I’m as sensitive and activist-minded as the next guy and am no fan of the torturing that went on during the Bush years. But what got me about this ACLU spot is the off-angle cutting and the mesmerizing faces of Oliver Stone, Phillip Glass, Rosie Perez and Noah Emmerich. None of Emmerich’s performances over the years have inspired any kind of kinship or sympatico, but I suddenly feel cool about the guy because of this video riff. Go figure.

If a movie is bad in an altogether grand-sweep way, it is also bad in hundreds of small particular ways. Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, which is going to choke and die when it opens on 8.21, is such a film. I didn’t think very much of it after seeing it at Cannes — I mainly complained that it’s too long-winded — but I caught it a second time last night and it really didn’t go down well.

Spoiler whiners are hereby warned to stay the hell away because I’m going to spoil the hell out of a certain scene that happens in the first act. Not a crucial scene in terms of plot turns, but one that exposes the Basterds game.

Inglourious Basterds, as costar Eli Roth and others have stated, is basically a World War II Jewish payback movie in which all kinds of brutal and sadistic killings of Germans (be they troops, officers or members of the Nazi elite and/or high command) are presented as not only righteous but delicious because “them Nazis,” in the parlance of Brad Pitt‘s Lt. Aldo Raines, are viciously anti-Semitic and deserve it all to hell.

I began hating Inglourious Basterds for the boredom (which is to say the repetition and the banality of making a movie about a cruddy ’70s exploitation movie and self-consciously smirking about this movie-ness from start to finish) and the acting (which is mostly wink-wink “bad” in a kind of ’70s grindhouse way) but mainly for something that didn’t hit me when I first saw it three months ago. I realize it’s a Quentin movie that’s basically about Quentin’s bullshit, but — I’m trying not sound like a rabbi here — Inglourious Basterds reeks of arrogance and sadism and indifference to the value of human life.

It’s a movie in which brutal death happens every which way, and by this I mean stupidly, callously, carelessly, plentifully. I began to hate it early on for the way it takes almost every character down (including ones Tarantino appears to favor) with utter indifference. Kill this one, kill that one…this is too much fun! Especially since we’re doing it to the Germans, who did what they did to the Jews. Shoot ’em, beat ’em, burn ’em, strangle ’em, roast ’em….yeah!

I hated it, in short, because it doesn’t give those German pigs a fair shake. I hated it because it has the same attitude about those damn Nazis that the damn Nazis and the other anti-Semites had about the Jews in the lead-up to the attempted implementation of the Final Solution. As Shepherd Wong says in Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily, “Two wongs don’t make a wight.”

I know, I know — a film that wink-winks its way through an arch movie-movie landscape can’t be faulted on moral grounds because it’s not playing with any kind of real-world cards. That’s a fool’s rationale. There’s no such thing as pure off-the-ground fantasy. All movies are tethered to some kind of world view that takes stock of the way things are outside the realm of make-believe. And the reality of this movie is basically a result of Tarantino having divorced himself so totally from making films about real life in favor of movies-about-movies that he’s drawing upon nothing except cool-cat attitude and smug satisfaction and fair-weather-friend (i.e., Harvey Weinstein‘s) flattery.

Tarantino has stuck his finger up his ass and given it a good sniff and smelled lilacs and gardenias so many times that he’s lost his mind, which is to say he’s lost whatever sense of proportion he may have once had about the relationship between free creative imaginings (which he’s obviously had a rollicking good time with in years past) and the way life actually is when you get dressed and put your shoes on and get in your car and put the key in the ignition and deal with the situation.

Inglourious Basterds is proof that QT has gone batshit crazy in the sense that he cares about nothing except his own backyard toys. He’s gone creatively nuts in the same way that James Joyce, in the view of some, crawled too far into his own anus and headspace when he wrote Finnegans Wake. (With no apostrophe between “n” and “s.”) All I know is that this is a truly empty and diseased film about absolutely nothing except the tip of that digit.

The scene in which it all starts to smell rancid is one in which Pitt and the Basterds — a ragtag group of Jewish soldiers conducting guerilla-style search-and-destroy missions throughout German-occupied territory — interrogate a captured German soldier. He is Sgt. Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel), who appears in the above trailer starting at the 16 second mark and exiting at 48.

The bottom line is that Pitt and Roth, who plays Sgt. Donnie Donowitz (a.k.a., ‘the “Bear Jew”), behave like butt-ugly sadists in this scene while Sammel behaves like a man of honor, character and dignity.

Tarantino has Sammel defy Pitt by saying “fuck you and your Jew dogs” so it’ll seem right and fair that an anti-Semite gets his head beaten into mashed potatoes with a baseball bat. But what speaks louder is (a) Sammel’s expression, which is clearly that of a man of intelligence and perception, (b) his eyes in particular, which have a settled quality that indicates a certain regular-Joe decency, and (c) his refusal to give Pitt information about nearby German troops that would lead to their deaths if he spilled.

Isn’t this is what men of honor and bravery do in wartime — i.e., refuse to help the enemy kill their fellow soldiers, even if it means their own death?

Compare this anti-Semitic but nonetheless noble fellow with the smug and vile Pitt, who does everything but twirl this moustache as he contemplates the delicious prospect of seeing blood and brain matter emerge from Rachtman’s head.

