In this contemporary retelling of the birth of Christ, the Virgin Mary is a gas station employee and Joseph her taxi-driving boyfriend. Mary is an ordinary teenager playing basketball, but who vows to maintain her chastity. Following a warning from an avuncular angel, a confused Mary unexpectedly falls pregnant and is forced to wed Joseph. He in turn must love his virgin bride from a distance, revering her without touching her.Read More »
Noel Megahy @ DVDTimes.co.uk wrote:
During the 1970’s Jean Luc Godard abandoned the notion of making normal commercial films for cinematic distribution in favour of his Marxist-Leninist ‘Dziga Vertov’ propaganda films. The director returned to regular filmmaking in 1980 with Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), his first theatrical release since his furious outburst against modern bourgeois society in 1967 with Weekend. Delivering another hate-filled attack on almost every aspect of modern society, it’s like he had never been away.Read More »
Description: This consists of four short films by different directors. Rosselini’s ‘Chastity’ (‘Illibatezza’) deals with an attractive air hostess who receives the unwelcome attentions of a middle aged American. Godard’s ‘New World’ (‘Il Nuovo Mondo’) illustrates a post-apocalypse world the same as the pre-apocalyptic one but for an enigmatic change in attitude in most people, including the central character’s girlfriend. In Pasolini’s ‘Curd Cheese’ (‘La Ricotta’), a lavish film about the life of Jesus Christ is being made in a poor area. The impoverished people subject themselves to various indignities in the name of moviemaking in order to win a little food. Finally comes Gregoretti’s ‘Free Range Chicken’ (‘Il Pollo Ruspante’) in which a family of the materialist culture inadvertantly illustrate the cynical, metallic voiced doctrine of a top sales theorist.Read More »
PotMatters Review :
Captured in beguilingly chic noir et blanc, Jean Luc Godard’s Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman) is an erudite, somewhat autobiographical, handsome and twisted examination of female infidelity. Although it has been rather overlooked amidst Godard’s formidable body of work, it is one of his most alluring and personal cinematic endeavours and represents a critical juncture in his evolution as a film-maker.Read More »
A symphony in three movements. Things such as a Mediterranean cruise, numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday… Our Europe. At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. The children demand serious explanations of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Our humanities. Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona. (IMDb)Read More »
With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave. (Criterion)Read More »
Godard’s meditation on things Russian and cinematic, featuring JLG himself as “The Idiot” My own not very good quality VHS recording from a NTSC TV broadcast, but I know of no other source for this. With some English narration and French dialog with subtitles. Video collages of Russian films, in the style of Histoire(s) and other Godard films of this period.Read More »