User reviews

If you love Godard's work (which I do), you'll love this final work of his. It's typical of Godard's late period, aka from In Praise of Love through The Image Book. There is a deep sadness that penetrates these later works of Godard, and Phony Wars is no exception. It's very rueful, sad, elegiac, and often profound. In other words, Godard still had it at the end. The film is only 20 minutes long, it's mostly voice over and stills (some early scenes have no sound at all), yet it's mesmerizing and completely Godarian. It's showing in cinemas with the documentary Godard Cinema. You owe it to yourself to see this final work by one of the great masters of cinema, and to see it in a cinema. Even at 92, Godard had lost of his cinematic genius.

I am convinced that the primary reason award winning, yet still obscure films deemed "art house" and "genius" by most professional critics successfully receive a relatively, if not overwhelmingly, high rating from general audiences is that there are very few individuals with good taste and sufficiently intelligent brains that are dedicated or stupid enough to not only seek out and persevere through the full run time, but to also take the time to rate the feature film, series, or short (the plentitude of ratings from people who pretend, maybe even to themselves, that they like it far more than they do in order to feel for their own confidence and seem to their friends to be "cultured" notwithstanding).

Yes, I am unapologetically one of these individuals. Blame it on the obsessive completist in me that must finish what I start, including certain awards list, despite their sometimes questionable validity. Blame it on my tenacity, to continue watching something even when I am bored out of my mind or even offended by whatever images thrown together that have the nerve to be labeled a finished piece.

I have seen a significant portion of Godard's oeuvre. There are very few that I liked, especially his later, more abstract, frustratingly obscure works. As his final attempt at making art, I was compelled to watch this. Only twenty minutes, I've been through worse (i.e., The Image Book).

Nice to confirm what I already knew. He is not a genius.