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Alphaville - Criterion CollectionRating:
Release Date: 20 October, 1998 Retail Price: $29.95 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $2.96! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
Alphaville - Criterion Collection Reviews
Experimental? Sure! Does that make it bad? NO!
I frankly don't understand what is up with all the negative reviews! I am an ardent film lover and received this for my 12th birthday. Sure some of it such as the huge computer is old fashioned, but the premise is not! Some of the most creative filming I've ever seen (Godard is a genius). And all the scenes are creative. The film follows the existentionalist movement. The idea is fairly creative, especially for the time, and all the actors, especially Eddie Constantine, were great. By the way, I was almost horrified at the brutality towards the end. I've seen films like Resevoir Dogs, yet this came off as just as brutal. Godard did a great job! This is one of my alltime favorite movies. Yes, it's experimental, but I think it works.
Enjoyable and Classic
What is most enjoyable about Alphaville is its sheer volume of pulp fiction and science fiction conceits. It is filled to the brim with those recognizable characters that are beginning to become archaic, references to high art, pop culture, and everything in between, and intertextuality that airs the feeling of influence throughout. Godard's early feelings around of his style make it almost a perfect comic-book movie: frames roughly stuck next to each other that are still pleasurably visual instead of just jarring.
What gives it its real impact, however, is a strange feeling of ineffability that is so subtle that it's never entirely dealt with in the plot. Sure there's the computer, Alpha 60, claiming its ultimate control over history, present, and future, but the true sense of a preconceived direction is much more undertoned than that. What I think is the best example of this feeling is when Caution gets out of a taxi in front of a glass door that has an arrow pointing to the right of the frame. Before the taxi parks, even before the viewer has a chance to register the mis-en-scene, one can already see Caution moving in that direction past the arrow, and when he does, it comes off as either a sense of deja vu and helpless inevitability. Similar feelings are created through the blinking lights, the sometimes sudden cutaways, the repetition of key shots, and a bizarre chase scene that is so lightly choreographed as opposed to fast and intense.
I also like the repetition of several metaphors, the biggest one being of the ants. If the rest of this movie doesn't seem to be really striking, the mindless grasping of the citizens should still be effective, if for nothing else than its rather simple surrealism. The ending is just a melange of exciting craftmanship, as the everything, including the very structure of the movie itself, begins to fall apart.
Those are the main things I took away from this highly enjoyable film by Godard, but there are many smaller things that were fun and interesting to notice too, mostly allusions and philosophical situations. However those are too numerous to even know where to start, so I'll just leave it that. Despite Godard's attractiveness to artsiness and film snobs, I feel very comfortable saying that this is a classic a wide range of people could really enjoy. It seems more open to the interests of fans of Sin City than it does fans of A Bout De Souffle, though it has a lot of importance to both.
--PolarisDiB
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