The 400 Blows is reckoned one of the greatest films ever made.\u00a0 I beg to differ.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t give a spoiler alert because there\u2019s nothing to spoil.\u00a0 Nothing happens.\u00a0 This was Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut\u2019s directorial debut.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 If I had been around back then I would have gotten in touch with him urging him to stop making movies, for everybody\u2019s sake.\u00a0 Mercifully, the movie is in French so that will warn off most of the unwary.\u00a0 Camera Girl and I decided to watch it tonight after I recorded it from TCM last month during its \u201cThirty Days of Oscar\u201d celebration of Academy Award winning movies.\u00a0 Which goes to show you that the Oscars have been selecting bad movies for well over sixty-five years at least.<\/p>\n
Wikipedia says that all of these famous filmmakers (Akira Kurosawa, Luis Bu\u00f1uel, Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg, Jean Cocteau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Richard Linklater, Tsai Ming Liang, Woody Allen, Richard Lester, P C Sreeram, Norman Jewison, Wes Anderson and Nicolas Cage) think this movie is one of the best movies ever made.\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s too bad.<\/p>\n
A 12-year-old boy is bored and gets in trouble at school, runs away from home and gets sent to reform school for trying to steal a typewriter from his father\u2019s office.\u00a0 At the end of the movie, he escapes from the reform school and runs until he finds himself on the beach at Normandy.\u00a0 The End.<\/p>\n
When the credits came up at the end Camera Girl looked at me and asked me, \u201cThat\u2019s it?\u00a0 What the hell kind of a movie is that?\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cIt\u2019s abstract!\u201d\u00a0 She was not happy.\u00a0 That will probably be the last French film she will be watching.\u00a0 I think she holds me directly responsible for this movie.\u00a0 I think I\u2019ve lost some stature in her eyes because I recorded it and didn\u2019t warn her off.<\/p>\n
While at the reform school the kid gets in trouble and one of the men in charge slaps him in the face brutally hard.\u00a0 So, I was afraid the title was about some horrible beating the boy receives.\u00a0 But that was the only violence in the film.\u00a0 The real violence is against the audience.\u00a0 After watching this film there are ninety-nine minutes I will never get back.\u00a0 It should be called the \u201cThe Ninety-Nine Blows.\u201d<\/p>\n
I know I\u2019m just a philistine and I don\u2019t understand art for art\u2019s sake.\u00a0 But I contend that a motion picture has to amuse the audience in some way.\u00a0 It can excite or frighten or sadden or confuse or fill the audience with mirth, nostalgia or lust or almost any emotion or intellectual state.\u00a0 But at the very minimum it cannot bore the audience to tears.\u00a0 That\u2019s the one feeling it cannot summon up in the audience.\u00a0 That\u2019s the one unforgiveable sin.\u00a0 The lights cannot come up on an audience that looks at each other and says, \u201cWhat the hell was that?\u201d\u00a0 That unfortunately was our reaction.\u00a0 If I had seen this in a theater I would have pounded on the manager\u2019s office and demanded our money back.\u00a0 That\u2019s how bad it was.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s the French.\u00a0 Being beaten by the Germans in three major wars over the course of less than a century may have done something terrible to their souls.\u00a0 Maybe this film is a form of revenge on a world that has beaten the snot out of them, physically, psychologically and spiritually.\u00a0 If that is the case, then I think they went overboard.\u00a0 No one, not even the Nazis deserves to watch this film.\u00a0 There are limits to revenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The 400 Blows is reckoned one of the greatest films ever made.\u00a0 I beg to differ. I won\u2019t give a spoiler alert because there\u2019s nothing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,1263,237],"tags":[4823,43,38,1355],"class_list":["post-32593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reviews","tag-francois-truffaut","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n