Watch Notre musique For Free

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

I am not sure if this amazing film has only just got into the Art Cinema Circuit here. Seeing it some 36hrs after the London Bombings was to experience something quite extraordinary and to confirm JLG as a filmmaker of unique relevance. If you haven't seen it-Get out there NOW.You will be probably appreciate it more if you haven't read any other reviews!JLG chooses a rather complex framework for this study of violence and the Human Condition.Indeed his own appearance within the film as JLG-auteur,could distract from the hugely powerful simplicity of any one of several interlocking "stories",in the end however my companion and I felt that this was the pinnacle of our 25years of film-going.Cheers and be excellent to .......!

A huge portion of the world's population consider Americans lazy, uninformed (because they are lazy), short-sighted (because they are uninformed), narcissistic (because they are short-sighted)."Can 30 million Frenchmen be wrong?" "Probably," we would say (that the French are worthy of scorn being an article of faith among a huge portion of our population)."Well, what about 3 billion non-Frenchmen?"Anyone who makes a filmlike this....uncompromisingly serious (this is a huge slap in the face to the notion that movies are about entertainment) political (read "leftist"), fiercely anti-American will be dismissed as difficult, obtuse, elitist. This is an anti-War movie and not one of those treacly "King of Hearts" anti-war movie that lets the audience off the hook by allowing them to congratulate themselves for their sympathy for the director's view. That is much too easy for someone like Godard who likes to think that mankind's endless history of "cutting off each other's heads" is unspeakably horrible, somehow something to be taken seriously.Maybe it's OK for someone to ask the audience to do a little work when engaging a work of art.This is a sublime experience. The look of the film is endlessly breathtaking....how does he get that look???? (i've never seen anyone else who could do this. And the musique, the cutting in and out of these short searing bursts of symphonic music....This pass weekend i saw 2 movies on DVD - Notre Musique and Predator. Yes, i relished the chance to see an Arnold classic and yes, i felt reluctant to have to put up with Godard's cranky obtuseness. After watching Schwartzeneger (??) I felt like i'd just wasted 2 hours of my life that i would never get back. After watching JLG, I felt like my view of the world had been permanently changed.The message of this film is that it might soon be too late. For anyone not interested in buying into such things, there is always Predator 2.

There's a moment in Notre Musique that tells you all you need to know about Jean-Luc Godard at this advanced stage in his long and varied career. A film lecture is taking place in a dimly-lit museum somewhere, with Godard himself presiding. After a typically rambling, critical speech (where that old hack Howard Hawks is put in his place), the director, swathed in shadow like Don Corleone, gives audience to a few of his young, admiring acolytes, one of whom asks a question about the potential of digital-video cameras to spark a renaissance in movies. The old Godard would've answered this query with some half-comprehensible diatribe, but the new Godard, emphasis on "God," sits there in knowing silence, as if to say that such a question is not worth answering - as if cinema is not only beyond saving, but is beyond even considering. Godard, having gone through several decades of being bitter, has come out the other side purged of all such base worries as whether the cinema is viable anymore, or ever was. He has reached the pinnacle of twerpdom.Godard burned-out on movies a long time ago, and his recent work represents a kind of pleasant after-glow. Notre Musique and the earlier In Praise of Love share in common the sense of someone embarking on a project without knowing where they're going or what they mean to say, but doing it because that's just what they do. Godard ran out of things to say a long time ago, but still feels the need to drag himself out of bed every couple of years or so and make a film. He seems to acknowledge his half-indifference in Notre Musique when, at the end, he takes to photographing flowers like an old man who doesn't care about anything anymore except his little, distracting hobby.The whole movie feels like it was made in a state of half-attention, as if at any moment the camera could just turn to some little detail having nothing to do with the action of the scene. The result is a sense of fleetingness that can sometimes be pleasurable, the way staring at a passing landscape from a car window can. Things go by your face half-glimpsed, half-noticed, and when it's over you have a little memory in your head that's already dissolving.The film's subject is War, and it's broken into three parts a la Dante: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The first part is composed of newsreel footage of all manner of 20th Century carnage, interspersed with images from movies made in the same period of time. The point being that war is horrible, and movies do their part in propagating the attitudes that lead to war, and that's a bad thing. This somewhat irreverent passage is followed by the main "plot," which involves a young Israeli woman's travels through a re-building Sarajevo, her interviews with various learned people, some Indians who show up to remind us nasty Americans how guilty we should feel about ruining everything, and Godard sitting in the background taking pot-shots. The "Paradise" segment takes place, somewhat tritely, in the forest (nature = paradise for old flower-planting washed-up filmmakers), after the young Israeli girl has been killed (off-camera, Godard being above such melodramatics).Godard's point is that none of this really matters much, the artist's job is simply to take note of what he sees, to bear witness to history as it passes by his window. The director takes on a god-like perspective, but he's a god who has lost interest in his subjects. The characters in Godard's films were never exactly three-dimensional, but the emotional blanks were filled in by the camera, which was unfailingly adept at finding the beauty, the sadness, the humor in the situations. There's still a wistfulness to Godard's work, but this seems like little more than a vestige. The film has the settled-in quality of a twilight work - the director has nothing left to prove. The old imaginative spark has been gone for awhile, and all that's left is this vaguely sour decline, the sense of talent fiddling its last hours away, not even nostalgic for its glory-days.

"Notre Musique" could be either a late night college bull session or one of those Monty Python skits where historical warmongers sit around rationally comparing their various atrocities with a coolly objective BBC moderator.Maybe it's a French intellectual's reality show pitch: we'll set up a dialog between a Jew and a Palestinian at a literary meeting in bombed-out Sarajevo as observed by living ghost Native Americans after bombarding them with images of war and genocide through 19th and 20th century history.Amidst this trumped-up pretentiousness, Godard the filmmaker does make some good points about war and memory. While the historical images, both from fiction and journalism, are colorized to contemporize them, one easily concedes, yeah, war is hell and hey didn't "Saving Private Ryan" prove that to us, when Godard cannily trumps that thought by discussing how war in fiction - from legend and poetry to movies -- touches people more than the reality.Then just as you're about to protest, hey, you're showing all these war images without their raison d'etre, Godard springs into a profound verbal and visual illustration of the importance of context, leading to an appreciation of how history is written by the victors. The points about the impact on Western psyche of the Trojans from Homer's perspective were more insightful than all of the "Troy" movie.However, those debaters that are translated in the subtitles talk in didactic epigrams that will make more sense when one can rewind the DVD for reflection (including the explanation of the title). The French intellectual smug superiority gets annoying -- we don't see any images of WW II collaborators vs. Resistance fighters, let alone colonial legacy issues in Algeria or Muslims in France today.While I'm not sure if the images of discarded books amidst the ruins of war were about the hopelessness of literature and the arts or its unquenchable survival as some are salvaged, Godard has an intellectual's faith in the power of dialog (and cigarette smoking), though pessimistic about the ability of the media to communicate it effectively, as he sets up an overly freighted discussion between an idealistic and ambitious young Israeli woman of Russian descent, whose grandparents were saved from the Holocaust by a Righteous Gentile, and an articulate Palestinian writer, as translated by another Wandering French/Israeli Jew.I think he was also trying to incorporate suicide bombers into the trajectory of French intellectual thought from Durkheim to Camus that sees it as an existential act of protest against anomie, but well, Jean Luc, we can't all be French.Typical for a Godard film, the woman to my right gushed that it was her second screening and it was her favorite of his films, and the woman on my left said she couldn't figure out what it was about.