Showing posts with label inglourious basterds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inglourious basterds. Show all posts
Friday, November 20, 2009
Awesome. Which should probably be spelled "Awesoume."
From Harry Knowles' Twitter feed, via Chud: faux Jack Kirby comic book covers for the 1970's adaptation of Inglourious Basterds:
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
War Movies 3: "I think this just might be my masterpiece."
You can add the incredibly enjoyable (enjouyable?) Inglourious Basterds to the short list of movies that Quentin Tarantino has made because they’re the kind of movies he’d like to watch. That list now includes a Dirty Dozen takeoff, a gangster picture, a Hong Kong revenge saga, a Spaghetti Western revenge saga, a blaxploitation flick, an old AIP car crash cheapie, and Pulp Fiction, which, like a crack-whore version of Seinfeld, is about nothing and everything at the same time. The truly odd thing about this list? It’s also the complete list of films that Tarantino has directed, period, not including 25% of Four Rooms and a couple of TV shows. So what we have here is a guy who pretty much does what he wants, when he wants, because he wants not only to do it, but to watch it. In a sense, Tarantino is still the clerk at that Manhattan Beach video store, looking up at the shelf and going, “Yeah, we got a lot of war movies, but none of them really do it for me. So look -- instead of recommending one? Why don’t I just make you one?”
So yeah, quick one-line description: Inglourious Basterds is a Dirty Dozen takeoff that starts out like a cross between a fairy tale and a Sergio Leone western. By the time you hear Ennio Morricone's "After the Verdict" from The Big Gundown, with its haunting use of the first few notes of "Für Elise," the movie pretty much falls on the Leone side of the scales, an impression which is only reinforced when you realize the opening scene is meant to echo the first Angel Eyes scene in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. But don't be deceived. This is still a fairy tale, with fairy tale logic and a once-upon-a-time ending. It's Tarantino pointing to The Dirty Dozen and saying:
TARANTINO: The only reason to make a men-on-a-mission World War II movie is to kill Hitler, not a bunch of nameless generals.
AUDIENCE: But Hitler didn't die at the hands of a dirty-dozen commando mission.
TARANTINO: You mean historically? Sure. But do you see a history book here?
The correct answer? No. We're in a world where a band of Jewish-American commandos can go uncaptured in occupied France for four years, where a crack German sniper is a film geek, and where a hot German actress geso to a 1944 film premiere without wearing silky ribbed stockings on her feet. (Okay, her one good foot.) A world, in other words, where anything can happen -- and because it's Tarantino? -- it will happen. Count on it.
The one thing that doesn't happen? The over-the-top violence that everybody went nuts about in Kill Bill 1&2. This is going to piss off rabid Tarantino fans who want to see somebody or something 'sploding blood every ten minutes for two-and-a-half hours; and while there are (of course) moments like that in IG, they're lobbed in like hand grenades rather than sprayed at you like machine gun bullets. What you get instead are words, words that sizzle like a slow-burning fuse or jump from speaker to speaker like a lit stick of dynamite in a Three Stooges short. In only one chapter does a conversation not end in violence; but in that chapter, the simple ordering of a glass of milk is what makes everything that's spoken afterwards tick like a time bomb waiting to go off. It's totally riveting, and all the more remarkable because it's almost entirely done in French and German with English subtitles. When was the last time you were on the edge of your seat during four subtitled set pieces? If your answer is "Never," then it will be when you see this movie.
Speaking of the writing: you'll read a lot of reviews which credit Tarantino with writing what film critics like to call great “set pieces.” Those of us in theatre call them something different; we call them “scenes.” And when you look at them from a theatrical point of view, you see that (whether he knows it or not) Tarantino as a writer is the spiritual son of Sam Shepard. Like Shepard, his speeches are jewels, but they’re set in plots that are made from borrowed paste. (At least Tarantino has plots; you say “plot” to Sam Shepard and he thinks “graveyard.”) In Tarantino’s case, his plots consist ofscenes chapters between which there is no connecting tissue. It’s like the movie Closer. Ever see Closer? In Closer, the storyline is simply the 10 shittiest moments in the lives of four people over the space of a few years, and because we don’t see them acting any other way, we can’t help but think of the four of them as shitty human beings. The same kind of selective distancing effect takes place in Basterds, where we get five chapters from a novel (or five episodes from Tarantino’s HBO miniseries Band of Mensches), all of which tie together in the end -- and yet each episode is such a perfect jewel that you can’t help wanting to see what the missing 7 or 8 connecting chapters look like. Where are the Basterds wreaking havoc in France? How does Shoshanna get to that movie theatre? What did Landa do (or not do) from 1941 to 1944 that changed him into the Landa of the last chapter?
