IN PRAISE OF LOVE — CANNES 2001

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French New Wave Cinema standard bearer Jean-Luc Godard's 2001 study in inventive filmic expression carries significant weight.

Godard refracts historic, personal, and editorial messaging through pure cinematic poetry.

The narrative involves a filmmaker navigating his current project while recovering after a break-up of a 10-year relationship.

A shift from black-and-white to color has a profound effect on the audience.

Godard's kaleidoscopic approach to storytelling is refreshing for his willingness to to make political statements big and small.

Jean-Luc Godard takes a steely knife to Stephen Spielberg, who he detests with an obvious fury.

Love isn't all that Godard is praising.

Hollywood and Americans represent people who refuse to ever become adults.

"In Praise of Love" could easily serve as a permanent installment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I screened this beautiful film in its truly amazing 4K restoration, kicking off the L’Alliance New York's Version restaurée series, held at the lovely Florence Gould Theater in Midtown Manhattan.

Check it out.

The every-Tuesday night series runs Tuesday, September 10, 2024 - Tuesday, December 17, 2024.

Rated PG. 97 mins.

WORKING GIRLS — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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Lizzie Borden's third film, behind "Regrouping" (1979) and "Born In Flames" (1983), is a perfect chamber-piece of neo-realist social satire.

The film's feminist trappings of an '80s era Manhattan brothel provides the frame for a piercing commentary on the effects of American capitalism on women.

"Working Girls" could easily be adapted to be a modernday Broadway play.

It would be a sensation for its timeless qualities of social, sexual, and economic truth.

Molly (Louise Smith), a professional photographer, lives with her lesbian girlfriend when she isn't working as a sex worker in a Manhattan brothel run by a domineering madam.

"Have you ever heard of surplus value?"

That theme line shoots like a sharp political dart when a character speaks it.

“All workers create more value at work than they receive in wages. The extra surplus value goes into the boss’s pocket as profit.”

Surplus value is "the surplus produced over and above what is required to survive, which is translated into profit in capitalism. Since the capitalist pays a laborer for his/her labor, the capitalist claims to own the means of production, the worker's labor-power, and even the product that is thus produced."

Female hands hold cups of coffee, count money, and remove cum-filled condoms.

Everyone chisels; there is no place to hide.

Not Rated. 93 mins.

TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL — SHOCKTOBER!

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Co-writer/director Eli Craig deconstructs nearly every slasher horror movie cliché dating back to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" for a gross-out laugh fest that works better than it has any right to.

Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine play the film's hilarious title characters. Tucker and Dale are a couple of backwoods best friends who fit the description of every hillbilly psychopath from "Deliverance" to "Creature."

And yet, these two overall-wearing goofs are just a couple of well-intentioned beer-lovers who want to enjoy the serenity of a rundown cabin on a quiet lake. Enter a group of hysterical college hipsters to stereotype our scruffy duo as serial killers from their worst nightmares. The kids can't help instigating a series of guffaw-inducing suicidal accidents that leave behind an explosion of gore.

The filmmakers get a little too carried away in a sloppy third act, but "Tucker & Dale vs. Evil" is a refreshingly funny black comedy. In turning the tables on worn-out horror movie tropes, Eli Craig and co-writer Morgan Jurgenson create a cogent diatribe on slasher movie clichés. They have purged 40 years worth of hackneyed ideas that deserve to be put out to pasture. We always knew that snotty young urban interlopers (read as capitalist imperialists) were the real blight on out-of-the-way regional locales; now here's your proof. Oh the irony.

Rated R. 86 mins.