock 1964 viewers into the realization, consistent with New Wave doctrine, that the film is not a product of the dreaded classical Hollywood narrative style of film-making.But the worst element of this film is the sound. Background, ambient noise is amplified; why, I don't know, except, again, as some counterpoint to standard Hollywood films. Yet, the noise in "Band Of Outsiders" is so distracting, even grating, it takes away from what little value the visuals and narrative may have.B&W cinematography is unremarkable. Lighting is low-contrast. Visuals trend toward grayish, pallid tones. Production design, in keeping with low-budget film-making, is plain, even cheap looking.As a daring and iconoclastic attempt in 1964 to provide an alternative to stodgy, old-style Hollywood film-making, Godard's "Band Of Outsiders" probably does have some historical value. But what was visionary then seems campy and trite now.

Momentarily stuck for conversation, three characters in a cafe suggest a moment's silence. "A minute's silence can be very long," says one. And, in almost Dali-esquire fashion, "A real minute can last an eternity." The actual minute, like Dali's clock, melts into a mere 35 seconds. But Godard plays a joke on us by blotting out all the ambient background noise, to great comic effect. What threatens to become profound simply becomes fun.Amateur criminals, Franz, Arthur and Odile, plan to rob the house where she works as a maid. Godard, providing voice-over, gets us up to speed on the plot. But he takes a sideswipe at the, "people who've come in late." Bande à Part has been described as 'Godard-lite' – it contains all of his quirky, Brechtian inventiveness, cinematic cleverness, obsession with 'things that matter' (such as sexual tension, intertextuality, youth, and Paris) over mere details like narrative continuity. There are none of his political rants or philosophical digressions - just a rollicking good movie. In modern terms, it falls halfway between Woody Allen capers and Tarantino satire. And Tarantino famously named his Pulp Fiction production company after the film, as well using the dance sequence to inspire Travolta and Thurman.Franz and Arthur are besotted with pulp culture. They act out gun battles where Billy the Kid is shot by Pat Garrett. It is part of their machismo bonding rather than any childish play. But visually foreshadows the death of one of them. Posturing over plans for the robbery merges seamlessly with mutual desire for Odile. As if both were one and the same ritual rite of passage. Odile, while going along with their conspiracy, often acts dumb and shy, pretending it's not happening. Just like a shy young girl being seduced.Many of the film's references will be lost on the modern audience – these range from Rimbaud, Jack London, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, to Greek Theatre, Charlie Chaplin and Loopy the Wolf. But they are for fans and not necessary to our enjoyment. Witty dialogue (which seems remarkably intelligent for such urban cowboys) will still delight almost any viewer. But especially the intelligent and 'cultured' classes' from whence Godard came and yet whom he constantly decries. Our hoodlums – reminiscent of the protagonist from À Bout de Soufflé – are depicted in as completely amoral. We might excuse this more easily, given the distanciation and fairytale existence, were we not aware also that Godard himself did time in jail for petty theft.Insipid greyscales of riverbanks in the Paris outskirts are dramatised by colourful imagery, partly purloined from the original novel: "Under crystal skies, Arthur, Odile and Franz crossed bridges suspended over glassy rivers. The moats frozen. A taste of blood was in the air." Arthur seduces Odile with sexy love notes, passed during an English class where the teacher expounds dramatically from Romeo and Juliet. All is larger than life. They drive an old banger: but dream of racing at Indianapolis.Techniques to block an audience from identification with protagonists are often used to get us to think more deeply about what is happening. But Godard both uses the techniques and (rather patronisingly, if equally amusingly) also does the thinking for us. The three characters perform a dance routine – a badly executed but engaging Madison. This time, Godard cuts out the music (but not the ambient noise) periodically. Both to question, and then to tell us, what each of them is thinks and feels. As the narrator is not one of the characters, and so seems to have no vested interest, it adds a documentary feel to the otherwise unreal proceedings (as John Hurt would do, many years later, in Dogville.) Is he poking fun at Hollywood musicals / crime thrillers? Or is it homage? More importantly though, it works. Bande à Part is continuously light and frothy, relishing its own resourcefulness, and serving up a streams of delights.But its strength is also its weakness. The story is too slight to be as memorable as the box of tricks for which it becomes the vehicle. Yet, unlike for instance, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, it does not demand any depth of the viewer. This is about as mainstream as Godard gets. He could have, for instance, used the 'one minute's silence' scene to underline our characters' relationship to each other, an eternity that only they share. But, as he misses no opportunity to remind us, this is Godard's story and his alone. The only relationship that interest him is with you, the viewer.

I found Godard's Bande à part to be much more entertaining than À bout de soufflé and my favourite out of the Nouvelle Vague films. It was in its cool, its aesthetics and simplicity in narrative that had me captivated and I finished the film with a smile on my face.It had everything you could want from a film with interesting textual references, comic quips, a love triangle and the protagonists sprinting through the Louvre, not to mention the best dance sequence to be caught on camera.This is why I want to make films, because they can be this stylish, this cool and this entertaining.8/10