Word: godard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...typical of Sontag that she would turn a personal preoccupation into an occasion for larger reflections. Her collected work is a map of her consuming passions: the French writer Roland Barthes, the German critic Walter Benjamin, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. (In her spare time, she has directed four films abroad.) All her work aims at defining a vaporous but crucial notion, the modern sensibility. She combines a metropolitan taste, omnivorous and hard to satisfy, with a transatlantic mind, drawn to European writers and filmmakers. Often she discusses them in the European form of fragments and epigrams. "I get impatient...
...front door, Psycho's mummified Mother Bates lurked behind a window. Against the back wall, German expressionism ran riot in a full-scale set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The museum was like an EKG of a national intelligence that can find value in both Jean-Luc Godard and Jerry Lewis...
...good stuff. Nicolas Roeg casts his wife, the exemplary Theresa Russell, as King Zog of Albania foiling a terrorist plot to the strains of Un Ballo in Maschera. Jean-Luc Godard sets Lully's Armide in a Paris gym. Body builders pump iron; two gorgeous sorceresses dust them off. Murder is in the air, and the kinetic poetry Godard can create from the way a woman's hair falls across her face. Julien Temple's witty episode -- quick gags and endless tracking shots -- plops Rigoletto into California's baroque Madonna Inn. A movie producer philanders in a room decorated...
Guess what? Things didn't work out quite that way. Allen, identified as "Mr. Alien," does deadpan a bit of Shakespeare's text. Mailer and his daughter Kate do appear briefly, but the novelist indulged in a "ceremony of star behavior" and left town. So Godard vamped. He hired Burgess Meredith to play a gang-lord Lear (with many Mailer intonations) and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. And he turned the film into a cynical, pun-laden, nonlinear meditation on virtue vs. power...
...make a play for my daughter?" asks Meredith of one William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth (Theater Director Peter Sellars). Well, yes -- and the play he wants to make for her is King Lear. The film, though, could be called The Comedy of Eras. With his usual dour brio, Godard mixes allusions from five centuries of drama, painting, film. He presides onscreen too, speaking like a deranged Hitchcock, his hair a Rastafarian tangle of phone cords, stereo jacks and dog tags. The whole sport makes for Godard's most infuriating, entertaining pastiche in two decades. It's nice to know...