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 of scenes 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:

War Movies 2: The Children of Pinter and PlayStation

Today’s extra-credit essay question: describe a movie to someone who’s never seen it in such a way that you do not undermine the experience of watching it, an experience which is designed to make the viewer discover what the movie is really about. This is tough. We’re not talking about revealing the kicker at the end, like the Zardoz Reveal or the Soylent Green Solution; we’re talking about the steps in the middle, where you follow a story from a perfectly reasonable opening and slowly realize that what you have just been told is completely different from what is really going on. The only equivalent I can think of is the novel The Remains Of The Day, and the reason the novel works (and the film doesn't) is because the eminently reliable narrator is totally blind to one specific thing which, when it gets revealed, hits the reader with just as much force as it does the character. Revealing that moment to anyone who has not read the book is like saying “They all did it” before handing someone a copy of Murder On The Orient Express. But like I say, it’s not about revealing the solution –- it’s about depriving the passenger in the car from realizing that he’s not in a Jaguar in the Back Bay during morning rush hour, he’s in a Jeep in Baghdad during a mortar attack. And yes, I’m talking around the point because (a) the more I describe The Sky Crawlers, the less you’ll experience what I did when watching it cold; and (b) you always use as many words as possible in an extra-credit essay answer, it’s the law.


Basics first. Sky Crawlers is a sometimes jarring mix of computer-generated animation and traditional line drawing, which appears to be about a bunch of children who fly modified propeller-driven fighters in battle for a corporation called Rostock, which is (perpetually?) at war with another corporation called Lautern. There are mysteries right from the beginning: why are they speaking English when they fight? Why do their helmets have English call names? Why are they all like 12? The first two you have to figure out for yourself, but the third question actually has an answer: they’re 12 because they’re Kildren. And what are Kildren? The first time you hear the word it’s 20 minutes into the movie, and you don’t find out what it means till 90 minutes in, but since it doesn’t spoil what’s really going on, it doesn’t hurt to know that Kildren are an artificially bred race of children who will do two things: never grow old, and fight in the Rostock/Lautern War till they’re shot down.


So on one level it’s a gorgeously animated sci-fi version of Dawn Patrol, with its own Red Baron in the form of The Teacher, Lautern’s deadly ace flyer who also happens to be the only adult in the air. But don’t expect dogfights and bombing sorties every five minutes; this is one war movie that is more Antonioni than it is Aldrich, with a lot of close-ups and silences, and a deliberate focus on down time rather than flying time. And yes, there were three times as many scenes on the ground as there were in the air in Dawn Patrol, but in Sky Crawlers there’s a detachment and an unhurried pacing that reminded me stylistically of L’Avventura and L’Eclisse.


There’s also a mystery, a mystery which is the central plot, the thing around which the propellers of incident and action spin. It's a simple question, really. The main character, Yuichi Konnami, asks it almost immediately: what happened to the kid I’m replacing? I’m flying his plane, so he couldn’t have been shot down. So what happened to him? His questions are either evaded or ignored, but he keeps at it, and one of the great things about the film is that, just about the same time Konnami figures out what's going on, you do as well.


Not to give anything away, but because of its focus on the past, there's a point where the film turns into a Pinter play, where it’s not about what’s happening now because what's happening now is incomprehensible unless you know what happened before, or what’s going on underneath the surface. In Pinter, the present is a moment in time stretched out between a dark past and a futile future. Same thing in Sky Crawlers. As one of the characters says, “Why bother growing old when you know you’re going to die?” Which means one thing when you see this movie the first time, and something totally different when you watch it again.

"I'll hold you to it."

And I do recommend watching it again, because it wasn’t until I saw The Sky Crawlers for the second time that I realized how subtle it is. Greetings that were straightforward were revealed to be ambiguous. Close-ups and reaction shots that were confusing became totally motivated. Remarks and turns of phrase that were random or casual open up like trap doors: “Oh – THAT’S why they said it that way.” And the concept itself – ageless kids fighting against each other as corporate employees – became a comment on the whole computer game experience. Because who else plays a first-person shooter fighter-pilot game but kids who can’t grow up?

It's one of the most haunting movies I've seen in a long time, something that's stayed with me a long time after I've watched and re-watched it. It's beautiful to look at. (Did I mention the gorgeous animation?) And if you do check it out, don't forget to watch through the credits for a bump at the end that will have you telling yourself "How cynical" and "How wonderful" at the same time.

War Movies 1: My Fuse Is Cute

There's a famous quote by Robert E Lee about war, something he's supposed to have said at the Battle of Fredericksburg, on December 13, 1862. I've seen it in several forms, but the one that sticks in my mind is two sentences: "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it." (The reason I like this version of the quote, as opposed to the single sentence versions out there, is because it needs the implied "otherwise" between the two sentences. Being who I am, I prefer it because it's the actor version, the one that needs to be interpreted, as opposed to the novel version, which spells out everything for you.) The quote itself, in all its versions, has always said something, not just about war, but about Lee's character -- that Lee was, like most professional soldiers, both horrified by and attracted to warfare. (I can understand. Given my day job, I am both horrified by and attracted to investment banking. And for pretty much the same reasons.)

There aren't many war movies out there that embody this quote. Mostly because they're movies about a particular war, and contain a layer of propaganda that is usually sandwiched somewhere between the plot and the characters, leaking into both of them like the fruit filling of a birthday cake. They answer the question Why We Fight by pointing to a particular enemy that deserves annihilation, or a set of values that need defending; and if there are characters who are born to the battlefield like gunslingers are born to the Wild West, then (just like those gunslingers) they are usually excluded from any post-war life, or treated as the exception, not the rule. Or the exceptional, like Lawrence of Arabia, which may not get all its facts right but certainly gets more truths right in its three hours than an entire shelf of war movies combined.

That's why it's such a pleasure to see The Hurt Locker, which confronts the Why We Fight issue head-on by saying "Because we fucking love it, okay?"



In case you haven't heard, Hurt Locker is the other movie with robots and explosions out in theatres right now, except that none of its robots talk and all of its explosions blow up real people instead of the Pyramids. (I can't wait for Transformers 3, where they destroy the moon. Without, of course, having it affect the tides. Because this is science fiction, remember.) It's about a team of soldiers tasked with disarming Improvised Explosive Devices in the streets of Iraq, and it's edge-of-your-seat stuff for three reasons: (1) the main characters are not played by stars, so all bets are off about who's going to make it to the end of the movie; (2) of the characters who are played by stars, 2 out of 3 of them don't even make it to the end of their scenes, never mind the film; and (3) the direction and camerawork get you so close to the action that there are times when you feel like you're just as much in danger as the soldiers are. One of whom, Jeremy Renner's Staff Sergeant William James, has definitely grown much too fond of the terrible.



Director Kathryn Bigelow has done the Howard Hawks thing with this film: it's not about the war, it's about guys doing a job, and how they rely on each other, what they expect from each other, and what they do for each other. There's an extended sniper sequence in the middle of nowhere in which our three main characters walk in with Label A on their helmets, and by the end of it we've seen B, C, D and E from all of them. And it's not trumpeted or glorified or underscored with anything (especially music, thank God); it's just shown. Which makes it real.

So if you're looking for real? This movie has it: real people, real stakes, real thrills. Go see it. And then we'll talk about how the breakfast cereal scene is the scariest moment of them all.