The Worst Film Ever

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Seen at the Viennale 2017: Reason for screening was a sad tragedy. Hans Hurch, director of the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) since 10 years, died this summer. Now for the Viennale 2017 several filmmaker selected movies in praise of Mr. Hurch. Agnes Varda selected Bande a Part for screening. I think, everybody who goes to the movies must see all Godard movies at least once. And for sure the wonderful Anna Karina in Bande a Part.

Jean-Luc Godard's extremely entertaining ode to the American pulp novel. Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur convince Anna Karina to help them steal a stash of loot from her aunt's house. Or does she? Godard's most playful film has only an occasional straight narrative and is infused with a lot of funny episodes (from the trio passing notes while attending English class to the now famous Madison dance scene). Karina, 24 years-old but looking like a teenage school girl, is exceptional and she's very well paired with both Frey and Brasseur. The music by Michel Legrand is a big plus as is Raoul Coutard's striking B&W photography, capturing a bleak 1964 Parisian winter. The telling narration is by Godard himself. Based on the novel by the American author Dolores Hitchens.

Godard's wonderful, watch-able little movie is a real breath of fresh air. The simplicity of it's cinematic style and the youthful spirit, and foolishness, of it's protagonists give it a reality that rings true on many levels. The plot is absorbing , the locations are superb, the casting inspired and the jazzy score hits exactly the right note for the time and place.Anna Karina is stunningly attractive as Odile. The camera just loves her, even when dressed down, her face flawlessly lights up the screen. Her eyes are bright and inviting and her character is a delightful mix of childlike uncertainty and kittenish would-be-sophistication. Her two co-stars are a pair of comic 'likely lads' with-a-plan, and how that plan unfolds and their relationships with her, and with each other, develop in the process form the nub of the story. There's a good deal of adolescent knockabout fun; the two men delight in play-acting as gangsters and reliving scenes from their favourite American movies, all three characters get up and spontaneously dance 'The Madison' in a cafe and the poor Simca sports car in which they drive around is repeatedly and mercilessly thumped over kerbs and pieces of scrap-yard junk. Typical kids....The Paris of BANDE A PART seems mostly far removed from the familiar clichéd, sophisticated landmarks (except for that one famous short scene in the Louvre) and although it's 1964, the whole area looks pre-war in style with painted advertising on walls and streets bare of traffic and pedestrians in a way unimaginable today. The cafe-culture is more centred around Traditional Jazz than Rock-and-Roll and even the way the characters dress appears to be from a time as yet untouched by the very youth-quake that Godard and his fellow New-Wave film makers helped to promote. The Beatles may have been taking the world by storm but they hadn't quite reached this Parisian quarter.The cinematography is good, given the constraints, while the editing and general production values are equally impressive - something not entirely expected given the New-Wave's preference for a raw, pared-back style.All in all this film really works and having just bought the DVD (for lack of any recent TV airings) I can see myself watching it over and over in future. Recommended.

"For latecomers arriving now, we offer a few words chosen at random... Three Weeks Earlier. A pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl."The recipe for the most effortlessly cool movie ever made. It's the sort of thing Tarantino has been trying to make for what seems like an eternity, what "Pulp Fiction", in occasional bursts, comes close to being. But that movie is too self-conscious, tries too hard. That's not to suggest that Godard wasn't conscious of what he was doing when writing this film- all writers are, we have to be. But I don't think Godard was trying too be cool, I think he just was. It's a cheap crime flick, according to some nothing too interesting at all, a rehash of "Breathless", and even some of the other New Wave giant Truffaut's movies... "Jules and Jim" and "Shoot the Piano Player" have been mentioned.But that's all part of this film's charm. Godard, a favorite of mine, can be awfully pretentious and HAS been awfully pretentious. If you're consistently making experimental movies you think are challenging, if you are always changing your mind on what constitutes good cinema, if you're obsessed with quotes and references and philosophy and philosophers, you're bound to be pretentious on occasion. "Band of Outsiders" is a pulpy crime flick with great wit, fun characters, good performances and a well-told story, and that's all it is. It's a great film because it's great at being what it is.The screenplay is glorious. The dialogue is gold, the narrative momentum never slows down, we know all we need to know about these people and their goals, and the movie's irreverent, hip air is a thing to behold. Or experience, rather. Great photography by Raoul Coutard. Everyone knows the best bits: the minute of silence, the dance scene, the visit to the Louvre. Depth is not needed in this sort of movie, it's a romp, plain and simple (though one with some amount of complexity- you can read it as Godard examining the need for escapism, specifically in the form of cinema, among other things). A glorious delight from start to finish and one of my favorite films. Unforgettable, still Godard's best film.