Going Places

Rating:
Summary: surprisingly entertaining
Review: Considering the fact that this DVD might be severely cut, this movie is quite frankly very englightening. It is basically a road movie, but actually a metaphor for free love. 2 young men, on a journey through france, commiting hit-and-run crimes (mostly just stealing cars) and having sex with women of all ages. That's the impression what you could get from it.
But below the surface this is a very thoughful, well-told film of typical french style.

Rating:
Summary: Going Places
Review: Going places

Bertrand Blier's `Going Places' is an emotionally anarchic scream of agony, it's a startling shout of revolt, a violent, radical response to morals and organized thought, it has the spontaneous madness, the gambling recklessness, the holy poetry of the few specks of beauty in junkyards. It wallows in its own excess, self-consciously quoting itself furiously as it ventures into the delirium of the unpretentious pettiness and the beauty of the ugly youth. It laughs in the face of those who are offended, it's vicious and aggressive and madly in love with itself, it's furious and violent and insane, nihilistic and rotten and crazy with a desire to shock. Blier's passiveness is the most incredible and anarchic thing about `Going Places': that indifference, that disdain for justification, that love of shock that breaks the screen open and making it ripe and alive. `Going Places' is a declaration of war but perhaps the greatest thing about Blier's film is its ultimate tenderness, it's an aimless film about aimlessness and that somehow makes it beautiful and poetic. Filmmakers like Pasolini and Godard had portrayed aimlessness in a revolutionary way, the first shooting in long, intact sequences of powerful observation and ideological realism often making very good films, the latter using the on-the-run style of American paperbacks to show a touching carelessness in films like `Pierrot Le Fou' and `Band Of Outsiders'. But `Going Places' has the feel of something completely different, Blier makes the film with instinct and it works completely, it creates its own patterns of expectedness and wallows in its improvisational feel. It's shot in self-contained vignettes of petty rebellion and moving feelings of alienation, it spirals into beautiful flashes of madness and it risks everything, Blier captures the feel of a Bukowski poem, he shows the same unhinged, candid, rebellious and ultimately tragic (but in a minimalist sense) love of decay. The film is pure and coherent, deliberately unemotional and underwhelming and still Blier's film is still, perhaps against his will, incredibly moving (in his typically underwhelming, cynical and un-definable way). Blier has made a poetic comedy about outsiders made for outsiders and it has a juvenile wisdom to it, unpretentious and unexpectedly touching. `Going Places' is a film about people who shouldn't be in a film, and Blier's ending is completely conclusive because it stays true to its own anti-bourgeois spirit, ending in mid-sentence, and yet beautifully climatic in its own way, because the film is all about that: about youth trying to escape itself, covering disillusion with spontaneous invention and cries with screams. It's a sad film about un-idealized struggles, and it covers itself up with anti-reality, but reality comes crashing through, as in a film by Bertolucci, and the characters become the contradictions of their own existence.


Rating:
Summary: a must see..!
Review: Patrick Dweare and Gerard Depardieu are so good together in this movie.a lot of energy from the pair and also some good laughs,the dubbing is ok but i think the movie is better in french speaking.it's a must see if you like french movie.

Rating:
Summary: A French "Easy Rider" but rather more misogynistic...
Review: Yes this is a french road movie, which in itself is interesting, but the rather sickening misogyny of the first part of the film makes it often hard to stomach. So be forewarned as you watch this, for if you are a fan of French cinema and culture, there are some things to be gleaned. As a portrait of a part of French society in the early seventies, culturally not long after the student riots of '68, the bohemian existentialist anti-bourgeois drifter held a romantic appeal similar to that found in an American equivalent to this film, Easy Rider. The relationship between the two men and the much older Jeanne Moreau actually subverts the film's early presentation of women as sexually and intellectually inept; yet her untimely end does nothing to truly mark her sexual freedom as empowered or stronger than that of poor miou miou who is pretty much a stereotyped kitten throughout, even when she learns to "enjoy" her freedom with the men at film's end.
Ultimately, if you are seeking an "amelie" or "il postino" or some other such Eurofilm fun, avoid this. But if you watch french films for some insight into the culture, this one is worth seeing. However, be prepared for some pretty brutal treatment of women. Nonetheless, the men are all largely bourgeois dupes or "liberated" trash too, so at least the film is egalitarian in its disdain for stereotypical gender roles. It is interesting to watch this film in tandem with Truffaut's "the man who loved women" for some insight into one aspect of the French view of women.

Rating:
Summary: A French "Easy Rider" but rather more misogynistic...
Review: Yes this is a french road movie, which in itself is interesting, but the rather sickening misogyny of the first part of the film makes it often hard to stomach. So be forewarned as you watch this, for if you are a fan of French cinema and culture, there are some things to be gleaned. As a portrait of a part of French society in the early seventies, culturally not long after the student riots of '68, the bohemian existentialist anti-bourgeois drifter held a romantic appeal similar to that found in an American equivalent to this film, Easy Rider. The relationship between the two men and the much older Jeanne Moreau actually subverts the film's early presentation of women as sexually and intellectually inept; yet her untimely end does nothing to truly mark her sexual freedom as empowered or stronger than that of poor miou miou who is pretty much a stereotyped kitten throughout, even when she learns to "enjoy" her freedom with the men at film's end.
Ultimately, if you are seeking an "amelie" or "il postino" or some other such Eurofilm fun, avoid this. But if you watch french films for some insight into the culture, this one is worth seeing. However, be prepared for some pretty brutal treatment of women. Nonetheless, the men are all largely bourgeois dupes or "liberated" trash too, so at least the film is egalitarian in its disdain for stereotypical gender roles. It is interesting to watch this film in tandem with Truffaut's "the man who loved women" for some insight into one aspect of the French view of women.