Buzz (DaytonaBob) Goddard is a genius? SERIOUSLY? This waste of time is violent, disgusting and any political message he is trying to portray as some sort end of the world scenario is total B******T.As I read reviews going on and on about what brilliant movie making I thought these people sound like the idiots I went to college with who would go on and on and on about a 40 minute movie showing a wall they stared at and had the supreme gall to call it incredibly thoughtful and a statement on...well stupidity in my opinion.The nonstop murders, rape that borders on bestiality, eating people is without a doubt some of the most pointless nonsense I've ever seen. The worst is Goddard seems to think killing animals live on screen is great entertainment. His "characters" slaughter a live pig on screen, rabbit and various other disgusting killings. Basically this is a snuff film that sophomoric people sit around drinking and getting high while calling it brilliant is probably the best sense of the demise of civilization that people would call Goddard a great film maker.Nope just a pretentious bit of garbage that was a waste of money and time. A better film would be showing Goddard a victim of his own entertainment and being slaughtered live on screen as punishment for making such drivel.Just goes to show that if you buy into this kind of hype you'll buy into anything without thinking.

Mopkin TheHopkin Jen Luc-Goddard's "Weekend" is a strange art film. Goddard uses garish colour and strange camera shots and editing cuts throughout the film to give it an anarchistic feeling. Fitting, as this film is about the collapse of society during a weekend car trip. I think. The film features a number of characters who are completely off their rockers. There is a roadside robbery by Jesus (or God? or God's grandson?), inexplicable on camera animal killings (real, I think), cannibals, murder and a ton of car's honking. I do not know what else to say about this film really apart from what it made me feel, which was a bit confused. The film is about anarchy and chaos, and the way it is shot is increasingly disjointed as society continues to crumble. Their is also a ton of political commentary about consumerism, neo-colonialism and class division. When this film ended, I really did not know whether I liked it or not. It had some good dark-humour and was interestingly shot, but made little sense beyond that, and left me thinking of an art school project.All in all, this was a disjointed art film about anarchy, and I didn't like it or dislike it. It just is. It exists. Why, I cannot say. Recommended for fans of Goddard, and anarchists I guess. 5/10

Steve Pulaski With a film like Weekend firmly secured under his belt, it's truly no wonder why French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has gone on to live in the hearts and minds of cinephiles young and old. Godard predicates himself off of convention-annihilation, otherwise known as destroying silently-accepted norms of filmmaking and with Weekend, it feels as if he held a book of cinematic conventions in his hand and went page-by-page, tearing each page out and proceeding to rip it up with great force.Running with this simile, Godard replaces each ripped-page with a page written all his own - pages that, unlike the predecessors, shatters all preconceived notions and silently-accepted conventions of cinema. The result is his 1967 film Weekend, a film that is one of the hardest pictures I've ever had to review or analyze. I suppose one could go through the film scene-by-scene and meticulously analyze what each one had to offer, but even that may make it difficult to come to conclusion. In my mind, it's best to watch Weekend from a distance and allow it to tamper with your mind and unfold like a violent trainwreck right before your eyes.We follow, through the best and worst of times, a French, bourgeois married couple, Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc). After a lengthy monologue involving Corinne describe, in great detail, a sexual experience in a way that is equal parts erotic and haunting, so begins their journey to Corinne's parents' countryhouse in order out collect her dying father's inheritance. If worse comes to worse, the couple plans to marry the man in order to collect the money as soon as possible.The trip is a chaotic one to say the least, beautiful in a disturbing way and disturbing in a beautiful way. The couple drive through the countryside of France, witnessing all accounts of shallow human materialism and the pitiful ugliness of western civilization in the form of angry, restless citizens, violent acts committed over relatively trivial occurrences, and several car wrecks and burning vehicles scattered on the side of the road.Arguably the most iconic shot of Godard's entire career is the lengthy tracking shot following a traffic jam for approximately three-hundred meters. The shot lasts about seven minutes and is captured at a small distance from the traffic, and shows the congested right-lane up close while the left lane is vacant and shows Roland and Corinne cruising at a controlled speed while seemingly removing the chaos from their mind.In this shot, like almost every other shot in Weekend, one could determine its meaning in several ways. Too me, Godard seems to be using these two characters' nonchalant and unfazed reactions to a violent traffic jam as a commentary for the desensitization of westerners in the regard that so much tragedy and evil happens at an excelling rate, looking away or just moving along with the tragedy and catastrophic events seems to be the easiest way to go about things. In present day society, things like mass shootings, war, poverty, and other forms of social ugliness have plagued newspapers and TV stations worldwide, so with constant ugliness around us, it's as if looking the other way is what we are best at.Godard's tracking shot brilliantly shows this in a way that some will find excessive and others will find astounding. Godard also uses his trademarks here to further destroy conventional cinema, such as flashing title-cards on screen that may or may not have to do with the subject matter, frequent jump cuts, unsteady shots, and some of the coldest depictions of society I have yet to see. The end of the film shows numerous people and animals slaughtered for what reward? Serviceable food rations and some sort of celebratory ritual amongst a group of anarchists that spout incoherent speeches about what appears to be a cross between appreciation for the land as well as control over it? It's dark and often hard to watch.With that being said, to call Weekend a tough sit for one-hundred and four minutes is almost an understatement. I emerge with the same remarks I had about Godard's directorial debut Breathless in that I had more fun writing the review and talking about the film than I did actually enduring it. With his frequent interjection of title cards, jump cuts, overlapping and fading sound mixing, among many other unconventional tactics, it's as if Godard, in the wake of creating one of France's most provocative and daring films, is also trying to create one of the country's most unwatchable pictures in history. If the subject matter wasn't enough, you have a presentation equal to a waiter spilling hot soup on your lap at a diner - it's a disruption to what you expect and it's thoroughly uncomfortable.But that's what you get with Weekend and what you take away from the film Godard doesn't seem to mind much. Whether you see it as a critique of bourgeois society, a magnifying glass on the hellish state of blue collar society, how bourgeois society views the lower classes, or a depiction of the disgusting materialism of western culture (or a combination of the aforementioned ingredients like myself), it would appear that Godard doesn't mind what you find in it. Thinking about it at great length, I'm almost certain he doesn't care if you watch it to begin with or emerge with something to contemplate. In a way, that would be the same kind of selfishness that Godard seems to be condemning in this picture. Who says what you have to take away and how you have to take it?