Answer: doesn't matter. Doesn't matter one bit to the movie on the screen. (The movie in your head is another matter.) What else doesn't matter? The fact that Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine is from Tennessee (hey -- just like Tarantino!) and part Cherokee (hey -- just like Tarantino!). What matters is that almost everything that Pitt utters with his cracker accent is totally fucking hilarious. And that's just the English; wait till you hear him speak Italian. Whenever Pitt was on-screen, I kept thinking of the Claude Rains exchange from Casablanca:
MAJOR STRASSER: You give [Rick] credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he's just another blundering American.
CAPTAIN RENAULT: We musn't underestimate "American blundering". I was with them when they "blundered" into Berlin in 1918.
Because make no mistake: that's what the Americans in this movie are. A group of blunderers who fall into somebody else's assassination plot and blunder their way to the most surprising victory of World War II.
And because this is a movie, I also thought about the fact that the last time Brad Pitt and Diane Kruger were in the same movie, he was killing Eric Bana and she was screwing around with Orlando Bloom. And boy, if their Achilles and Helen had even one quarter of the charisma that both display in this flick? Troy would have been phenomenal. It's like Tarantino is saying "See what these guys can do with the right material?" And don't think he's not saying it. Tarantino films are always just as much about other films as they are about the one you're watching now. And this one? Even more so. Because based on who shoots the machine gun, and who sets the fire? It’s the filmmakers who kill Hitler.
And oh yeah -- that once-upon-a-time ending? It's a lot more blatant in the final shooting script than it is in the current cut of the movie:
So yeah, quick one-line description: Inglourious Basterds is a Dirty Dozen takeoff that starts out like a cross between a fairy tale and a Sergio Leone western. By the time you hear Ennio Morricone's "After the Verdict" from The Big Gundown, with its haunting use of the first few notes of "Für Elise," the movie pretty much falls on the Leone side of the scales, an impression which is only reinforced when you realize the opening scene is meant to echo the first Angel Eyes scene in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. But don't be deceived. This is still a fairy tale, with fairy tale logic and a once-upon-a-time ending. It's Tarantino pointing to The Dirty Dozen and saying:
TARANTINO: The only reason to make a men-on-a-mission World War II movie is to kill Hitler, not a bunch of nameless generals.
AUDIENCE: But Hitler didn't die at the hands of a dirty-dozen commando mission.
TARANTINO: You mean historically? Sure. But do you see a history book here?
The correct answer? No. We're in a world where a band of Jewish-American commandos can go uncaptured in occupied France for four years, where a crack German sniper is a film geek, and where a hot German actress geso to a 1944 film premiere without wearing silky ribbed stockings on her feet. (Okay, her one good foot.) A world, in other words, where anything can happen -- and because it's Tarantino? -- it will happen. Count on it.
The one thing that doesn't happen? The over-the-top violence that everybody went nuts about in Kill Bill 1&2. This is going to piss off rabid Tarantino fans who want to see somebody or something 'sploding blood every ten minutes for two-and-a-half hours; and while there are (of course) moments like that in IG, they're lobbed in like hand grenades rather than sprayed at you like machine gun bullets. What you get instead are words, words that sizzle like a slow-burning fuse or jump from speaker to speaker like a lit stick of dynamite in a Three Stooges short. In only one chapter does a conversation not end in violence; but in that chapter, the simple ordering of a glass of milk is what makes everything that's spoken afterwards tick like a time bomb waiting to go off. It's totally riveting, and all the more remarkable because it's almost entirely done in French and German with English subtitles. When was the last time you were on the edge of your seat during four subtitled set pieces? If your answer is "Never," then it will be when you see this movie.
Speaking of the writing: you'll read a lot of reviews which credit Tarantino with writing what film critics like to call great “set pieces.” Those of us in theatre call them something different; we call them “scenes.” And when you look at them from a theatrical point of view, you see that (whether he knows it or not) Tarantino as a writer is the spiritual son of Sam Shepard. Like Shepard, his speeches are jewels, but they’re set in plots that are made from borrowed paste. (At least Tarantino has plots; you say “plot” to Sam Shepard and he thinks “graveyard.”) In Tarantino’s case, his plots consist of
Answer: doesn't matter. Doesn't matter one bit to the movie on the screen. (The movie in your head is another matter.) What else doesn't matter? The fact that Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine is from Tennessee (hey -- just like Tarantino!) and part Cherokee (hey -- just like Tarantino!). What matters is that almost everything that Pitt utters with his cracker accent is totally fucking hilarious. And that's just the English; wait till you hear him speak Italian. Whenever Pitt was on-screen, I kept thinking of the Claude Rains exchange from Casablanca:
MAJOR STRASSER: You give [Rick] credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he's just another blundering American.
