Mommy

Xavier Dolan's winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes (he shared it with Godard's Goodbye To Language in 3D) is nothing like it sounds. A recently widowed mother, Dianne, also known as Die (the fierce Anne Dorval), has to pick up her teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon, amazing) from a detention center and and take him home because no one else will have him. She is a mess: rude, potty mouthed, unemployed, and as unfiltered and undisciplined as Steve.
Dolan frames the story in the near future, in which Canadian law could allow parents to relinquish their pathologically unruly children to the state with no further legal review. And believe me, during the first 10 minutes you will be rooting for her to do just that. Steve is impossible. Fitfully charming, grating, violent, chaotic, no school or social setting will abide him. But he is not one of those dark kids with homicidal tendencies, like the Newtown or Columbine murderers (perhaps because he doesn't go to school). He is just more than a handful, in the care of a mother who is a handful herself. They've both been on a tailspin since they lost Steve's father to illness. They feed on each other's passionate chaos.
In less inspired, confident hands, this film would be a bitter or too saccharine pill to swallow, but Dolan, who is only in his mid-twenties, is a gifted filmmaker. He elicits spectacular performances from his actors. Even with a 1:1 aspect ratio, which is a perfectly square frame, Mommy is so beautifully shot that two seconds into the movie you forget the format. And in fact, this intimate shape helps convey the isolation, the narrow focus that is required to live with someone who cannot really function in society. The camera and editing are fluid, kinetic and masterful. A sequence in which Steve unleashes his chaos as he arrives home is handled so well, you feel like you are in the room, engulfed by two human tornadoes, and you don't know what just hit you until it's over. But Dolan also achieves moments of tender grace. This fierce story of maternal and filial devotion will test your patience, give you hope and break your heart in equal measure.
Dolan does not shy away from big dramatic gestures as he burrows into the heart of sorrow, chaos and relentless energy which is to be Steve and Die. He introduces a third wheel, Kyla (the excellent Suzanne Clement), a lonely neighbor with a mysterious grief of her own, who completes their family at the expense of her own.  Mommy surprises at every turn with its self-assured intensity. One can see the poetic gesture in awarding the Cannes Jury Prize to the old Godard and the young Dolan, for Dolan has the verve and the inventive cinematic flair of the young Godard, but, less in thrall to sheer intellect, he dives deep into waves of emotion.

Frances Ha

I have never enjoyed the films of Noah Baumbach. Although they are well written and well directed, I find them mean spirited. From The Squid and The Whale's withering portrait of a couple of monstrous, self-absorbed parents, to the depressive sibling dysfunction of Margot at The Wedding and the bitter nihilism of Greenberg, their sour humor is rarely tempered by compassion. Their main characters are really hard to take, and at times it feels like Baumbach is too unforgiving with them. Not this time around.
In this luminous collaboration with actress, co-writer, and main squeeze Greta Gerwig, Baumbach has finally loosened up and delivered a truly lovely, funny, sad film that's an homage to a lot of many splendored things. It's an homage to the early films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, with echoes of Jules Et Jim and A Band Apart, and reminiscent in spirit of Woody Allen's Manhattan; beautifully shot in black and white by Sam Levy. It uses the gorgeous music of Georges Delerue to great effect (together with an extremely well considered soundtrack). It is a tone poem to the difficulty of making it in New York if you are an artist, a bittersweet love letter to female friendship, and a very enjoyable film. Most remarkably, it is an homage to Gerwig's charm, and somehow through her, to all the female movie stars who light up the movie screen with their ineffable loveliness. There is barely a frame without Gerwig in it, and the camera basks on her beautiful, expressive face at all times.
Gerwig plays Frances, a 27 year-old eternal aspiring dancer. She lives with her best friend from college, Sophie, (Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting, and very good) and refuses to grow up. Frances is a world class ditz, but she is sweet and loopy and fun. Life gets in the way, the way life does, particularly in New York. Better apartments are found, jobs are lost, friendships strained, and through it all Francis soldiers on, where someone with less moxie would have taken to shrinks and antidepressants. What she does instead is lie. She lies to her friends and family and to herself, trying to hold on to a way of life that is slipping away from her.
It's a strange occurrence when the middle of a movie is actually the most satisfying part of it. The second act introduces some real pain into Frances' life. Gerwig and Baumbach leave Frances' twee antics behind and delve into the painful crush of reality. Everything seems to go wrong for Frances. She can't pay the rent, her best friend is having a life without her, and Frances refuses to give up her dignity, as well as her messiness, for a shot at financial stability. The movie is arranged by chapters on her diminishing fortunes. She moves from neighborhood to neighborhood, the harsh economics of living in New York laid bare, until she's practically homeless, and a fellow dancer takes her in. Still fun, but now faced with serious problems, we really feel for Frances, even as she makes whimsical, unsound choices. She's not a violent rebel, but a sweet fuck up, and it takes rock bottom to make her come through to the other side, older and wiser. At certain points, I thought Gerwig was on the verge of falling into shtick, but she is such a charmer that she gets away with it. I just hope she doesn't play lovely, loopy women forever. She is an intelligent, vibrant actress and it would be great to see her stretch her range.
There are a couple of plot contrivances that gently strain credulity. Potential love affairs never get off the ground, because Frances is more of a sport than a seducer. She doesn't take herself seriously, so no one else does either. A refrain runs through the movie that Frances is undatable, which I found hard to believe. What man in his right mind wouldn't like to spend a couple of hours in her presence? And in the third act things come together way too neatly. The movie really makes you root for her happy ending, but I wish the ending was not so perfect. A little more of Frances' own messiness, of the bittersweet sting of successful compromise would have been nicer, but these are nitpicks. Frances Ha is Baumbach's best movie to date.

