The IMDb boards are the true worst.
MacNille: Movies like "Persona" or "Last Year at Marienbad" could be described as full of themselves, too, but I only really care about arrogance if the artist in question can't back it up. Had Kubrick or Kurosawa declared themselves among the greatest of all time, they'd not be wrong. Godard was someone whose break from orthodoxy was historically important, but he didn't really do anything with it. There's a scene in Breathless where the two protagonists are zipping around in a car, and random jump cuts are inserted to break up their conversation. The jump cuts say nothing about the situation, about the characters, etc. and are there merely as a way for Godard to preen and show how "edgy" he is for not following traditional rules of continuity. Ditto the famous scene in Band of Outsiders wherein he removes the sound during the dance. 50 years later, is it really some big revelation that the inner reality of a work is a conventional construct? Meanwhile, his characters are almost always shallow (and I mean materially shallow and shallowly-limned; Fellini he is not, in terms of inserting shallow folk into realms of depth and complexity), his conversations have really odd, unnatural rhythms and are filled with BS pseudointellectualism, he was sexist as all hell, and he just didn't really have anything in particular to say that was of consequence. I'll grant that he had a good directorial eye for cinematography, that he had a good sense for wringing an odd sort of naturalism in various moments, but what few pleasures his films have to offer require sitting through a lot of bullshit with little cogency other than tracking down his words and seeing what intent he had for this or that scene.
