Mr. Ned wrote:Features feel a little weak, don't they? Too bad the commentary didn't make it, but I hope a few things get added before the November release date.
I agree that the features seem slim. It's obviously too early to tell anything about their quality, but the quantity, at this early stage, is a disappointment. I would have hoped for enough stuff to warrant a two-disc DVD set given that
Weekend is kind of filling a gap left in the collection by the absence of the abundantly supplemented OOP
Pierrot le fou.
I listened to the David Sterrit commentary recently and while it's pleasant enough he pretty much tells you what you're seeing on the screen, and throws in some stuff about the actors and crew which sheds little light on the movie. When it does something formally or politically daring he says "this shows how political Godard's thinking was" or "this shows how Godard had no respect for the rules of commercial cinema." He seems to expect that you didn't like the movie, can't imagine anybody else liking it, and don't understand how a movie that doesn't try its best to entertain could even be talked about. So in a way he's trying to break you out of the mold in which the only two responses to a movie you can imagine are "it successfully entertained me, so it was good" and "it tried to entertain me, but it failed, so it was bad." I don't think its absence on the CC disc is a bad thing, given that most people who are going to watch it will not be stuck in that mold anyway.
Nothing Sterrit says is dumb or wrong, exactly, it just struck me as a little hand-holdy, and the viewer he seems to anticipate is like an undergraduate intro to film student who has just watched Weekend for the first time and has a paper due on it tomorrow morning. It's as if he thinks part of his job is to convince you that the film was indeed made on purpose, that it's not just a bunch of random footage Godard had lying around, that it's aesthetic choices were conscious and add up to something that can be interpreted and discussed.
Is there no Adrian Martin commentary for
Weekend? I know he's recorded a bunch for Australian releases of Godard films, I just don't know which ones. His contributions to
Vivre sa vie and
2 or 3 Things... were outstanding, and I think he does a great job balancing the needs of people who have never stepped off the cineplex path before with people who want to hear an actual, substantive, interpretative argument.