CAPTAIN RENAULT: We musn't underestimate "American blundering". I was with them when they "blundered" into Berlin in 1918.
Because make no mistake: that's what the Americans in this movie are. A group of blunderers who fall into somebody else's assassination plot and blunder their way to the most surprising victory of World War II.
And because this is a movie, I also thought about the fact that the last time Brad Pitt and Diane Kruger were in the same movie, he was killing Eric Bana and she was screwing around with Orlando Bloom. And boy, if their Achilles and Helen had even one quarter of the charisma that both display in this flick? Troy would have been phenomenal. It's like Tarantino is saying "See what these guys can do with the right material?" And don't think he's not saying it. Tarantino films are always just as much about other films as they are about the one you're watching now. And this one? Even more so. Because based on who shoots the machine gun, and who sets the fire? It’s the filmmakers who kill Hitler.
And oh yeah -- that once-upon-a-time ending? It's a lot more blatant in the final shooting script than it is in the current cut of the movie:
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Weekend Update: How to tell stories
I’ve seen three movies in the last two weeks (well, four, counting 500 Days Of Summer, but I've already talked about that). One of these three is a classic, two of them are great, and all of them will get full reviews in the next couple of days. Promise. But for now, I just wanted to blather a little about how seeing them in close proximity to each other made me think of how it’s not just the story but the way you tell the story that counts.
Ponyo, or, magic and realism. When something magical, alien or supernatural shows up in a film, it gets dealt with in one of three ways: the Professor Challenger Way (somebody in authority bludgeons you into belief with a lot of facts and history), the Doubting Thomas Way (the characters freak out or make fun of it until something personal makes them believe), or The Come With Me If You Want To Live Way (somebody in the know saves your life and then keeps you so constantly on the run that whatever’s chasing you becomes nothing more complicated than Danger with a capital D). There’s a fourth way, of course; like those Celtic triads which always end by saying “And greater than these three was when Arthur did blah-blah-blah,” greater than these three is when an artist just allows magic and realism to coexist without making it remarkable. It’s not a strategy you see in movies much -- it’s a lot more prevalent in novels, where Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll (pardon the expression) have magic down to a science –- but the one place where you can always find it is in a Miyazaki movie. There are no borders between the real world and the spirit world; they’re just two different rooms in the same house. Magic isn’t something that has to be grappled with intellectually; magic is just something that happens, like the tides or a sunrise. A castle in the clouds, a bi-plane pilot who’s a pig, a country where your parents are turned into animals -- it’s no different from a goldfish who falls in love with a boy, and wants to turn into a human girl. Just another part of life. And I don’t know why, but telling a story this way, where the magic and the reality pool into each other without anybody making a big deal out of it, taps into something that is so simple and primal that it breaks your heart.
District 9, or, when science fiction delivers. Science fiction in movies has been Lucasized, Spielbergated, and Bayed to death over the last few years. Encounters with aliens used to be something that tested humanity (think the original Day The Earth Stood Still), and not a way for the director to work out his shallow fanboy fantasies, his missing-father issues, or his special-effects-porn disorder. That’s what makes District 9 different. The special effects serve the story, and there’s no directorial agenda beyond telling a story that has more than one level, and never beating you over the head with that other level, like Spielberg would do. (Can you imagine him making District 9? There’d be a human kid, and he and the alien kid would save the day.) In District 9, humanity and aliens are just two rooms in the same house, like Magic and Realism are two rooms in the same Miyazaki house. And in science fiction those two rooms can be at war, or in uneasy alliance, or coexistence. The one thing they can’t be is unaware of each other (that makes it a monster movie, not a science fiction movie; which is why Alien is really a monster movie). And if you have the balls to show the worst of human behavior in a confrontation with aliens, then you’re asking the two questions every great alien contact movie needs to ask (and not necessarily answer): who’s the alien here, and what does it mean to be human? You want to know why District 9 is getting such great reviews? Because it’s all about those two questions.
Inglourious Basterds, or, Hollywood goes to war. And then there are movies that are really about other movies, where everything is a level of code –- where music from spaghetti westerns is aimed at one group of geeks, cameos are aimed at another group, cinematic references at another group –- and the film you’re watching isn’t telling you a story, it’s reminding you of all these other stories you know, either dismissively (like Godard), or conspiratorially (like Tarantino). David Goodis and Richard Nixon as character names in Made in USA are like Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds --- you can’t NOT be jolted out of the story when they say who they are. Godard wants you to be annoyed (very Brechtian) while Tarantino wants you to feel cool (very Tarantino), but at heart their story-telling strategy is the same: it’s not about the plot, it’s about the genre, and the history of the genre, and my favorite films in the genre, and your understanding that sharing those favorites is what will make my movie a film you will enjoy. Which means that, just like Finnegan’s Wake was deliberately written to be taught in English courses, Inglourious Basterds was deliberately made to be taught in film class. It’s a genre critique and an example of the genre at the same time. Are they two rooms in the same house? No. One is a room in the house, and one is a projection booth with a library of films in it. And yet there’s still magic. But it doesn’t require suspension of disbelief. It requires extension of criteria. Yes, it works. It glouriously works as an example of the genre. But it only works on one level. The other levels will only be accessible to those who share the director’s vocabulary. Which, in a sense, makes the average movie-goer feel like (yes) an alien.
