A Woman Is

The Musuem Of Modern Art was especially disgusting today. I don't know if it had to do with the rain, but the tourists were literally crawling all over the place. I'm sure it didn't help that one of the escalators was down, so you had lots of people walking down the stopped up escalator. I went mainly to check out the Walker Evans show and as much as I love his photographs, this is another show that looks better in the catalog. In fact the catalog is indeed in a rack in the exhibition space, a first time that I can recall a book of a show actually in the exhibition, which says a lot. I actually spent more time looking at the larger photos in the book than the ones on the wall. I also thought the Carol Bove pieces a big waste of everything, another artist who appears to me to be terribly overrated. They're pleasant enough pastiches of every kind of work of the last 30 or so years, and are are so art directed, empty and sterile that I had no emotional feeling for them so of course the Moma gives her a show. I also went to the movies there to see Godard's "A Woman Is A Woman" an innocuous early "accessible" piece of intellectual fluff that is an homage to all those silly Hollywood musicals that we all love. For such a serious Marxist Godard hits you over the head over and over with his silly little references and glib winks not only to Hollywood musicals but also to the early works of the New Wave with special emphasis on Truffaut. Starring the impossibly young and handsome Jean Claude Brialy, an impossibly young and beautiful Anna Karina and an impossibly young and sexy Jean-Paul Belmondo as Alfred Lubitsch, get it ha ha. The colors are pastel and pretty and in wide screen, but he doesn't really use the scope and space of the process all that well. Godard places someone or some action on each side of the screen or smack in the middle and thats it. The plot is simple enough a beautiful young stripper wants to have a baby with her live in boyfriend who is not interested so she tries to make him jealous by carrying on with Belmondo who is more than happy to make a baby with her. Some of the visuals and decors are fun (the street scenes of 1960's Paris are entrancing) but I found it just a little too clever and dull, and was happy when "The End" flashed on the wide screen.