One of the most barbaric and morally repellent scenes in war-movie history happens in Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds (’09).

I’m speaking of the baseball-bat murder of an anti-Semitic German soldier — Sergeant Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel) — by Sergeant Donny Donowitz aka “The Bear Jew” (Eli Roth). Rachtman isn’t murdered for his racist beliefs, mind, but for refusing to betray his fellow German soldiers by helping the Americans to capture or kill them.

I’m sorry but it my book a soldier who refuses to help the enemy slaughter his comrades, even at the cost of his own life and even if he harbors ugly and inhuman attitudes, is honorable.

Originally posted on 8.24.09: The moral scheme in Inglourious Basterds decrees that German troops were serving an evil criminal regime and therefore THEY, the troops, were evil and criminal as well as viciously anti-Semitic, so snuff ’em out like rats. Shoot ’em, club ’em, exterminate ’em.

IGB is basically a table-turning game in which Tarantino decided to have fun by letting Germans suffer en masse the way Jews suffered en masse at the hands of the SS and other Nazi command types who carried out the Holocaust.

Consider looking at this situation from the other side of the coin.

It is still shocking news to some ostrich-heads out there that Americans were the bad guys in the Vietnam War (i.e., a great industrial nation coming down full-force upon a peasant society and calling out the furies). By this token the troops who served this policy were bad guys as well, or even, if you want to really fulminate and get angry about it, just as bad as average German grunts were “bad” for serving their side during WWII.

Except grunts are grunts. They don’t formulate policy. They sign up and go through basic training and shoot the enemy and try to survive so they can come back to their families. And yet by the standards of some, U.S. grunts serving in Vietnam were okay and just trying to get through the Vietnam War — regular guys, one of us, etc. German grunts, on the other hand, were evil and deserved to be slaughtered with baseball bats.

What myopic idiocy!

IGB is playing a facile, cheap and repugnant game. Two vicious wrongs really don’t make a right, guys. And by relishing the idea of slaughtering average-Joe Germans — by revelling in their elimination like cheering baseball fans in the bleachers — Tarantino degrades the morality of Jewish survivors…indeed, the moral residue of the entire horrific Holocaust experience.

I’ve always approved of Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, but in a limited way. I’m okay with first four-fifths but truly in love with only the final fifth. So I can’t really put it in the same Olympian category as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown — QT’s three finest films.

I’m still saying, in short, that his 21st Century films, pleasing to many and commercially successful to boot, don’t compare to the cornucopia of the glorious ’90s (which includes True Romance and his dialogue polish of Crimson Tide). He had the heat for 10 years, and over the least 22 years he hasn’t. He’s done fine work but the electric God current took hold and shot through his system during the Bill Clinton years, and then it flew away.

Despite God knows how many millions of fellows having shared an intense attraction to attractive female peds, there’s a reason why directors and cinematographers almost never include MCU insert shots of bare feet in feature films. It’s because oddly proportioned feet have a way of interfering with damn near everything. Over-sized big toes in particular.

This is apparently a real-world conversation, but if it’s from a film the screenwriter is quite brilliant. In a single line the woman (i.e., the object of the man’s earthly devotion) conveys what serious emotional insecurity (or serious wackadoodle) is, and we realize at once that the relationship is doomed. In one line. A Waldo Salt screenwriting trophy.

There is no such thing as a horror comedy. You can make one and call it that, but in my eyes it’s a non-starting bullshit sub-genre that’s fatally stricken before it even gets off the ground. I can’t wait to see it tomorrow. Not.

This wouldn’t be worth touching but it’s Sunday afternoon so what the hell. Sometime in the mid ’70s Joan Crawford shared a complaint about the sexual explicitness of Last Tango in Paris, and particularly about a nude scene performed by “fat” Marlon Brando, she claimed. Brando certainly became a sea lion in the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts, but when Tango was filmed in late ’71 and early ’72 Brando (born in ’24, 47 at the time) was relatively trim. He wasn’t even stocky. Born in ’05 or thereabouts, Crawford was around 70 when she shared this opinion. She passed in ’77 at age 72, give or take.

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, a kind of philosophical Moses when it comes to articulating wokeness, has written an 8.13 column titled “From Blonde to Star Wars, Hollywood Needs to Accept Actors’ Accents.”

Right away you’re thinking okay, Kohn is going to argue that it’s not the performances that matter these days, but the representations. Which he more or less does.

Okay, the performances matter to some extent, but probably not as much as the electrifying idea of a Cuban-born woman playing Marilyn Monroe with the accent of a Cuban Airlines flight attendant….that’s something to really feel good about and celebrate.

It follows, naturally, that anyone who has a problem with a Cuban-accented Marilyn is a bigot.

Kohn is also going to argue, you’re thinking, that Moses Ingram‘s Baltimore street accent fits right into the Obi-Wan Kenobi universe without a hiccup, and that anyone who complains about Ingram not speaking in the crisp British speech patterns of previous Imperial villains (a tradition that goes back 45 years) is also a bigot, or at the very least someone who doesn’t get it.**

But Kohn doesn’t argue this. He kinda dodges the issue, in fact. He implies, of course, that people who’ve expressed concerns about Ingram’s Obi-Wan performance are racists (he wouldn’t be a good wokester troubador if he didn’t) but otherwise he doesn’t even allude to the arguments that ensued after Obi-Wan premiered.

As for the Blonde star, he relies on a quote from Bodies Bodies Bodies costar Maria Bakalova, to wit: “I think Ana de Armas is an incredibly talented actress and that’s what should matter. It sounds like she has her natural accent and it should be about the feeling you get from the performance.”