So much for meta-blather. Coming up? Actual reviews.
Ponyo, or, magic and realism. When something magical, alien or supernatural shows up in a film, it gets dealt with in one of three ways: the Professor Challenger Way (somebody in authority bludgeons you into belief with a lot of facts and history), the Doubting Thomas Way (the characters freak out or make fun of it until something personal makes them believe), or The Come With Me If You Want To Live Way (somebody in the know saves your life and then keeps you so constantly on the run that whatever’s chasing you becomes nothing more complicated than Danger with a capital D). There’s a fourth way, of course; like those Celtic triads which always end by saying “And greater than these three was when Arthur did blah-blah-blah,” greater than these three is when an artist just allows magic and realism to coexist without making it remarkable. It’s not a strategy you see in movies much -- it’s a lot more prevalent in novels, where Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll (pardon the expression) have magic down to a science –- but the one place where you can always find it is in a Miyazaki movie. There are no borders between the real world and the spirit world; they’re just two different rooms in the same house. Magic isn’t something that has to be grappled with intellectually; magic is just something that happens, like the tides or a sunrise. A castle in the clouds, a bi-plane pilot who’s a pig, a country where your parents are turned into animals -- it’s no different from a goldfish who falls in love with a boy, and wants to turn into a human girl. Just another part of life. And I don’t know why, but telling a story this way, where the magic and the reality pool into each other without anybody making a big deal out of it, taps into something that is so simple and primal that it breaks your heart.
District 9, or, when science fiction delivers. Science fiction in movies has been Lucasized, Spielbergated, and Bayed to death over the last few years. Encounters with aliens used to be something that tested humanity (think the original Day The Earth Stood Still), and not a way for the director to work out his shallow fanboy fantasies, his missing-father issues, or his special-effects-porn disorder. That’s what makes District 9 different. The special effects serve the story, and there’s no directorial agenda beyond telling a story that has more than one level, and never beating you over the head with that other level, like Spielberg would do. (Can you imagine him making District 9? There’d be a human kid, and he and the alien kid would save the day.) In District 9, humanity and aliens are just two rooms in the same house, like Magic and Realism are two rooms in the same Miyazaki house. And in science fiction those two rooms can be at war, or in uneasy alliance, or coexistence. The one thing they can’t be is unaware of each other (that makes it a monster movie, not a science fiction movie; which is why Alien is really a monster movie). And if you have the balls to show the worst of human behavior in a confrontation with aliens, then you’re asking the two questions every great alien contact movie needs to ask (and not necessarily answer): who’s the alien here, and what does it mean to be human? You want to know why District 9 is getting such great reviews? Because it’s all about those two questions.
Inglourious Basterds, or, Hollywood goes to war. And then there are movies that are really about other movies, where everything is a level of code –- where music from spaghetti westerns is aimed at one group of geeks, cameos are aimed at another group, cinematic references at another group –- and the film you’re watching isn’t telling you a story, it’s reminding you of all these other stories you know, either dismissively (like Godard), or conspiratorially (like Tarantino). David Goodis and Richard Nixon as character names in Made in USA are like Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds --- you can’t NOT be jolted out of the story when they say who they are. Godard wants you to be annoyed (very Brechtian) while Tarantino wants you to feel cool (very Tarantino), but at heart their story-telling strategy is the same: it’s not about the plot, it’s about the genre, and the history of the genre, and my favorite films in the genre, and your understanding that sharing those favorites is what will make my movie a film you will enjoy. Which means that, just like Finnegan’s Wake was deliberately written to be taught in English courses, Inglourious Basterds was deliberately made to be taught in film class. It’s a genre critique and an example of the genre at the same time. Are they two rooms in the same house? No. One is a room in the house, and one is a projection booth with a library of films in it. And yet there’s still magic. But it doesn’t require suspension of disbelief. It requires extension of criteria. Yes, it works. It glouriously works as an example of the genre. But it only works on one level. The other levels will only be accessible to those who share the director’s vocabulary. Which, in a sense, makes the average movie-goer feel like (yes) an alien.
So much for meta-blather. Coming up? Actual reviews.
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