Rating: 
Summary: a very boring pretentious post-structuralist rant
Review: Very dated, what a show off Godard is, he just can't wait to show what an arty intellectual he thinks he is. Ideas obviously taken from the trendy ideas of its time- Barthes, Brecht and Neo-Marxism. It's very easy to be oppositional, but more difficult to take that further by suggesting solutions. Just doing what is opposite to the dominant ideology of Hollywood cinema is conceptually easy. He trivalises political issues, how politically serious is he? what political action has he actually taken? Film should be more appropriately named "look what an incredibly intellectual I am"
Rating: 
Summary: Funny, Tragic, Mystic : Pierrot le Fou c'est moi
Review: What I love about the two Godard/Belmondo films (Breathless & Pierrot Le Fou) is the marriage of the sacred and profane, the comic and the tragic, the high and the low. Only true masters achieve a world view that encompasses so much of life. Pierrot Le Fou is to the late sixties what Breathless was to the early sixties. If Breathless contains just the rumblings of unrest then Pierrot Le Fou is an open revolt. In Breathless Belmondo played at being Bogart and he and Jean Seberg just played at being alive. Breathless was Godard's homage to gangster films and American spontaneity, compared to Pierrot Le Fou however it was a very tamely structured film. In Pierrot Le Fou all semblance of structure is destroyed; Godard picks up and discards genres as quickly as Belmondo picks up and discards books. Godard and Belmondo make a perfect team; Godard is the overly intellectual auteur and Belmondo the oafish clownish ham but together they seem to comprise one complete individual--one behind the camera and one in front of it. Anna Karina is perfect just being Anna Karina. She doesn't have to do much but be her charming and pretty self--everything seems to come too easy for her and so she is always bored and in need of change. On one level the film traces a love story from its inception to its demise but on another level its about how pervasive consumer culture has become. Consumerism affects every aspect of these characters lives. Belmondo consumes culture-- he reads books at an alarming rate, and he needs a constant supply of new books to keep him happy. And Karina consumes lovers--the first time we see her there is an unidentified male corpse in her room(an old lover that she has grown bored with and disposed of). Eventually she will dispose of Belmondo too. Its a very funny film in parts and a very sad film in other parts and even a bit mystical toward the end. Its a poignant elegy for the brevity of all things. In the end once all the antics and activity have ceased and the play acting at love and at being gangsters has lost its ability to entertain, Belmondo and Karina confront the emptiness that is always at the heart of life and its then that we realize how important all that play acting really was. But Godard finds beauty even in emptiness and the ending of this film has an eerie and mystic grace to it--two dead lovers talking to each other about how only death can truly bring them together. Pierrot Le Fou is one of the most satisfying of Godards films--it entertains more consistently than any of his other films and it also presents the Godard vision in full.
Rating:
Summary: This film was the business
Review: When I watched this film I found it to be quite unlike anything else I had seen. To really appreciate the flow of this one, I realised early on that I would have to cast aside my general expectations of a plot and storyline being the focus of the film and just see it as being a whole spectrum of experiences and emotions. I had heard that this film was shot without a script, and was almost entirely improvised by the director and the actors. This had the brilliant effect that on seeing it that there was a feeling that that anything could happen, and it carried a genuine sense of freedom and exhiliration, because the actors themselves were often actually experiencing for the first time whatever their impulse was for their characters to perform. When I first saw this I was very new to arthouse-type films and it really turned me on to the thinking that a film could simply be made up of emotion and experience, and that it doesn't necessarily have to be giving some moral or meaning or following some narrative structure, and that as an artform it could be improvised and therefore lived in at the same time that it was recorded. I watch this with a real feeling of being ALIVE. It's what inspired me to watch just about every new wave film around since I saw it. See it with a totally open mind and you might well get a bang out of it.
Rating:
Summary: 5 star film, 1 star DVD - Boo hiss to Fox Lorber
Review: Why Fox Lorber doesn't just turn its catalog over to Criterion and stop desecrating great films is a mystery. I love this film, the 400 Blows and others. But i would never never never buy anything from Fox. I've rented this release and others. They have bad video and audio
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