Platicsco
Good story, Not enough for a whole film
TrueHello
Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
federovsky
This must be a candidate for the most difficult film ever made. Great reviewers can't make head nor tail of it. It's Godard's own Finnegan's Wake-like dreamscape of the making of a film on the theme of King Lear, beginning with the contract, ending with the editing - a project that apparently turned into a nightmare. Hence the disjointed narrative, Alice in Wonderland elements, weird juxtapositions, elaborate pseudo-philosophies - all familiar components of delirious semi-consciousness. It's an anti-film, a film made deliberately to be disliked as much as it dislikes itself. Just as Godard's film about Lausanne, Lettre a Freddie Buache, consists of his refusal to make a film about Lausanne, so King Lear is his refusal to make the Lear required of him, while contract bound to make something.It opens with an actual phonecall from the producer giving Godard a roasting for failing to deliver the film. The film that follows is Godard's response and is basically a middle finger to the Cannon Group and everyone else, focussing as it does, on the key word in the play: Nothing.In the opening scenes, Norman Mailer and his daughter discuss the King Lear script he has just finished. It's unclear whether Mailer's actual script was ever going to be used, assuming he wrote one, or why Mailer himself would want to act the part, or why Godard would ever have agreed to make a film written and acted by Norman Mailer. Obscurities matched only by the resulting film itself. In any case it wasn't going to work. Perhaps to deliberately abort the project, Godard quickly succeeded in pissing off the Mailers who left in a huff. Godard blames the petulance of 'the great writer' and his daughter's inability to handle the pressure from various sides, including her father. That's one hell of an opening for a film, leaving us blinking and wondering what is going to happen, or not happen, next.A kind of story pops up. A descendant of Shakespeare (Peter Sellars) is trying to recreate the Bard's works after all art has been lost in a nuclear catastrophe. In a Swiss hotel he finds Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald, vaguely recognised as Lear and Cordelia (power and virtue in contest), and from whom he gradually reconstructs the play. Mailer's idea of making Lear a mafia don resurfaces here. Meanwhile, Sellars is in pursuit of the mad Professor Pluggy (Godard, in a truly bizarre performance) who has crucial knowledge of how images should complement the words.Pluggy's long and solemn thesis on words, images and reality is at the centre of the film. Life and images of life.Telling and showing. There is more than recreating a universe of words (says Pluggy). Images are purer. Images serve to connect two realities and meaning is created by reconciling these two realities. Their coming together in image form releases the emotive power. Contrary realities (Lear and Cordelia) don't come together. The strength of an image lies in the association of ideas it contains. Bringing them together is the function of the artist. This presumably also applies to sound - the use of sound in the film is astonishing - layered, atmospheric, and apparently insane - and presumably explains the seagulls that are heard at random intervals, even during interior scenes. This is all dream-theory. Barely understandable on a single viewing - perhaps complete gibberish - yet key to what the film is about: the struggle of the artist to create.At the end, Woody Allen is splicing the film with safety pins while reciting an irrelevant Sonnet - a final swipe at the Americans who clearly should never have messed with Godard in the first place. His response was to deliver something that is probably Nothing with an artistic fiendishness ungraspable by mere mortals. According to your fondness for the director, it's either highly entertaining or unendurable punishment.
lemmy caution
Godard's listless crapfest is a big waste of time. I mean- it's fine if you want to pick one scene from a play and analyse it for an hour and a half; it's fine if you want to do this in an obscure semi-story way that only become the tiniest bit clear after having watched the whole thing.But when it's constructed as an endurance test, with the director holding the audience in contempt- I mean, why waste your time? (To the end of making your experience as unpleasant as possible, Godard shows up as a "professor", mumbling unintelligible profundities. And then throws piles of squealing seagulls and vari-speeded music onto the soundtrack. Thanks for reminding us that film is a constructed medium, professor!)There were a couple effective scenes, but they were immediately undermined by what followed. I did think a little about Lear, but more to keep myself occupied than from any theses the film presented.And a caveat to anyone considering seeing this because the IMDB credits list Woody Allen: don't bother; he's only in the flick for a few minutes at the end and barely says anything.To review: avoid.Rating: 3 out of 10 (very poor)
valmont7
No Plot. Four characters who don't interact. Nothing happens. Peter Sellars walks around and thinks. His recurring voice-over monologue obsessively examines a thought that is not very interesting to begin with. Not content merely to bore us, Goddard assaults us with shot after shot of crudely filmed, irrelevant imagery, accompanied by unintelligible overlapping speech. Perhaps there's something resembling an idea buried underneath all the nonsense. But I doubt it. And what does any of this have to do with 'King Lear'? To be bored by a film is bad enough, but this film is aggressively, offensively, violently boring.
naxash
certainly, if you're looking for entertainment and nothing else, then this isn't your movie. but if you want to have several insights concerning issues like authorship, patriarchy, literacy, the entertainment industry (hey, this is a Golan-Globus production!), the mafia, crime (anyone read Albert Fried's Rise and fall of the Jewish gangster in America?).....don't miss Godard's King Lear!
