Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

4/10
My great shame is that I didn't see this in 3D, which is seemingly a sin on par with watching Avatar or Gravity on one's smartphone. I saw it in the officially-released 2D Blu-Ray version, so that still counts for something? I would like to see it in 3D, not because I enjoyed the movie but because apparently there's some pretty impressive and rule-breaking 3D shots that I think would be very interesting to see "for real". The way the movie is shot (by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno) is by far its strength as there's a real hypercolor beauty to a lot of the shots. Goodbye to Language is if nothing else a really strong and convincing argument for how beautiful digital filmmaking can be.
As for the movie itself, well, to me it's an arthouse Avatar. Avatar was beautiful but packaged with a dumb plot that a 5 year old could understand. Goodbye to Language is beautiful and packaged with a dumb plot that nobody on earth could possibly understand. Where Avatar quotes anyone-can-get-it fare like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, Goodbye to Language is its polar opposite, jammed with no-one-can-get-it references to Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Solzhenitsyn, Ellul and too many others. And if you stripped away the technical marvels of Avatar you were left with little of interest; the same, I think, applies to Goodbye to Language. Or at least it did for me. And maybe Godard wanted it that way too. But his movie still bored me to tears. Even after watching it in part or in whole three consecutive times (it's only 69 minutes long) and reading as much as I could about it, and deconstructing and piecing back together its twin narratives and double actors and obscure references, the value of the movie was almost entirely lost on me and I have my suspicions that it would have been lost on a whole lot of other people too if it didn't have the uncriticizable name of Jean-Luc Godard attached to it.
Nonetheless I do remain impressed that Godard has not gone quietly into his twilight years - this is a movie as provocative and impenetrable as anything released by any younger filmmakers out there, and it still could not have been made by any other filmmaker but Godard. Not many directors in their 80's have ever continued to try to push boundaries as aggressively as Godard has without dipping into self-parody at any point, and I have plenty of respect for that.

Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)

5/10
I really liked the first act of this latest mindbender from Jean-Luc Godard - it takes place on a cruise ship, there's all kinds of voiceovers and shots that don't seem to relate to one another, and you get the feeling like you're watching parts of three different movies at once. It's kaleidoscopic but also very interesting. After that however I thought the film dropped off steeply - once we were getting to distended, uninteresting monologues and static shots where nothing seemed to ever come together, I wasn't feeling it.

Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

8/10
Pretty outrageous, silly, but ultimately very innovative Godard movie that surely must contain his most overt, vicious attacks on the bourgeoisie. It almost feels "too" Godardian in that respect, too over the top, but maybe that's the point. Hilarious, frustrating, endlessly self-referential, I thought it was great fun.

Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

8/10
Yep, took me this long to get around to this classic...great, fun movie but I can't help but think that anyone watching a Godard movie in 2009 will, for the most part, miss out on what made them so special back in 1960. Godard seems very much "of his time" and while it's possible to still appreciate and enjoy them now, you can't help but feeling you're missing out on something.
As an aside, this was a copy of one I rented a long time ago and it wasn't the Criterion version. Annoyed at myself for getting an inferior version, I did some reading and found that the Criterion release of Breathless is actually illegal in Quebec because it's a French movie being sold under an English title. Come ot think of it, that may explain why it's so hard to find Godard's movies for sale here...