The 50 Greatest Films of All Time

Sight and Sound Magazine just released its list of 50 greatest films of all time. The big surprise is that Hitchcock's Vertigo dethroned Citizen Kane for the first time in 50 years. Now, is Vertigo the greatest film of all time? It is a great film, but the greatest of all time? Will it be able to last 50 years on top like Kane did? That is the problem with best film lists. They are by definition myopic.
Every time someone asks me to name my favorite film of all time, or even my 10 best, I groan. I find it impossible to say. I can tell you 25, 50, but to narrow it down to less than 25 is a futile exercise.
The Sight and Sound list is a venerable canon, a solid, sensible list. It's a great primer on the history of cinema. It includes films that changed other films forever. I'm thrilled it puts Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 6th place. I'm relieved it does not include Star Wars. It does not overtly celebrate greatly influential movies, for better or for worse, like Spielberg's Jaws, nor does it celebrate insufferable pains in the ass like R.W. Fassbinder. It is an august list. It includes most of the usual suspects (Dreyer, Godard, Tarkovksy, Ozu, Kurosawa). A great many movies in the list hail from the distant past. We need that much hindsight to select great films, that we can't think of anything newer than David Lynch's Mullholland Drive and Wong War Kai's In The Mood For Love, which are more than 10 years old.
But then half the fun of these canonic lists is you get to quibble with them.  This one includes a few essential comedies, Keaton, Chaplin, Wilder, Singing in The Rain, but in general it skews towards the solemn. It includes some stuff that I find unbearably pretentious, even if it might be essential viewing. I loathe mid and late Godard, and so while I agree with the inclusion of Breathless, and have no choice but grump at the inclusion of Contempt, I can't abide Pierrot Le Fou, which is like watching a French brat throw a tantrum for two interminable hours. I sat through eight hours of Bela Tarr's long, mesmerizing and sometimes soporific Satantango. It is a great work of art, but is it one of the 50 best films of all time? If sheer arty length is a criterion, then I think The Clock by Christian Marclay should be a worthy contender, even if he did not shoot one foot of film himself. Do we really need three Tarkovsky movies in the mix? (Not in my book. I find him very tough going). Why not three Billy Wilder's? Or Chaplin? Polanski's Knife in The Water? Why not The Shining? Fargo? Dog Day Afternoon? Still, if you want to explore the essentials of world cinema, this list is a great place to start arguing.

On DVD: The Future

I remember reading sundry reviews about this second movie by professional hipster Miranda July, all of them emphatically caveating how you had to endure a lot of twee, mumbling, pointless hipster anomie to finally come to some arty epiphany about the nature of time. Well, Marcel Proust this isn't. I tried, readers, to sit through this thing with an open mind, in the hopes that the epiphany would change my mind about Miranda July, only to stare in disbelief at the interminable sight of two fully competent adults (July and Hamish Linklater) deliberately behaving like childish retards.
The plot: These two live together, each fixated by his laptop. Their cat is very sick so they decide that when it dies, they will go their separate ways because the relationship is not working any more. They quit their jobs and pursue the most deliberately annoying version of carpe diem ever known to man. He volunteers for some kind of environmental organization where he accosts people by wearing a vest and holding a clipboard, and she has an affair with some guy who is, OMG, a normal. This they do by figuring out over the phone if they are actually staring at the same cloud. Of course, they have never spoken to one another before.
This is as much as I could take. If this is what it takes to receive an epiphany, I'd rather live in eternal darkness.
This new kind of pretentiousness, sprung from the precious heart of American hipsterism, makes me pine for the kind that at least has the guts to be pretentious, like Godard's or Jodorowsky's. Because at least those guys are having FUN. They have a blast throwing their intellectual superiority around. They know they know better. But this entitled, milquetoasty, whispery dreck will not even own up to it,  hiding instead behind talking cats, cute haircuts that could only possibly belong on Shirley Temple, and people who are so arty, they are incapable of articulating one sentence without breaking into spastic dance moves or staring wide eyed at their own quirks. They are so very hip that each word of of their mouths feels like it's going through an occluded birth canal. In this world, articulation and wit, charm and intelligence, and most importantly BALLS, or ovaries, if you insist on being politically correct, are out of fashion.
But Miranda July is not alone. This is some sort of aesthetic movement, and it raises some nagging questions: Is the idea behind the hipster/mumblecore aesthetic to present a precious, sensitive America to the world? An America so pure and misunderstood it breeds wallflowers and nerds instead of G.I. Joes? Do these people think that those who resent America and its power will be swayed by this ridiculous pretense of righteous innocence?

NYFF 2011: 2 Small Films

Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet, a small film about romantic disillusionment, takes place in the wilderness of Georgia, Russia, and follows two young travelers, Nica, (Israeli actress Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) as they go hiking in the mountains. There is very little incident. The opening scene shows her naked and shivering, waiting for him to bring her hot water for her bath. They are roughing it, and the camera takes an intimate look at what seems their budding relationship. There's lots of sex, silent walks in remote places, trying to figure out how to communicate with the locals. Some scenes suggest the possibility of peril (like dancing with drunk locals at a crummy little bar), but nothing ever happens. Alex is relaxed and good-natured and for a Mexican male, extremely confident in his woman. She has beautiful red hair and seems to be fit and a game traveler. We don't know anything about them except they seem to be having a nice time. Both actors are gorgeous to look at in a completely natural way. Loktev is great at capturing unspoken nuance, tiny shifts of emotion, which her actors handle beautifully. Furstenberg is a very charismatic presence, absolutely stunning in some scenes, and coarse looking in others; she has personality to fill the screen and then some. The camera adores García Bernal and he is particularly good at being inarticulate. He is a great silent actor. 
As they traverse the landscape with a local guide (Bidzina Guiabidze), nothing much happens until a small but loaded gesture, a threatening situation, provokes a reaction in Alex that completely alters Nica's understanding of him and changes their dynamic irrevocably. If before they weren't talking because they were happy in each others' company, now they are not talking because they can't bear to be near each other.
The movie aims to be naturalistic, but Loktev's stylistic choices seem pretentious. She cuts abruptly in scenes between them and the locals, but then the camera rambles endlessly in open shots of them walking through the spectacular landscape. She avoids the feeling of travelogue, but at the same time it is frustrating that we don't quite get to see what they are seeing. It feels deliberately claustrophobic. The sparse music score is one of those ugly abstract compositions that call attention to how arty the filmmakers are but add little to the images.

But even though the subtle psychological dynamics of the couple cast a certain spell, since the characters seem to be abstract figures rather than real people with past lives and present quirks, it is hard to be invested in their journey or their conflict.
The movie tries the viewers' patience with long aimless scenes and a disjointed rhythm. Once things get worse, the film gets better. The rift in the couple makes the guide, a man that is between benign and taciturn, potentially menacing, sense an opportunity. The ending is a wash out. Loktev goes for a very stripped-down world and, mostly through the excellent performances of her actors, who do a lot with very little, it does have a certain emotional power, but the self-conscious style gets in the way of raw emotion.

In my view, the same thing happens with Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre, although this is a far more complex work, with a lot of cinematic references. The Finnish filmmaker is known for his stylized, quirky deadpan. Shot in beautiful compositions with harsh light and primary colors against flat backgrounds, Le Havre is quite remarkable to look at but at the same time its style is starting to feel a bit old. It is the kind of thing that directors in advertising try to imitate when they want to give ironic edge to their commercials, except they rarely know how to pull it off as beautifully. Le Havre is a sweet, subversive little fable about racism and immigration. It takes the opposite route of weepy, truculent movies like Biutiful or Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, which approach the topic with indignant moral outrage.
In Le Havre, a dreamlike world that pays homage to old French films with its deliberately fake sets of a quaint France, the old boulangerie, the old corner bar, the little cottage where the protagonists live, in contrast to the realistic, ugly modern port, some old folks band together to help a group of African illegal immigrants that are trapped in a ship container. The protagonists, an old couple that go by the names of Marcel and Arletty Marx, no doubt a nod to old French cinema stars but also to Groucho and Karl, are poor but happy. He is a debonair gent who shines shoes and can't pay the bills and she stays at home and cooks. His friends patiently allow him to freeload. They seem to stem from a distant age of dignity and courtesy, but in complete opposition to the world today, they have great empathy for the plight of the illegals and organize to save one of them, a young boy named Idrissa, who escapes from the clutch of the police. The actors are deliberately wooden and speak clunky, mildly funny dialogue. The characters seem to belong to the world of film, including a police inspector dressed at all times in a black trench coat and a black fedora, perhaps an homage to Jean Pierre Melville's tough resistance fighters. The gang of friends may have been resistance members themselves, with their instinctive antipathy to the police and an organic tendency to altruism. The meanie who blows the whistle on the kid's whereabouts is Jean Pierre Leaud, Truffaut's alter ego in many films, looking ghastly and mugging for the camera. Kaurismaki has composed a little love song to his favorite French films, the ones full of esprit de corps and humanity, the Marcel Carne's, Jean Renoir's, Truffaut's, rather than the brainy Godard, Bresson or Resnais.
The film is gently funny and offbeat and it convinces once we realize that Kaurismaki is not being naive, but quite the contrary, he is being a contrarian. He asks what if instead of rejection, racism and intolerance, Europe would be warm and welcoming to those seeking a better life. He has enough studied quirkiness to make the liberal pieties less preachy, but my problem with this film is that the high style creates distance, it screams look at me, instead of bringing the audience closer to the characters. Even though I really like the idea and appreciate the execution, I find it difficult to feel passion or enthusiasm for this film.
When you see deeply humane films like Miracle in Milan, which Le Havre resembles in spirit, those films are steeped in human warmth and they open your heart. Le Havre might bring a smile to your face, but it does not reach your soul. 

Cahiers Du Cinema Ideal Cinematheque

These kinds of lists are meant to be discussed passionately. I agree with many of the 100 movies and disagree with more. For instance, under no circumstances would Godard's insufferable Pierrot Le Fou make the list, and I would add more Billy Wilder to the canon, among others, but this is a good a compendium to brush up on your classic cinema. Please disregard the stupidest, most unimaginative yet pretentious use of music ever.


La cinémathèque idéal selon Les Cahiers du cinéma
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Department of Irrational Hatreds

Everybody has irrational hatreds in film (just like we all have passionate adorations). Everybody has one star, or director, or movie they cannot abide. The hatred itself is not unfounded, but the extent of it may be irrational. I have plenty of those, and so, my dear reader, should you.

• Jennifer Jason Leigh. (aka the female Rod Steiger). I absolutely loathe her. I loathe her face, her hammy acting, her tics and mannerisms. I didn't totally hate her in Dolores Claiborne and I liked that movie that she made with Alan Cumming. I can't stomach the poor woman. The movies of her husband come in a close second.

• Star Wars. I hate this movie with a passion. I blame it for everything bad that ever happened to American movies. I hate Princess Leia's hair and her stupid bathrobe, I hate Mark Hamill, I hate Chewbacca, I hate those two stupid robots, I hate its reductionist good v. evil American crap. I hated it when I was 14. Do I need to lighten up? Maybe.

• Tom Cruise. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein (who was referring to Oakland, California), "there is no there there". This, to me sums him up. There is nothing inside. He is only good at playing assholes. He creeps me out (and this was before I ever knew of Scientology and maniacally jumping on talk show couches).

• Quentin Tarantino. An idiot savant. A talented guy who chooses to be deliberately stupid and stupidly violent. Can't fucking stand his movies. I did like Pulp Fiction, however.  Same goes for Kevin Smith (actually less talented than QT, but funnier in person).

• I hate Clint Eastwood, director. The most overrated hack on Earth.
• I hate Mumblecore. 

• I hate Benicio del Toro (sorry, ladies). He's the Jennifer Jason Leigh of men, a bad ham. Let me know when he stops mumbling.

• Jean Luc Godard. I know, I know. J'aime the old Godard, the one of Breathless, A Band Apart, and Contempt. He changed film forever. Duly noted. The rest of his pretentious, pompous, self-important, childish provocations, I can't stand.
• I hate, I hate, I hate and I hate James Horner. He is responsible for the music of Titanic and other painfully overblown schmaltz.
• This reminds me that I hate Celine Dion. I don't think explanations are necessary. She is the human equivalent of a dental drill on an infected root canal without anaesthesia. I also hate Lady Gaga (just because) and Coldplay. Derivative, pretentious hacks.
• I hate Tarkovsky and the people who love him.
• I hate people who say that they don't hate anybody or that hate is too strong a feeling. Bull. Shit. 

Shoot the Piano Player

Yesterday night I needed a fix of beauty and lightness and French.
So there was Truffaut's lovely little noir to do the trick.
Shoot the Piano Player is an adorable, quirky little film noir. Which is its greatest virtue. When has anybody described this genre as adorable and quirky? Shoot the Piano Player, with the unflappable, lovely, melancholy, Charles Aznavour, is a little gem of a film, a deeply romantic, sweet, very funny, wistful film noir.
It is totally original and very daring in an unpretentious way. Which is why I love Truffaut.
It reminded me of some of the work of the Coen brothers, who also do genre mashups. It reminded me of Raising Arizona, where there is plenty of slapstick but a very moving story propelling the plot. I also thought of Y Tu Mamá También, by Alfonso Cuarón, in which there is a lovely balance of sex farce, road movie and drama, suffused with heartbreaking melancholy. I wondered if these younger filmmakers had ever seen Shoot the Piano Player and were inspired by it.
Truffaut was the master of the light touch. His films are light and breezy, utterly tender and soulful, with a precocious wisdom about the world.
I was thinking that the difference between the antics of Godard and the antics of Truffaut is that Truffaut has a deeply empathetic sensibility. He's all feeling, whereas Godard is mostly brain. Truffaut's playfulness is sweet, his whimsy unforced, authentic and delightful. When Godard decides to get playful, like in Pierrot le Fou, it feels to me like a spoiled brat clamoring for attention. In some cases, like Breathless or A Band Apart, a genius spoiled brat, but still.
I'm firmly in the camp of Truffaut.

Truffaut Vs Godard

I'm a Truffaut kind of jeune fille.
And to judge from Richard Brody's gossipy article about the deux of them, I'm not wrong about the spoiled brattiness of Godard.
Without them both, however, we would have no New Wave, and who knows how long it would have taken for cinema to be liberated and revolutionized. It is fitting that it was a pair of French young guys who did it. No one loves the movies like the French.

Classics: Contempt

For the most part, I don't quite get Jean Luc Godard. I can't say I'm a fan. I really like his first movies, where he liberated the camera, and made cinema sexy, gorgeous, free and modern (A bout de souffle, A Band Apart). But then there is a really self-conscious strain in him that I find insufferable. A whimsical, pretentious movie like Pierrot le Fou is, to me, just some Gallic spoiled brat acting out with a camera. Not my cup of tea.
I had never seen Contempt, and I knew I had to, because even if one doesn't love Godard, one needs to be acquainted with his work. One of the reasons that spurred me was that the man himself has said he likes it very little. A good recommendation, as far as I'm concerned.
Contempt has a lot going for it. For one, it has Brigitte Bardot in it. As photographed by Godard, she is not an actress, she is a creature. One thing I like of Godard is how he portrays women. Women in his films are devastatingly gorgeous. They are the essence of some kind of feminine ideal; mysterious sprites that look amazing with a sweater and a scarf and tousled hair, creatures who pout and do spontaneous things for no reason other than they are women, made to be loved by men and by the camera. Godard's gaze is adoring and totally sexy. It helps that his women are beautiful, alluring French gamines like Jean Seberg, Anna Karina (his wife and muse) and La Bardot.
They just don't make them like they used to. Consider this a tragic sentence. Bardot at the height of her beauty was a natural beauty. As natural as a peach ripening in the sun. Today, 20 year-old actresses in this sick in the head country have surgery and no sex appeal.
La Bardot in Contempt is not only insanely gorgeous. She is French. Only the French can wear their crazy manes up like that. For only the French can make disheveled, unwashed, tangled hair look just so. You could look at her hair the entire film and obsess. And then there is that pout, and those feline eyes with the best eyeliner job since Cleopatra, and surprisingly, the acting, which seems to come from a feral, honest place.
I could see how armies of men would fight over this woman. I could see how the gross caricature of the American film producer, played by Jack Palance (who looks and acts like a caricature) would want to possess this woman. She's the ultimate trophy.
And married to this extraordinary creature is the divine, gorgeous Michel Piccoli.
Here is an actor so supremely relaxed, so without artifice, that he seems to have wandered in from real life (except who in real life is so damn sexy?).
And there is also Fritz Lang, playing himself, charmingly quoting poetry in three languages.
He brings a welcome degree of unselfconsciousness to the movie.
So here's what I like about Contempt (besides Piccoli and Bardot, who make the movie well worth watching):
• it is a quietly brutal portrait of the end of a relationship, the death of love. It bummed me out deeply, which is a good thing.
• It is also a portrait of selling out. Try to please the money man and you end up selling your soul, and your wife in the balance.
• Some people think it is one of the greatest films about making films. I think it is a bitter, if rather basic take on the corruption of art by commerce, but not necessarily a great film about filmmaking. (I'm in the camp of Sunset Boulevard). I liked it more for its exploration of the death of love.
• The beautiful, haunting score by the great Georges Delerue. The music is gorgeous, but the cues are used very unorthodoxly -- in the middle of scenes, for no apparent reason. Still, it is a classic.
• Some shots are stunning. The fluidity of the camera in the apartment scene is frightening, it's so good.
Here's what irks me:
Parts of Godard seem childish to me.
• The completely over the top portrayal of the American producer. Not that Hollywood producers need defending, but this is too crude. An American barbarian in Europe, giving money to none other than Fritz Lang so he can shoot what looks like a cheesy, and needless to say, irrelevant, movie version of The Odyssey, should indeed seem like a Martian. But the character is a witless joke.
• Now, maybe I really don't get it, but the movie that poor Fritz Lang has been saddled with looks like it belongs more to the Ed Wood school of directing. Not that I want the movie within the movie to be a blockbuster production, but Greek statues with lips painted blue or yellow don't seem fit for Fritz Lang. They look like a very bad Mexican movie from the 70's.
• Some sequences are masterly, others are shoddy (horrible lighting, horrible sound). This seems to be deliberate and purely for reasons of epater le spectateur.
• Selfconscious symbolism. I know I'm supposed to love the use of the three primary colors as accents in the wardrobe and furniture. Yellow and red towels, blue sofas, etc. Yet these kinds of flourishes are distracting because they are so deliberate. They scream: "audience: you are now in symbolic territory, brush up your Freud and/or whatever cultural name dropping you have access to". It bothers me that the pretentious gets in the way of a really great story.
Is this too philistine of me?

