Month: May 2009

Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has praised Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds as “a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor…by turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, [it’s] an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich.”

But the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw is calling it “a colossal armour-plated turkey from hell…awful…achtung-achtung-ach-mein-Gott atrocious. It isn’t funny; it isn’t exciting; it isn’t a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn’t emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that.”

And I called it “a fairly engaging Quentin chit-chat personality film in World War II dress-up. It’s arch and very confidently rendered from QT’s end, but it’s basically talk, talk, talk…low story tension…no characters are subjected to tests of characters by having to make hard choices and stand up for what they believe, and nobody pours their heart out. What they do is yap their asses off. Cleverly and enjoyably at times, yes, but brisk repartee does not a solid movie make.”

I didn’t say but am saying now that the best movies are always defined, in part, by the things that are not said — by undercurrents that you feel or sense but which aren’t directly commented upon. Inglourious Basterds has a delicious undercurrent of tension in the first Col.-Landa-vs.-French-farmer scene, but otherwise it’s pretty much all on the surface.

Giggly girls hanging out on the roof of the Weinstein Co. penthouse at the Gray d’Albion residence, taken two days ago. If these women lived in ancient Egyptian times they’d be palace courtesans.

Monday, 5.18, 7:35 pm.

Monday, 5.18, 7:37 pm.

Wednesday, 5.18, 3:30 pm.

IFC has shown chrome steel cojones in agreeing to distribute Lars Von Trier‘s Antichrist. (They’ve also acquired Ken Loach‘s Looking for Eric and the Romanian anthology farce Tales From The Golden Age, which I saw last night — half amused, half meh. Marketing/distribution suggestions: (a) Don’t market it as a serious film but as a hoot; (b) Make a deal with a toy company to sell battery-powered toy foxes covered with blood and afterbirth that say “chaos reigns!” when you pull their tail; (c) After the initial release sell it to the midnight-movie freaks as something that only the truly freakish of mind can handle — i.e., are you man enough to see Antichrist?.

This relatively new In The Loop trailer is obviously a close relative of this 1971 trailer for Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange. Watch, compare.

“How hot is James Cameron‘s Avatar?,” asks N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply. “Hot enough that Imax so far has not lined up any other Hollywood movies for its ultra-big screen theaters between Fox’s release of Mr. Cameron’s 3-D science fiction thriller on Dec. 18 and the arrival of Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland on March 5.

“Things could change. But the Imax people are mulling whether the several hundred large screens by then expected to be up and running with commercial films (as opposed to the museum-type fare) will be needed for almost three months to satisfy demand for Mr. Cameron’s first feature film since Titanic.”

“No matter how much extreme contextualization and heavily stylized techniques Quentin Tarantino [uses] in Inglorious Basterds, it feels like a bubblegum sidedish to the heavy dinner plate of his career,” says Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn.

“Despite a World War II setting, Inglorious Basterds mainly feels like an homage to crime and thriller movies, using Nazis as cardboard villains in a facile manner akin to the Indiana Jones franchise.

“As the story [builds] into an espionage drama, Tarantino churns out the most conventional accomplishment of his career, Jackie Brown included. Sure, you can tear apart the layers of references to countless genres from multiple eras, but not with the same relish allowed by Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction, where reading into the text and digging its natural flow were not mutually exclusive.

“That’s hardly the case here. To watch Basterds without considering Tarantino’s implementation of enyclopedic movie knowledge makes it into a breezy, insignificant experience. Basterds is a talk-fest. Anyone familiar with the Tarantino touch will testify that the director likes to make his characters talk and talk and talk — and sometimes so that it ends up absorbing the spotlight. In Basterds we see the worst side-effects of this tendency.”

For those just joining, Anne Thompson has written a rundown of Cannes’ 8 Buzziest Films for the Daily Beast. She’s quite wrong, of course, about Pedro Almodovar‘s latest being “so-so” but that’s her entitlement.

Here’s that riff from Quentin Tarantino this morning about why the Cannes Film Festival is so important and exciting. “One of the things I love about Cannes is [that] during this time on the Rivera, cinema matters — it’s important,” he said. “And even when people boo [and whatnot], it’s out of passion. It’s not just these images glazing over you — it matters, it means something.

“And all of the world’s film press from the planet earth — America, England, Iceland, Greenland…they’re all here. Bam, at once. Everyone here at the exact same time. They argue and they jostle and do this and do that, and it’s like the cat is out of the bag for the entire planet earth. And I’m down with that. I am not an American filmmaker — I make movies for the planet earth, and Cannes is the place [for that to happen].”

Here’s the opening of this morning’s Inglorious Basterds press conference, following this morning’s 8:30 am screening. And here’s an mp3 of most of what was said. About 13 or 14 minutes in director-writer Quentin Tarantino delivered a great riff on what the Cannes Film Festival so special. I’ll try and find and isolate and run it as a stand-alone. As for the film…

It’s not great. It’s a fairly engaging Quentin chit-chat personality film in World War II dress-up. It’s arch and very confidently rendered from QT’s end, but it’s basically talk, talk, talk . Tension surfaces in a couple of scenes (especially the first — an interrogation of a French farmer by a German officer looking for hidden Jews) but overall story tension is fairly low. A couple of shootouts occur but there’s no real action in the Michael Mann sense of the term except for the finale. No characters are subjected to tests of characters by having to make hard choices and stand up for what they believe, and nobody pours their heart out. What they do is yap their asses off. Cleverly and enjoyably at times, yes, but brisk repartee does not a solid movie make.

The theme, I suppose is the penetrating and transformative power of film. The secondary theme is a Jewish revenge fantasy against the Nazis. (Costar Eli Roth called it “kosher porn” in this sense.) No emotional currents, no sense of realism and no characters you’re allowed to really and truly enjoy and care about. That said, the two best performances are given by Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa — a great malicious Nazi — and Melanie Laurent as Shoshanna Dreyfus, a French farm girl who escapes Landa’s grasp and winds up running a Parisian cinema.

Inglourious Basterds is probably too talky to lure the knuckle-draggers. The chat really does seem to weigh things down in the middle section. It’s an arch exercise in World War II genre filmmaking, a kind of filmic valentine for people who love film and film culture, and a put-on about World War II movies.

“The version of Inglorious Basterds that bows in Cannes is unlikely to match the one that Universal and the Weinstein Co. roll out at a multiplex near you,” the Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Roxborough wrote today. “Wednesday’s screening clocks in at 2 hours and 40 minutes — reassuringly long for cast members worried about ending up as cutting-room dross — but a programming challenge for distributors. So Basterds in Cannes could resemble a test screening, with a leaner, perhaps meaner cut going up in August.”