Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

polysicsarebest 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.

Gloede_The_Saint I simply can't understand this. Whenever a film is extremely original this happens, oddly enough this do not seem to be the case with the oddities of the 30's and 40's, so I do smell a little discrimination.After watching this film, with mixed expectations I might add I found that it's one of the greatest films I have ever seen. A masterpiece. Now I will not go around hitting other people with my taste but I believe there's a few things that should be said so you know what you're getting yourself into:1. It's one of the weirdest films of all time - It's not just surreal but a tiny bit minimalistic too. - People speak like they were in Inland Empire.2. It focuses a lot on technical skills and picture making.3. As most of Godards films he's trying new things out. And it could be viewed as a project of some kind.4. One of the characters, the one played by Godard actually, mumbles a lot, also in his narrations, this seem to be more of a comic relief after a while but at the opening it can be found as annoying and it seems to be the most criticized part of the film.If you don't object to any of these things and have liked/loved other Godards of the 80's, 90's, you will like/love this. I most definitely love it and I hope you do too.

tsf-1962 This is a strange film, but a likable one. It asks the question: what would we do if all the great works of literature were suddenly lost? In a way, this is Jean-Luc Godard"s "Wasteland": in a manner not unlike the T.S. Eliot poem, Godard fills his work with quotes, allusions, and sometimes outright plagiarisms of his favorite works of art, literature, and film, including hommages to Robert Bresson's "Trial of Joan of Arc" and Grigori Kozintsev's "King Lear"; there's even a character named Kozintsev in the movie. Godard is not making a movie based on Shakespeare's "King Lear": he's making a movie about "King Lear." Godard has always considered himself an essayist rather than a storyteller, and the frequent use of captions, stills, and other distancing devices are reminiscent of his hero Bertold Brecht. Marxist rhetoric, though not absent, is less strident here than in some of Godard's earlier works. The movie is fun if occasionally irritating and often incomprehensible. Of the international cast, Molly Ringwald gives a touching performance as Cordelia, conveying much of her character's anguish through body language alone; Burgess Meredith reads Lear's lines with authority, and one wonders how he would have measured up in a more traditional interpretation of the play. The film hints at father-daughter incest, but there's no overt sexuality.

tedg Spoilers herein.Lear is about sight and truth, and incidentally about how devilish charms (derived from the audience's participation and perception) bend sight and truth. So it (and the similarly placed `The Tempest') are naturals for film, especially self-referential films about films and filmmaking.Self-referential filmmaking is an art that the French believe they invented -- and they have a continental tradition of deconstructive semiosis to draw from. So this would seem a natural. Godard is an experimentalist -- a theorist -- but not a great artist, and it shows here. Because he doesn't know, or can't reach, the deep structure of Lear on that matter. For Shakespeare, confusing forces of naming emerge from a capricious aether, drawn forth by the creative process of life. Modern semioticians hold that this comes from the hidden inner mind, drawn forth by the messy animal processes of life. Godard rattles about with this thin notion, somewhat of a curse for the French, and never touches the deeper notion, which accidentally fell, it seems, on the English. The French have never forgiven them, and here equate the notion (and films about it) to American gangsterism.