Shioka O
Avant-garde, challenging project, and it was dull. I simply couldn't keep eye on it after some minutes.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
12/04/22
Full Review
Audience Member
Yes, Cannon gave Jean-Luc Godard the money to make an experimental French New Wave Shakespeare adaption written by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy. It was originally to be written by Norman Mailer, who was also making Tough Guys Don't Dance with Cannon and that's a totally different story.
Famously, Golan and Globus signed the contract for this film with director Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival. Golan refused to sell the famous contract napkin for $10,000 when asked by the New York MoMA, which seems like a low figure.
Only three characters from the story — Lear (Mailer), Cordelia (Molly Ringwald) and Edgar (Leos Carax) — are in this. It's set in and around Switzerland were William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (Sellars) is trying to restore his ancestor's plays in a world where civilization and culture has lost after Chernobyl.
Much of the dialogue isn't spoken by the characters on-screen, but heard in voice-over or spoken, whispered or echoed by someone else off-screen. If that seems confusing, King Lear deliberately does not use conventional filmmaking techniques or even tries to be watchable.
I definitely think that the beginning, where Menahem Golan complains about how long Godard is taking to make the film and demands its competition by the 1987 Cannes Film Festival is completely real.
King Lear did make its premiere at Cannes on May 17, 1987. It played U.S. theaters for two weeks and then disappeared for fifteen years. How many people actually saw it? Well, for years, Quentin Tarantino's resume claimed that he had appeared in it, as he correctly figured that nobody would have seen it and known he was telling a lie.
You know who is in it? Burgess Meredith and Woody Allen.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
william k
Radically obscurantist contemplation on Skakespeare'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.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Intrinsically contradictory.
For Godard nothing seems to be as complicated as the simpler things. Therefore, to expect that his film "King Lear" was a passable film adaptation typical of Shakespeare's tragedy, it is at least the public's total lack of knowledge about the director or incoherence on the part of critics.
Although some lines of Shakespeare's play are used in the film, only three characters (Lear, Cordelia, and Edgar) are, so to speak, "presented." King Lear is, without any confessionalism, a difficult film, and so it is, if we consider Godard an insane director (in the positive sense), we have in this his visual experiment, the apex of human insanity when questioning art in a new world Of a major nuclear disaster (in reference to the Chernobyl episode).
I view Godard's films as a laudable experimentation, which makes it unmistakably unique to each film. Godard is one of the rare, almost sole director who succeeds in affirming cinema through denial, thus more than presenting or affirming what cinema is, Godard discusses the various possibilities of being and making movies. And it does this by laughing and mocking the audience, but not in a gratuitous and unnecessary mockery instead, laughter is in front of our lack of care in assimilating the narratives of a film, seeking understanding and logic for everything, including in art, that historically sought Always breaking with the conventional, taking into account the very incoherence that is humanity and its disastrous way of living.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/28/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Wow. Bad. Just terrible.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Behind this is Godard's inability to resolve an essential contradiction in his work -- his reverence for ideas and theories and all sorts of philosophical speculation, and his utter disregard for a sustained, coherent presentation of them.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/21/23
Full Review
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