chaos-rampant I've thrown rocks at cops in protest rallies in my angsty youth, if nothing else at least I can understand anger and outrage as expression of political sentiment. I can also understand the folly of that violence. With a film like Week End, do we give Godard his satire or do we bemoan how blunt it is? Inasmuch as the film is an opportunity to express politics rather than a forum to discuss them, I'm willing it to give Godard the stage to see what he has to say. Is the vehicular havoc of the beginning "a scene of Parisian life", perhaps, Paris is notorious for its traffic jams, but the famous tracking shot that defines this part of the movie plays out like a tableaux of Tati humour, except there's no charm in its delicacy, the intended effect is horn-blaring cacophony. It gets the point across, this is a world of madness and hysteria we're tracking through.But what about the politics expressed here, once the amusing novelty wears off what happens inside this apocalyptic landscape of provincial roads littered with corpses and wrecked cars? A film doesn't need to resort to protest rally sloganeering to be agitprop, but when it does, when it quotes from Marx and Engels, when the US and Israel is the source of evil (curiously enough, France is not singled out among the imperialists), when the actual problems of Africa are trivialized in the manner of reading from a pamphlet, does that reveal a filmmaker who doesn't know any better or one that does but chooses to obfuscate the bigger picture to promote an ideology? I guess I'm wondering if the malice is naive or deliberate. If it was any other filmmaker I might begin to consider that the intended message is also an object of outrage and ricidule, but for someone who was a proclaimed Maoist, I can't help but shudder at the thought that he means what he says.Godard seems to me like he's the bourgeoisie of cinema, exactly what he despises. Having solved his apparent problems, he turns to the world to find a source of vexation to complain about. There's an insatiable hunger here to point out wrongs and shake fists in the air, nothing to love or embrace or attempt to understand. If he's not sneering at his own countrymen, he will speak on behalf of blacks or Arabs or he will make idiotic claims about modern music. His little reenactment of a revolution in the Parisian countryside is a mockery of that revolution.To paraphrase the words of one of his characters, likely there are more terrifying things to contemplate than the strange nature of man, but Godard can't even contemplate that strange nature. Likely he can understand it, he's an intelligent film mind and in the first few minutes seemingly without effort he creates a marvelous game of deceit, but he's too busy humiliating it, too busy trying to provoke a response to really evoke something. Fin du cinema, only for him maybe.