Powerful

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

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

This film is absolutely brilliant. Weird characters and the fact that there's NO-THING really going on made this film interesting for me. Other people might find this film pointless and totally boring, but for me it's a treasure. I don't know anything about Shakespeare's 'King Lear' so I can't say if this film has anything to do with the actual play at all. This is exactly the kind of film that makes you think. After seeing this film you wonder what did the director want to tell me? Because clearly this film is made to communicate with the audience, it's an expression of the film maker's ideas, views and emotions. Or in other words... IT'S ART! The same goes to another Godard film 'Numero Deux'.

This is a strange film, but a likable one. It asks the question: what would we do if all the great works of literature were suddenly lost? In a way, this is Jean-Luc Godard"s "Wasteland": in a manner not unlike the T.S. Eliot poem, Godard fills his work with quotes, allusions, and sometimes outright plagiarisms of his favorite works of art, literature, and film, including hommages to Robert Bresson's "Trial of Joan of Arc" and Grigori Kozintsev's "King Lear"; there's even a character named Kozintsev in the movie. Godard is not making a movie based on Shakespeare's "King Lear": he's making a movie about "King Lear." Godard has always considered himself an essayist rather than a storyteller, and the frequent use of captions, stills, and other distancing devices are reminiscent of his hero Bertold Brecht. Marxist rhetoric, though not absent, is less strident here than in some of Godard's earlier works. The movie is fun if occasionally irritating and often incomprehensible. Of the international cast, Molly Ringwald gives a touching performance as Cordelia, conveying much of her character's anguish through body language alone; Burgess Meredith reads Lear's lines with authority, and one wonders how he would have measured up in a more traditional interpretation of the play. The film hints at father-daughter incest, but there's no overt sexuality.

Cahiers du Cinema rated this as one of the top ten films of 1987. On the other hand, Leonard Maltin said of it, "Bizarre, garish, contemporary punk-apocalyptic updating of Shakespeare classic. Little to be said about this pretentious mess except... avoid it." I don't think it is a great film, but I certainly don't think it can be dismissed in such an offhand manner. There was a lot of thought put into it, and it can be very thought provoking, and also quite funny. I liked this film quite a lot and I thought it was interesting. I think it is very innovative and ahead of it's time; it almost seems like a multimedia project more than a film. I can see how people might find it very boring, but I didn't at all. It deals with many issues that have since become prominent themes in academic discourse.

No Plot. Four characters who don't interact. Nothing happens. Peter Sellars walks around and thinks. His recurring voice-over monologue obsessively examines a thought that is not very interesting to begin with. Not content merely to bore us, Goddard assaults us with shot after shot of crudely filmed, irrelevant imagery, accompanied by unintelligible overlapping speech. Perhaps there's something resembling an idea buried underneath all the nonsense. But I doubt it. And what does any of this have to do with 'King Lear'? To be bored by a film is bad enough, but this film is aggressively, offensively, violently boring.