Todd Mintz: Brain Serial Blog

I guess my relationship with the films of Jean-Luc Godard could be described as “It’s Complicated”.

I’ve gone out of my way to seen every film I have had access to…which might be close to 30. Yet, it’s hard to say I really like his films…it’s more that I find them extremely interesting.

His early to mid-60’s films were the best. Known as the father of the French New Wave, Godard’s films had an incredible style to them even though I didn’t necessarily understand the point of his artistic effort. He also featured incredible looking women (especially the smoking hot Anna Karina) and allusions to socialist politics which weren’t all that obtrusive at first but got much more so later to the detriment of his art IMO.

It was 1980 and I was 13 years old. Mork and Mindy had just started its third season. As I recall, the first two years were really great but during the third season, the show went downhill fast. I was extremely disillusioned by this happenstance. The kid in me, in some sort of silent social protest, swore off network television shows for good.

For good. Forever.

Really. Not joking.

I went to see “The Artist” yesterday and I saw a behavior that I’ve seen many times before that I find curious and rather strange.

The line to buy tickets was about 20-25 deep. 2 cashiers were on duty selling tickets.

On either side of the ticket windows sat a Regal Automatic Ticket Kiosk. Nobody was using either.

The weather outside was brisk, windy & rainy (if you weren’t under the overhang). Yet people universally decided that they rather stand in the ticket line exposed to the weather instead of using the kiosk.

This post is in a similar vein to Google Street View 1968 (Model Shop).

I was watching another random 70’s movie this weekend. Entitled “Zig Zag” w/ George Kennedy, it was from 1970 and was filmed around Los Angeles in many locales that were either somewhat or very familiar to me (and FYI, the movie was WAY better than most of the IMDB reviews).

I’m not going to try to describe how powerful and compelling this movie is for me…too many other folks have done that far better than I can and I don’t have the time to write a post that lengthy. However, I will say the following:

If space aliens came from a galaxy far far away and decided to destroy our planet because we’ve made a jolly mess of things and humanity was permitted to offer one piece of evidence as to why earth should be saved, I think a DVD copy of this film would be what I would offer.

While I don’t think Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point is quite the film accomplishment of Blow Up or Red Desert, I still think it’s a heck of an important movie and probably (along with The Passenger) much more accessible to American audiences than his earlier works. I can go on and on about how much I love Antonioni’s films…however, that’s not the point of my post.

First, for reference, here is the last 9 minutes of Zabriskie Point. About the 4:00 mark is when the final “action” begins (the house blowing up…sorry if I ruined it for you) and at 5:20 the final “scene” begins.