And here is where my personal tastes swing wildly away from the good folks at the Criterion Collection, nearly every other cinephile in existence, and general hip movie opinion: I despise Jean-Luc Godard. Not just his films, mind you, but the man himself. Usually a prickly asshole of a filmmaker is easy to ignore if their work is great enough, but reading about the man, seeing how he treated his colleagues, and then watching that personality seep into his work, it's almost impossible for me to be objective about any of his films.
Given all this, I want to make it clear: I really did try to give Alphaville a fair shot. There is a lot to like about this movie, even for a Godard-hater like myself. The gravelly voiceover is a nice effect. Lemmy Caution's dickery can be funny at times, especially in the early scenes of him pulling his briefcase away from people who offer to carry it for him. The locations that Godard found to shoot this movie do a great job of conveying a futuristic setting, and there are a number of long takes that look fantastic. It's definitely an interesting film, with some good ideas in it. It was under two hours.
Here are my issues with this film, and with Godard in general: his films are never as smart as he thinks they are, nor are his characters that interesting. The charms of Anna Karina are completely lost on me, and her "I don't know what love is" arc is shockingly trite for a filmmaker who poses himself as being philosophical. A lot of his films feel gimmicky as hell; for instance, the scene where two men are beating up Lemmy in an elevator and all you see is Lemmy bobbing back and forth, but you never see the two men hitting him. In theory, this sounds awesome, but when you actually see it it looks embarrassing. Alpha 60 is uninteresting as the big bad and never feels like a legitimate threat. Worst of all, and this is the breaking point for me: Godard's general attitude towards his characters and his audience is obnoxious in the extreme. A scene near the end where Karina's character Natacha is telling a joke feels like the kind of digression an "edgy" film student would put in his film and then expect to hear kudos from his classmates. So much of Godard's work has the feel of an ambitious film student with a bit of a budget. These films are fucking terrible.
The dilemma I expect to have is that there is so much Godard in the Criterion Collection. I've seen a lot of his movies, and once again, I have tried to like him. The only film of his that I've enjoyed was Contempt, but everything else has either left me feeling indifferent or infuriated me. I will watch the films again, and each time I will try to put my feelings about him aside and see these films with fresh eyes. But right now, today, on second viewing I still dislike Alphaville. This was the one I had the most hope for given the sci fi dystopia, but it's still a Godard film, and I still don't like it.
This one was not even remotely difficult for me to rank. I'd gladly pop in Salo or Summertime over this one. Right to the bottom you go, Alphaville.
1. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
2. Robocop (1987)
3. Seven Samurai (1954)
4. The Seventh Seal (1957)
5. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
6. Grand Illusion (1937)
7. High and Low (1963)
8. Shock Corridor (1963)
9. Hard Boiled (1992)
10. Sid and Nancy (1986)
11. The 400 Blows (1959)
12. Walkabout (1971)
13. The Killer (1989)
14. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
15. Dead Ringers (1988)
16. The Naked Kiss (1964)
17. A Night to Remember (1958)
18. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
19. The Samurai Trilogy (1954-1956)
20. Amarcord (1973)
21. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
22. Summertime (1955)
23. Alphaville (1965)
Next time: I have no idea what The Long Good Friday is, but that's what I'll be watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment