King Lear

Cahiers du Cinema rated this as one of the top ten films of 1987. On the other hand, Leonard Maltin said of it, "Bizarre, garish, contemporary punk-apocalyptic updating of Shakespeare classic. Little to be said about this pretentious mess except... avoid it." I don't think it is a great film, but I certainly don't think it can be dismissed in such an offhand manner. There was a lot of thought put into it, and it can be very thought provoking, and also quite funny. I liked this film quite a lot and I thought it was interesting. I think it is very innovative and ahead of it's time; it almost seems like a multimedia project more than a film. I can see how people might find it very boring, but I didn't at all. It deals with many issues that have since become prominent themes in academic discourse.

I can't say I've ever actually *liked* ANY film by Jean-Luc Godard (and I've actively hated several), but this late entry in his career is lighthearted and infectiously playful in its experimentation, especially early on, so that even when what it's trying to do doesn't come off, we still feel involved enough to roll along with it.

It was apparently first commissioned as a genuine, straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare's play, but the end result is a wild, free-associating modern creation of its own, much more to do with the process of adaptation than the play itself, and peopled almost entirely by famous faces such as Norman Mailer, Burgess Meredith, Julie Delphy, Molly Ringwald and even Woody Allen for a few seconds.

It's a very strange thing to exist, and many, I'm sure, would just find it insufferably pretentious (which it certainly is), but I still enjoyed it more than any of his efforts from the 60s and 70s, so take from that what you will.

P. S., you're definitely gonna need the subtitles on, particularly for Godard's own (English) scenes.

I don't know where to begin.

I cannot contain my contempt for this film (if I dare call it a film). In my opinion this is the worst Shakespeare adaptation committed to any art form anywhere in history. And one of the most egotistical pieces of rubbish in the annals of film.

It has NO USE. You couldn't even use this if you were doing a thesis of King Lear at college because this is faeces. Not to mention that it has hardly anything to do with the play King Lear. It has no plot, no interesting characters or character study and hardly anything in the way of decent direction.

And it is not just the fact that it lacks so much, it is the fact that what it does have is so goddamn terrible. Quotes and sayings repeated endlessly, terrible seagull sound effects that 1) happen in scenes where there are no seagulls and even scenes when we are indoors 2) happen in scenes when there is other dialogue going on and 3) are so loud that your ears begin to bleed (well, nearly).

I went to see this film because 1) I had only seen one other Godard movie Bande à Part (1964) and 2) I am a great Woody Allen fan. Now I mentioned earlier that this was egotistical and I will go further and say that this is sheer celluloid masturbation! Godard (in my opinion the most over rated director in cinema history) has almost become drunk with power, power gained from years of critics kissing his ass, and now believes he can do no wrong as long as he entertain and excites himself (i.e. masturbation). Another celluloid masturbator (for want of a better word) is Woody Allen, this shared hobby probably bringing the two together. But the one difference between these two is this, Woody Allen still has the gift to entertain and excited others as well as himself, whereas Godard lost this gift along long time before King Lear.

Now I have wasted enough time talking about this catastrophe.

I give it 0 out of 10.

P.S. If you want a really good Shakespeare adaptation try Throne of Blood (1957).

This is by far one of the weirdest films ever made, as I've said before. Godard is probably my second favorite director (right behind Kitano), and this isn't his first really weird film or anything (I'd go so far as to say all of his films in his unfairly-neglected-but-superior "late period" are quite strange in some way, either in their fractured narrative, or in their hardcore deconstruction of typical movie-making -- "Where's the story?" indeed...). But this is kind of a mix of everything he'd done with his newer stuff, when it came out; all the themes and elements and ideas he had been exploring, and it even predicts a bit of his stuff after this. People usually get interested in this film for its genesis and some of the bizarre happenings in this film (Godard signs a contract on a napkin; Godard recorded telephone conversations with producer and put it in the film, which peeved the producer off; Godard never actually reads past page 3 of King Lear itself; this film was made from like 4 or 5 different aborted scripts cobbled together; a father and daughter sign on to do this movie, do 5 takes or so, and then walk off the set in disgust, all of which is captured in the movie, with a voice-over explaining this; Woody Allen was hired to be in this film and he had no idea what he was doing so he drinks some coffee, puts some safety pins in some film, recites a few verses from the play King Lear and that's about it).

Well, it goes far beyond that, as far as strangeness is concerned... seeing Molly Ringwald in a Godard film is just bizarre, first of all (keep in mind she was HUGE at the time; Pretty In Pink and all that stuff). Second of all, Godard's narration is absurd. I mean, you can barely even tell what he's saying, in English (this is also his only English film from beginning to end!). He might as well have been recorded through a voice box. Godard plays a guy with a headdress made of hi-fidelity wires, so he can jack himself into the unknown at any time. He is looking for "The image". Since Godard never actually read King Lear, the film instead asks if King Lear is even an important work of art, if it's even valid a radioactive, post-Chernobyl landscape. So, the main actor (who actually says the line, "Oh yeah, by the way, my name is William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth." in a comical tone) is "searching" for, uh, something, and he encounters a bunch of crazy characters, in an extremely, EXTREMELY fractured narrative, with scenes ending abruptly, double (sometimes triple) voices of characters constantly on the soundtrack, and pretty much everything crashing, colliding, and being completely out of sequence, out of time, out of tune. Oh, let's not forget the soundtrack, which is made of slowed-down and electronically-manipulated versions of Beethoven symphonies; also, there is a loud, annoying, seagull sound about every 3 minutes in the movie.

Sounds like a disaster, doesn't it? Well, I gotta say, it's one of the best films -- not just by Godard -- but EVER. Even beyond the "strangeness" that attracts me, there is a strange, otherworldly beauty to the proceedings. Godard designed the film to fail, but he did so in a way that's really, really interesting, and is actually extremely experimental, especially when you consider that this was designed to be a mainstream film! Godard himself said he never got page 3 of King Lear, it didn't interest him at all... he said the film was the first 3 pages of King Lear and the rest of it is him trying to "Get past" the rest of the play. Which is hilarious, absurd, and reason enough to check it out...

A powerful film, misunderstood to be certain, groundbreaking and unconventional in every way, I'd say anyone into Jodorowsky and stuff like that should probably want to seek this out and have their mind blown.

Radically obscurantist contemplation on Shakespeare's classic play presents itself as a wild associative stream of images and sound, in a for Godard typically brilliant montage, but presupposes an audience of polymaths; for everybody else it is of limited interest.