Godard le Fou

There was a reason why I didn't stand in line to see Godard films but I had forgotten what it was. Until I went to see Pierrot Le Fou, playing at BAM. Then I remembered: the pretentiousness. The smugness.
I like some Godard films: Breathless and A Band Apart are lovely. I appreciate his enormous contribution to the evolution of cinema. The free, fluid camera, the spontaneity, the playfulness, the love of the medium. But 1. I much prefer his contemporaries Truffaut, Louis Malle, J. P. Melville; 2. the pretentiousness is hard to bear. You can give him brownie points for experimentation with a disjointed narrative. Fine. But Pierrot le Fou is maddening. Tries to be funny and is only in spurts. It seems, with all due respect, sophomoric. You can entertain yourself watching Godard's beautiful muse, the sprightly Anna Karina, who is lovingly shot and who is a master at charming gallic nonchalance. You can try to find the missing charm in Jean Paul Belmondo's completely indifferent performance as you marvel at his charisma and the geography of his face, complete with dangling cigarette at all times. You can try to forgive the cheap, stupid shots at Americans that befit a bad student film. If you have patience with auteurs whose motivation seems to be to epater le bourgeois, this may be an enjoyable movie for you. Not for me.

My Sentiments Exactly

I do not always agree with David Denby, film critic of the New Yorker. I sometimes think he nails it, and sometimes his taste is a bit conventional for my taste. But in this week's issue he writes the most cogent, thoughtful and articulate essay against the new ensemble cast, multistory, fragmented narrative kind of movie that is getting nominated left and right, but that makes you pine for one story well told. These movies, the bogus, awful Crash and Syriana, the pretentious Babel, are the reason why I loved movies like The Queen and United 93 and Children of Men. One story, told chronologically and far more profoundly devastating, illuminating, human and real than the crazy antics of 546 people, running around all over fragmented time frames, giving the audience a headache.
Read the Denby article. It is very illuminating.
His analysis of the Arriaga-Gonzalez Iñarritu oeuvre is flawless. Some golden nuggets:

• The Mexican housekeeper, having taken the children across the border, gets into trouble when returning to the United States. After that, damned if she doesn’t lose the children in the desert, at which point I lost all faith in the movie. “Life is like that,” I heard people in the audience say. Actually, a certain kind of pseudo-serious bad fiction is like that. ...“Babel” feels like the first example of a new genre—the highbrow globalist tearjerker.

I actually lost faith in the movie almost from the first scene, when Brad Pitt calls the housekeeper and asks her not to go to her son's wedding because there is absolutely nobody in the whole of San Diego except her who can take care of the kids. Not a neighbor, not a friend, not a relative. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK.

• “L’Avventura” was an open form; it didn’t play around with time sequences, but it altered our sense of how life works. The Arriaga-Iñárritu films, for all their structural innovations, are closed, even overdetermined, forms—puzzle boxes. All the pieces are there to be put together in our heads, but the rich ambivalence of art somehow slips away...

• Experience can’t be random and also structured like a cage.

• Godard once said that he wanted to make films with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. “21 Grams” moves sideways and turns itself inside out, but in no order... But why? Since none of the characters are part of any reality that makes sense to us, we can’t say, as we did at “Amores Perros,” that a social malaise has made the normal sequencing of the story irrelevant. On the contrary, we may wonder if Iñárritu and his editor didn’t scissor the movie into fragments in order to give soap-opera dismalness the appearance of radical art.
The same suspicion of pretentious fatalism and structural willfulness shadowed my response to “Babel.”

Hear, hear, Denby.