Strictly average movie

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Jean Luc Godard's Made in the USA is a smug bore of a film with the director riding high in his peak period during the Sixties that featured abstract works mocking narrative style and bourgeois lifestyle while embracing Maoism. While some of his works ( Breathless, Weekend, Alphaville, Les Carabiniers ) hold some fascination his overall canon is one of grand tedium where he drones on in endless political thought and non-sequitur with cloying pretense and name dropping for the post modernists to dig. Enter "USA," looking like a refugee from a Jaques Demy musical, featuring another of Godard's obsessions, adorable wife and muse Anna Karina seeking out the man who murdered her husband. Wearing some pretty Paris frocks and inflecting monotone Godard gets the rest of his cast to go along as well while slathering his jarring but underwhelming compositions in gaudy color, sloppily editing (signature Godardian artistry) then sitting back and waiting for the art house critics to proclaim this dull goulash a "subversive indictment of..." take your pick. Along with Fellini, Bergman, Kurasawa and Truffaut Jean Luc Godard was part of the foreign film movement that helped transition film appreciation in America from entertaining block-busters to carving out a niche in the market with small personal art films. His first feature Breathless is considered for its introduction of a new film language (ellipses) the birth of the new wave. After that came a series of similar broadsides against the decaying West that may well be still going on today given the old guy is still making highly obscure films. But the game was up by the end of the 70s and all very evident in this flaccid mess (sorely missing the camera work of Raoul Coutard) re-hashing the same theme, ideas, distance seen in all his other works. I admire Godard for still be able and desiring to make films in his 80s. But given his messy incoherent, filmography he may be more con artist than film artist. Looking back at that seminal moment in film history where film editing changed forever, John Cassavettes Shadows (59) seems to have beat Godard and Truffaut to the punch. For Godardian loyalists only, especially the ones willing to fall for his Big Sleep re-make blurb and his hackneyed visionary politics that might aptly re-tile this mess as Made in Venezuela.

Dwight MacDonald might not have liked Goddard's 'Made in U.S.A.'It is a film that marries high culture and low, which bristles DM disdain for 'masscult'. For 2016 film goers 'Made in U.S.A.'is a 20 questions quiz. It has everything thrown in from soup to nuts, from pulp fiction to politics to literature to American politics to Hollywood and even to the signature of the 'last of the Red Hot Mamas' Miss Sophie Tucker. Goddard references Horace MaCoy's 'Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye', which rests on Anna Karina's breast in the opening shot, but substitutes it with the words of say Samuel Beckett. His characters have the names of Hollywood directors, Goddard admired. Selig or Misoguchi for example. Or writers like Ben Hecht. His bad guys bear the monikers of Nixon and Robert Macnamara. Into his script he doffs his hat to the poet Prevert or Louis Aragon or the writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Otto Preminger is a street name. Richard Widmark is in good company as a killer, and he delights in Karina killing the detective novels David Goodis. Who today recalls the abduction of the Moroccan leftist opponent of Hassan II, abducted at noon in St. Germain des Pres? Or Mers El Kebir or the failure of the Free French to wrest Dakar from Vichy control? Or the destruction of Agadir during a strong earth quake or the crushing to death of protesters when the police closed the Metro Charonne? And Goddard's disembodied voice rings out on an AIWA tape recorder as he condemns the sterile politics of the French Right and Left and the pusillanimous Communist Party, a condemnation which finds echos into America's presidential brouhaha for the White House. 'Made in U.S.A.' is full of talk that today might send the viewer to turn off his DVD player. Is it a museum piece? an obscure film that best be viewed by cinema students? Goddard's film is a relic of the turbulent 1960s, of a France exiting from a long war in Algeria in 1962, ending fighting wars from 1939 till June 1962. As the country under DeGaulle's Fifth Republic energized a tired France, the American war in Vietnam brought about what the French called the 'May Days of 1968', but we are ahead of the story the film tells. 'Made in U.S.A.' reflects through Goddard's lens the 'Sturm und Drum' of those seemingly forgotten Times.

An opening title card thanks a friend of Godard's for teaching him to love sound and image. From there comes Godard's building of a narrative through just that, sound and image, except now the sound is structured much more like how the image is in film, by cuts instead of layers, as opposed to the usual synced dialog with music and sound effects underneath.The genre would be film noir except there isn't a bit of black in it. It's shot entirely in bright, luminescent, primary colors. The narrative is taken from The Big Sleep, but frankly doesn't even matter to how the movie operates, as in one scene Godard deconstructs the whole thing by pointing out that sentences don't have any meaning. In fact, the bar sequence of this film is it's finest part.This is apparently Anna Karina's last role with Godard, and his eye for her hasn't changed a bit this late in the game. She pretty much is the frame, rather than fills it. Everyone and everything else in this movie is only there to be framed by her.Savvy self-reflexive dialog ensues. "La mise-en-scene! La mise-en-scene! La mise-en-scene!" (mistranslated laughably in the subtitles of the print I saw as "The charade! The charade! The charade!" Oops.) According to Godard's dialog, this is a Disney film--with blood. I say it's a comic book, and a rather good one at that.I suppose one could say that this movie isn't "logical" (it certainly doesn't fit the more confined logic of Alphaville and A bout de soufflé), but I'd honestly be surprised if anyone watches this movie for the plot. It's surreal and stagy--that's what this movie is, not how it's made. And yes, it bears Godard's "signature" throughout.--PolarisDiB

On the surface this one was playful and cute like Karina's character but those qualities masked a frighteningly piercing introspection in both the lady and the film. Generously sprinkled with amazing philosophical/existential lines and dialog ("There's a door in front of me, and behind you") it was extremely exhausting but also equally rewarding symbolically: left and right as struggling but complimentary sides of a political yin/yang and perhaps representative of an individual heart's desire to evolve up to a higher social/ethical level of existence. The rolling stones' "as tears go by" hints at the sad but necessary inevitability of this evolution in a sentient heart, and USA "laissez-faire" ethics on one end of the spectrum and nazi fascism on the other both made the metaphorical moral discipline of communism seem pretty attractive to our heroine. Some very cool retro A/V equipment too.