RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Ersbel Oraph This movie is about an opportunist seeking the approval of armchair revolutionaries. The story is about the director slash film writer JL Godard and the public is expected to be sucked in the disjointed stories presented on screen. And the final product is a working product which gave the opportunist a boost in image.Pick any star of today you dislike. Someone liked by the masses but disliked by you. Godard is the same shallow thing, only for the Marxists for whom he sang.This is a masculine ode, of course, given the name. A catholic revival story. And to make things more revolutionary you have the exploitation of images like Coca Cola or the Vietnam war. Which was started by the French. What makes Godard disgusting is that he knew of Vietnam, he knew of all the colonial wars, he knew about Algeria and how a decade before the police has drowned hundreds of peaceful Algerians in the Seine, yet he needs to point out his spineless resistance against the US. Which makes him yet another proud cultural icon serving the power.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

Blake Peterson "We are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola," a character remarks in "Masculin Féminin". This isn't the character's sentiment, per se; it is, in actuality, the sentiment of Jean-Luc Godard, and he doesn't want to mention it passively. It is as though he wants the quote to be stamped on his grave, to be lauded as a visionary for generations to come. So who woulda thought that, nearly fifty years later, the children of those children's children would be the children of Tumblr and Starbucks, more likely to wonder aloud who the hell Marx is and why one should drink Coca-Cola when a five-dollar "coffee" awaits a few blocks down the road.Godard's attitudes have, of course, dated over the course of a half-century — but the way he expresses them, the way he captures 1960s youth, have not. To be a successful Godard film is certainly not an easy thing. A director who can hardly suppress his love for bizarre sound manipulations ("Masculin Féminin" itself is often soundtracked by a single, cartoonish gun shot that seemingly comes out of nowhere) and teleprompter-ready intellectual speak, it doesn't take much for a Godard film to go from zero to insufferably pretentious miles-per-hour in an instant.But most of the time, Godard keeps the politically/intellectually minded atmosphere humorous and engaging, even if you can't quite put your finger on why watching Jean- Pierre Léaud dive into a radically liberal speech is entrancing. The kiddos of "Masculin Féminin", all in their late-teens/early 20s, spend most of their time smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in stylish cafés around the city, delighting each other in their oh-so-adult conversations and escaping in movies they know they're smarter than. All attractive, all high in their hopes, all avant-garde, they regard sex as a breezy pastime, responsibilities as a chore they can save for later. They act worldly, name-dropping Sartre whenever the time comes, but heaven knows they would be much more content swimming in each other's cerebral coolness than actually do something with their lives. Leading lady Chantal Goya, who portrays the ambitious Madeline Zimmer, wants to become a yé-yé singer — but does she know that Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy were one-in-a-million chanteuses hard to recreate? "Masculin Féminin" is about everything while also being about nothing. It covers just about every topic found in the mind of a '60s dwelling youth, but it knows that these are just fleeting thoughts, especially when considering most of the stuff happening internationally is the responsibility of the leader of the free world (whoever that is, a character might accidentally grunt). A café is perched just a block down the street and, last time I checked, I wasn't the leader of the free world.The film doesn't take itself seriously, and its actors are likable; New Wave staple Léaud is always so fascinating to watch (don't ask me why), and Goya, looking like a typical Anna Karina-type, enchants with her childlike smile and jet-black, Anna Wintour reminiscent bob. "Masculin Féminin" is Godard at his most focused, his most audience oriented — it is a pleasure from start to finish, even if we don't quite have a grip on what we just watched.

Emil Bakkum Let us start with the bad news. Unfortunately with the film Masculin Féminin, Jean-Luc Godard clearly produced a child of its time, the roaring sixties. It has become hopelessly outdated. The good news is: if this is your generation, or if you find the era fascinating, you will still find Masculin Féminin amazing. It was made in 1967, and depicts the lives of students in Paris during the year 1965. We land in the time of L'imagination au pouvoir (Imagination in power), an ideal that was more or less copied from the USA, being in the wake of the civil rights movement. To be fair, most post-war cultural developments stem from the USA. In France there was a growing resistance against the government of Charles the Gaulle. The people were no longer prepared to accept Unjustified authority. Godard assimilates this rebelliousness in his art of filming, and abandons the established rules of the trade. Note that this approach is called Nouvelle Vague, not New Wave! On the one hand his new vagaries introduce originality, and on the other hand they sometimes look amateurish (amazing for such a great director!). An example: there is a small film inside the film, and it is always nice to have two for the price of one. Many of the dialogs are interwoven with street sounds. Several scenes are surrealistic, for instance when a man stabs himself for no reason. Often the dialogs have the form of interviews. Typical is the preoccupation with revolution and with revolutionary philosophers (Sartre, Karl Marx) and artists (Bob Dylan). The traditional French society opens up in favor of the American way of life. Perhaps the major theme and certainly the most exciting is the sexual liberation. The script breaks tabous and openly discusses commitment, sexual freedom including many-cornered love affairs, birth control and family life. Sure, such dialogs do not portray normal conversations. However, it does reflect on the improved sex education and on some emerging extremely liberal circles. And the characters explore each other, which is interesting. In retrospect the rebellion of the time ran on and became deprived of the sense of reality. The counter-culture was mostly nonsense and not viable, You just can't have the imagination in power, without affecting the standard of living. Therefore, in the eyes of the present-day viewer the film must look more like a comedy than a serious accusation against the institutions and relations in our society. Nevertheless, is it really naiveté - the idea that the rejection of evil will by itself produce something else that is good? The emotions more than compensate for the lack of quality in the film. So if you are in for something different, I can recommend Masculin Féminin. An American film about the same theme, and of higher quality, is Strawberry Statement. You may also consider seeing the Swedish film Tillsammans - let us skip the word amazing here. Or some of the other films about counter-culture, that are in my list of reviews.

Graham Greene ACTION: In many respects, Masculin / Féminin (1966) is a precursor to Godard's subsequent film, the radical and highly satirical La Chinoise (1967), with the spirit of political unrest, reaction and revolution suggested through a series of random and disconnected acts of violence that are contrasted throughout by a series of dialogues and discussions on the nature of everything from music and movies, to the battle of the sexes. It came from a period in Godard's career when he was moving further away from the ironic referentialism and playful subversion of American genre conventions that had featured so heavily in his earlier and more iconic works - from establishing films such as À bout de soufflé (1960) and Une Femme est une femme (1961) - and more towards the deconstructive, essay-based cinema of reaction that would follow on from the creative year-zero of the difficult masterpiece, Week End (1967). As ever, it is a film about ideas and a satirical look into the notion of "youth" within the context of mid 1960's Paris - with the hopes, dreams and aspirations of the characters cast against a backdrop of Dylan and The Beatles and the war in Vietnam - presented in such as a way as to question the integrity of this generation, without ever drawing any obvious conclusions.REVOLUTION: In the hands of any other filmmaker, Masculin / Féminin could have easily descended into your average, run of the mill, teenage love story; focusing on two characters from the opposite ends of the social spectrum, thrown together in a courtship that is continually threatened by a number of external concerns, from political differences, career ambitions, jealousies and social divergence, and all devised within the environment of swinging 60's Paris, again, post-Beatles/post-Dylan. Nevertheless, the ever iconoclastic Godard does deliver these elements, but in his typically subversive approach, in which every element becomes a comment on the ideas and interpretations behind it. ...THE CHILDREN OF MARX AND COCA COLA: Even the subtitle of the film - which doesn't appear until right towards the very end - is a perfect summation of Godard's approach here; with his comment on the contemporary youth of 60's France being both celebratory, but also critical; in the way that he renders these characters as buffoons that spout and pontificate - as characters in Godard's films often do - to illustrate that behind the ideas and the ambitions there's an emptiness that is simply cosmetic.VÉRITÉ: As with Godard's 1967 trilogy - comprising of the aforementioned La Chinoise, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Week End - Masculin / Féminin invites us to spend time with these characters, to think about the things they say and do, and then to cast judgement on them. Once again, I think the problem that many people have with this film, and with many of Godard's work in particular, is that they assume the director is sympathising with his characters; presenting them as people that we should care about or identify with, when in actuality he seems to be showing them up as the fools that they clearly are. Again, recalling the presentation of Guillaume in La Chinoise, young actor Jean-Pierre Léaud portrays Paul as a likable enough young man, though one whose pretence of political action and Marxist belief is eventually revealed to be nothing more than pseudo-intellectual pontification and playful theatricality. Unlike his more motivated friend Robert, Paul is simply playing at political activism like he plays at being a lover; throwing out carefully rehearsed slogans and ruminating on segregation and Vietnam, while his true thoughts and feelings are wrapped up in idealised notions of marriage and romantic fulfilment, represented as sex.POLITICAL FILM: You could perhaps argue that it isn't one of Godard's clearest of socio-political statements; with the film often going around in circles, suggesting questions that are never answered - or giving answers to questions that were never asked - as the director continually conspires to satirise and critique his subjects in a manner that goes against the usual preconceived conventions of narrative based cinema. DEFIANCE: If you're familiar with Godard then you'll expect such presentation, though even then, the end of the film, which wraps things up with a cruel joke, might seem contrary to the point of flippancy by many viewers who have taken the time to view the film and invest some thought into Godard's uncompromising ruminations. However, it's completely typical of the director to end his film in such a way; mocking his characters as shallow chancers ready to shrug off any situation, no matter how horrific, while never once leading the audience in their opinions. As the film ends, we're allowed to think about the actions that these characters have taken throughout the film, and make up our own mind as to whether or not these are negative attributes, or positive ones.CINEMA: The presentation is familiar, with Godard shooting in low-quality black and white, with the early new wave reliance on disarming jump-cuts and Godard's continual interest in ironic inter-titles still used throughout. The camera is mostly stationary, or we have Godard using the tracking shots that his colour films were famous for; while a number of scenes are presented with documentary-like elements in the way that characters address the camera or are framed in order to undercut the action ironically. The machine-gun sound effects that punctuate the inter-titles would be used again in the more entertaining Made in USA (1966), while there's that similar feeling of rehearsed spontaneity familiar from all Godard's 60's films, giving us the impression of improvisation, when we now know how carefully planned the project actually was. GOD(AR'): If you're already an admirer of Godard's cinema then Masculin / Féminin is an essential, if not entirely successful work, from his most interesting cinematic period; even although it could be argued that it lacks the finesse or ingenuity of his more iconic films, it is still worthy of experiencing.