Due respect but no. Armas is playing an iconic superstar whom everyone knows rather well, and who spoke with an unmistakably homespun Los Angeles accent. I think it’s silly for anyone to play her with a Cuban accent, or for that matter a British, Russian or Australian one. We’re all residents of the planet earth and we all know what goes so why are we playing games when it comes to portraying famous people? It invites derision.

If you’re going to dye your hair platinum blonde and wear all those flashy Monroe outfits (as de Armas did) you’re obviously making a stab at physical resemblance, so speaking-wise you should at least try to sound like her. Or allow yourself to be dubbed. (You know what would’ve been cool? If tech guys had digitally reconstituted Monroe’s voice into micro-vowels and micro-consonants and then dubbed AdA with Monroe’s actual voice, so to speak. Seriously.)

The next time they make a movie about John F. Kennedy, how about casting Gael Garcia Bernal in the part? Okay, so Bernal is six or seven inches shorter than Kennedy was and he doesn’t resemble him even slightly, but the important thing would be the representation aspect…right, Eric?

Last night I finally saw King Vidor and Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead (’49), start to finish. (I had previously only seen clips from the rock quarry scene.) I was amused and at times frustrated, but never bored. And that’s saying something.

For this is one crazy, bizarre and curiously obstinate film of ideas (individual vision vs. collective go-alongism**) and ardent sexuality (i.e., Gary Cooper‘s Howard Roark putting the high hard one to Patricia Neal‘s Dominique Francon).

It’s not at all realistic or convincing as far as anyone’s idea of human behavior is concerned, but it’s certainly been written with a capital “W” by someone with a strong (as in “listen to me….no, really listen!”) point of view about vision vs. commerce, that someone being Rand, of course.

It’s a nutty movie, but at least it understands itself and stakes its philosophical claim and lays the Randian agenda face up on the table — take it or leave it.

Howard Roark is a gifted, strong-willed architect of principle who won’t be compromised or pushed around, not to mention a tough, brawny fellow with a pulsing, rock-hard donkey schlong who knows how to slam ham like a champ.

I can’t say The Fountainhead is an especially good film, but at least it’s ballsy in more ways than one, not to mention plain-spoken.

The Fountainhead was shown in 35mm at the Film Society of Lincoln center’s Walter Reade theatre. (Saturday, 8:30 pm show.) It looked clean (scratch-free) and well cared for, but there were almost no decent blacks to be savored in the whole thing. Almost every frame was composed was in varying levels of gray. I’m not saying it looked bad but it had a vaguely diminished, half-milky quality. It didn’t excite me.

Face facts — 35mm prints are getting older and older as speak, and quite often can’t stand up to the sharp, richly hued look of digital.

And my God, poor Patricia Neal! Having vigorous off-screen sex with Cooper must have been great, but that heightened, bug-eyed, flaring-nostrils way of emoting is awful. In just about every scene she’s saying “I can’t deal with my libidinal longing, Gary…I want to be ravaged!!” And King Vidor, who should have known better, actually encouraged Neal to give this kind of embarassing, over-the-top performance. She was 15 times better in The Day The Earth Stood Still (’51), 25 times better in A Face in the Crowd (’57) and 50 times better in Hud (’63).

Friendo to HE: “Neal was only 22, It was her second film after a Ronald Reagan comedy shot a few months previous.”

HE to friendo: “Okay but what’s Vidor‘s excuse? He was in his mid 50s during filming — by any yardstick a seasoned director who knew the ropes. And yet he encouraged Neal to deliver almost a parody of a sexually charged performance. Good God. Two years later, at age 24, Robert Wise guided her into a fully believable, calmly centered, first-rate performance in The Day The Earth Stood Still. That flared-nostril stuff isn’t on her — it’s on Vidor.”

** In today’s world Howard Roark would be written as a courageous anti-wokester (i.e., someone like myself) and the villainous go-alongers would be modelled upon the you-know-who brigade (Eric Kohn, Anne Thompson, David Ehrlich, Elizabeth Wagmeister, Clayton Davis, Tom O’Neill, the Toronto Film Festival Stalinists, etc.).

hjkhtyyghjgf;riuyu0t6$WE#@0K,0N;0PVB 54`Q`137655654636395066]
=[67P[[P[[ .≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥≥[[[[[[[[-09
,m]
= ≥≥≥≥≥≥≥

A MOMA-supplied 35mm Technicolor print of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (‘46) screened this afternoon at the Lincoln Center Film Society’s Walter Reade theatre, and man oh man oh man…they got me.

The images were so dark and murky you could only see about half of what had been captured by dps Lee Garmes, Ray Rennehan and Harold Rosson. The rest, it seemed, was hiding in shadows, smeared with lentil soup, covered by a scrim.

Even the brightly lighted Technicolor Selznick logo sequence (the Gone With The Wind Bluray delivers a perfect rendering) looked like it was shot during a solar eclipse.

I was told by management that it wasn’t a case of poor illumination (the projectionist told a theatre employee that the image was lit by 16 foot lamberts) but a dark–ass print. Besides the lack of sharpness (the clarity difference between Duel and GWTW is like night and day), the cinematography had a generally thick and heavy quality. Nothing looked beautiful; it was horrendous.

I got up and left around the 40-minute mark. “Why am I watching this?” I muttered to myself. “I feel like I’m going blind.”

These DVD Beaver screen captures from a 2017 Kino Bluray simulate the difference between a properly illuminated Duel in the Sun image (above) vs. how it looked inside the Walter Reade (below) — the projected images actually looked worse than this.

The projected main title sequence looked dark and muddy — it didn’t pop in the slightest. This is how it should have looked (but didn’t):