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Absolutely Fantastic

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This movie was an experience I will never forget. It is a movie that would be cheapened to describe too much. It is about so many things to those who will let it mean something. As for what it meant to me? I will give you a little to go on. For me, it was about how guilty we all are of being so haunted by guilt for everything- unlike the imaginative, loyal dog who has no idea what guilt is. For me, It was about how many things are lost in translation between people- even those who are quite intimate with one another. It was about how our feelings have became the Hitler to our humanity. It was also about how the only language we all know (even the dog) is our bowel movements. However, they don't mean **** to the dog as he goes on to experience more- never worrying where he left his waste or if you saw him drop it. It is also about how lost we all are in artificial means of communication- even film. IF you think I have cheapened it too much, you need more imagination. This film has so much to give- just be open to listen. But it is not an easy watch let me say. It is only a little bit more than an hour of your time. It meant a great deal to me. Godard was 84 when he made it and his wisdom is as memorable as every color (or lack thereof sometimes) in this potential swan song. If it means nothing to you, all you have lost is an episode of "The Voice" or some other magic trick. This is a director's poem about his life and his reminder to you to write yours.

As far as treats are concerned, Héloïse Godet is it in this maddeningly annoying 3-D movie. We men get to enjoy seeing her naked. And for the ladies there's a little bit of male full frontal nudity as well.But there's no doubt the man is outshone by the resplendent Ms Godet who attended a screening at Roger Ebert's Film Festival this April 15th. She was gracious and as attractive as she is in the movie, but she related a surprising tale of never having seen the dog that shares a lot of footage with the actors in this movie. Add a couple of the other oddities here that I will keep to myself as they border on being spoilers and Godard's intent is clear.I've never been to Paris, but I've heard again and again that people there don't pick up their dog's droppings. This movie is a clever and effective answer to those who wonder why dogs are allowed to dirty the city's streets with so much impunity. I can't say I'm not a bit swayed, but if it were up to me I'd have people love their dogs AND pick up after it.Godard's argument is more substantial than you'd expect, but judging by the discussion of his film tonight, his attempt to educate us cretins is likely to be a wasted if audacious effort. Still, if you insist on seeing this movie, and if you will try to follow his argument, you just might enjoy it enough to not feel insulted.

In the end I felt as if 70 minutes of my life had been stolen... not to mention nauseous from the unbelievably bad 3D cinematography/editing. How could it have won an award? This film was a mishmash of Hitler, nudity, and too many overly long scenes of an ugly man sitting on a toilet. There was no discernible plot, no character development... The best thing about the film was the home movie of Godard's dog and even that had been spoiled by over saturated colors and poorly applied 3D. Apparently this movie is the result of a combination of an over-the- hill "art" director and his cadre of sycophants. My recommendation is to save your money, avoid it when it comes to netflix.

To call a post-Nineties Jean-Luc Godard's film "accessible" would be a stretch. But his new one, Goodbye to Language, is discernibly more appealing and less of a slog (70 minuets instead of 104) than his Film Socialisme (NYFF 2010). The latter occasioned Todd McCarthy's angry-sounding assertion that Godard is mean-spirited and exhibits "the most spurious sort of anti-Americanism or genuinely profound anti-humanism, something that puts Godard in the same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This is less visible in Goodbye to Language, which spends a lot of time with a naked middle-class white couple in an apartment, and with Godard's own dog, Roxy, and is playful enough to be shot in 3D, of which it makes some good use. I do not see that use as "revolutionary," as Mike D'Angelo did in a Cannes bulletin for The Dissolve. I think in the face of a rote-acknowledged "master" (and Godard really did seem exciting and revolutionary back in the days of Breathless and La Chinoise) whom one can't make head nor tail of, it's natural to pick out elements one enjoys and blow them up into something important. Thus one notes that the distorted color in Goodbye to Language is sometimes gorgeous. And one wishes that more mainstream films dared to do such things more often, with one excuse or another.Goodbye to Language, like Film Socialisme, is divided up into parts with portentous titles, which one would remember if they seemed to illustrate their titles in any relatable way. The NYFF festival blurb calls this "a work of the greatest freedom and joy," but it's not. It's didactic, full of general nouns (like "freedom" and "joy") thrown out with the verve of a French university student. It cites fifteen or twenty famous authors whose names were dropped or lines quoted; and ten or twelve classical composers, snippets of whose compositions are folded in to add flavor and importance. But when Mike D'Angelo says "it doesn't constantly seem as if he's primarily interested in demonstrating his own erudition," he's saying this because other Godard films have constantly seemed to be primarily interested in that, and this one just barely avoids it. Here's what D'Angelo observes in the film's 3D that he thinks revolutionary (and this one moment is indeed remarkable): "Turns out he'd had the camera pan to follow an actor walking away from another actor, then superimposed the pan onto the stationary shot, creating (via 3-D) a surreal loop that, when completed, inspired the audience to burst into spontaneous applause. " It's hard to describe, and strange, and indeed original. I'd very much like to have watched this sequence -- which you do have to take off your 3D glasses to appreciate the transformative nature of -- with an audience keen enough to have noted its cleverness and applauded it. The audience I was with applauded at the end, but that just felt like an obligatory gesture, not the "olé" of connoisseurs noting a visual coup. As D'Angelo says, since the Nineties Godard has been "a full-bore avant-garde filmmaker." This means his films are the kind of thing you might see showing in a loop in a darkened room of a museum. When any film makes no rational sense I remember my museum experiences of that kind of art film and am calmed. Such films have their place. They are like complex decorative objects. Yes, and Godard's references to Nietzsche (pronounced "NEETCH" by French- speakers) or Solzenitzen are like gilding on a frame. And offhand gibes like the man in the hat who says Solzenitzen didn't need Google (which also sounds funny in French) to make up the subtitle for a book, as D'Angelo puts it, "ranks high among the dumbest things a smart person has ever said." Godard is a smart person who in a long career has said plenty of dumb things. He would have been a lot better as a filmmaker if he'd done more showing and less telling, from a long way back.But parts of Farewell to Language are bold and visually stimulating, and ought to be studied by conventional filmmakers, editors, or cinematographers to get some more original visual ideas. I also like another D'Angelo's Dissolve note (and he himself says this is his favorite Godard film since Weekend): "According to my Twitter feed, Goodbye To Language has reinvented cinema again—one dude went full Pauline Kael and compared it to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Unfortunately, some after the screening I saw, with bunch of ostensible film writers, out in the lobby some were pronouncing that this was "the future of cinema." Not Marvel Comics?Watched at NYFF 2014.