So, the Frencies strike back. My asshole teacher made me watch yet another movie from the comtemptible French New Wave, also by Jean-Luc Godard. It was the worst movie I have ever seen. I enjoyed Manos: The Hands of Fate more.

I know I bitched about Contempt a great deal, but the movie I saw today, Weekend, was a hundred times worse. Contempt was the most dull, plodding, uninteresting film I could imagine, and was not even rescued from its own tedium by the stunning environs it was filmed in and the natural beauty of Bridget Bardot. Yes, Godard managed to completely destroy any potential the movie had through careful, sadistic planning. Godard must have habored a blinding hatred for the movie-goer.

If Comtempt was the least interesting movie ever, Weekend is the most incoherent, irritating, and completely pointless movie ever projected. I would rather watch ineptly filmed home movies made by 5 year olds than suffer through Weekend again.

It was a pseudo-intellectual, rambling, incoherent mess that barely resembled a narrative, staring complete amateurs, and photographed by someone who must have been a blind cripple.

This refuse makes fucking Roger Corman look like a film auteur par excellence.

My teacher was giving us the usual horseshit about how the French New Wave was fighting against Hollywood stagnation and taking advantage of new portable equipment while Hollywood stayed locked up in their studios.

If by anti-Hollywood, they mean anti-entertainment, I completely agree. If by anti-Hollywood they mean they are adamantly opposed to logical plots, compelling characters, real meaning, or ANY degree of cinematic skill... God. What a charade. I can't even continue talking about this. Believe me when I tell you that anyone who considers Godard in the same league as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, King Vidor, Alfred Hitchcock is a lunatic. Breathless and Contempt prove that he grasped the techniques of the cinema, dull and insipid though those films may be.

Are we to believe Weekend was a bold experiment? If so, it failed utterly on many, many levels. Even Un Chien Andalou, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's infamous surrealist film had a more coherent plot. Weekend has the barest wisp of a plot. 98% of the movie has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Not only are the characters not developed, they hardly exist. It's largely a collection of poorly composed scenes pointlessly and poorly cut together without regard for logic or continuity with non-actors staggering dazedly through them while mouthing vaugely Marxist nonsense. The other bits are when the non-actors are reading DIRECTLY from books or reciting speech about overthrowing the bourgeoisie. The scenes are, of course, not in any way related to the rest of the movie. If this film was meant to be a joke, the punchline is that Godard has no respect for his audience and would rather waste his questionable talent on complete garbage than to do something even remotely interesting.

The only thing innovative about Weekend is that he actually managed to convince other people this horseshit was worth financing and viewing.

Dear God, this is a crime against cinema.

Any gruding respect I may have had for Godard has been completely eroded by this travesty. At least home movies made by five year olds have an excuse.