And then comes a protracted and tedious build-up in which we hear Roth’s baseball bat banging against the stone walls of a darkened tunnel as he approaches the daylight and Sgt. Rachtman, who is kneeling next to Pitt. Whack, whack, whack, whack. Forever, interminably. Only a director who has truly lost his bearings would make an audience listen to that sound this much — 14, 15 times. And then Roth finally comes out of the tunnel and beats Rachtman to death. And then he screams and shouts with joy, going all “whee!” and “yeah!” and “all right!”

This is one of the most disgusting violent scenes I’ve ever sat through in my entire life.
Morally disgusting, I mean.

It didn’t make me want to see the Inglourious Basterds Germans come out ahead, but after this point I felt nothing for Pitt and his boys except loathing. All I knew is that they’re scum and that if they wind up dying, fine. No skin off mine. I don’t think this is the reaction Tarantino was looking for. I’m a Martian, I realize, and it’s quite possible that most viewers of this film are going to be cackling and giggling along with Pitt and Roth, but maybe not. Either way it’s not going to make anything after the first weekend.

If you half-liked and half-disliked Basterds the first time, my advice is to let well enough alone and don’t see it again because it’ll totally fall apart. You’ll be moaning and writhing in your seat like me. I tried to keep it down, but Jett told me later on that I was over-the-top with it.

There’s a feeling of gathered moral clarity — a certain down-to-it, no-mucking-about, time-to-face-it vibe — in Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Five Minutes of Heaven (IFC Films, 8.21). It’s basically a film about two veterans of the Irish troubles in the ’70s (Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt) looking back at a brutal political killing and trying to do or say something that will put the ghosts to rest. Except ghosts have a tendency to hang around. The darker the memory, the more they rule.

Split between Ireland’s present and its violent past in the early ’70s, Heaven is basically about Neeson’s character of 16 or 17 having shot a young boy from the other side (now that I’m thinking back I can’t remember which is Protestant and Catholic), and dealing with the victim’s still enraged and inconsolable younger brother (Nesbitt) when an Irish TV show brings them together to talk it over and come to grips.

Nesbitt’s character seems a bit dim — okay, intellectually challenged — but the ferocity of his feelings about Neeson is quite penetrating. They’re so intense that he can’t handle them, as evidenced by his darting eyes and hyper breathlessness and a general sense of a looming panic attack.

And the sad, guilt-ravaged expression on Neeson’s face seems tethered to some awful place deep in his soul. One look at him and you know there’s no way he’ll ever get past what he did, and that he himself knows this best of all.

Five Minutes of Heaven is obviously a smaller film than Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, a jarring look at the Third Reich’s final hours in a bunker in Berlin, but it’s about something that not only matters in terms of Ireland’s past — political murder and the personal rage that not only follows but stays alive for decades — but applies to today’s Islamic jihadists.

The film is so tight and focused that Guy Hibbert‘s screenplay could have been a theatre piece to start with, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. Plays tend to have more of a lean and sharpened quality than films as a general rule, and there’s no denying that Five Minutes of Heaven is some kind of hard diamond.

My only real problem is with the title. It alludes to the pleasure of getting revenge, but it’s obviously too oblique to mean anything to Joe Popcorn. It doesn’t mean that much to me and I’ve seen the film. I believe that if you lose control and wind up killing someone you hate, you might feel the satisfaction for 10 or 15 seconds, at most. If you’re any kind of human being you’ll be feeling the guilt pangs in less than a minute. How Hibbert figures that the pleasure would last for five minutes — an eternity in such a context — is beyond me.

If someone famous dies as a result of an external force or condition (car crash, drowning, lightning on golf course), journalists report it. If someone famous dies due to some common disease or affliction, journalists report it. But if someone famous dies due to the usual result of blatantly self-destructive behavior (like heavy cigarette smoking, black-coffee-drinking or relentless fatty-food-eating for decades), journalists don’t report it. In other words, if someone in effect commits a form of slow-motion suicide, journalists would rather not point this out. Update: I should have just spat out what I was told a day or two earlier, which was that the late John Hughes was (or had been) a heavy cigarette smoker and coffee drinker. Actions more often than not have consequences.

Dave McNary‘s Variety article about Triple Frontier, the next project for director Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, said they;d be executive producing but declined to say in so many words if Bigelow will be directing. I’ve been told she in fact is attached to direct, which is basically a yeah-I’ll-probably-direct-but-I’d-rather-not-yet-sign posture.

The pic, being written by Boal, will be a crime drama he “set in the notorious border zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where the Igazu and Parana rivers converge — making ‘la triple frontera’ difficult to monitor and a haven for organized crime,” etc. None of which means anything about what kind of movie it might conceivably be. I don’t much like the title for the same reason — i.e., doesn’t convey anything.

In a q & a with Variety‘s Michael Fleming, G.I. Joe director and Morlock flunky Stephen Sommers blurted out the following comments:

(a) “I don’t think the mainstream critics are relevant [when it comes to G.I. Joe] — they have criticized themselves into irrelevancy. Transformers 2 got the worst reviews in the last decade, and it is the biggest hit of the year. More people will see that than any other movie. On my movie, it became so clear to us. Why not make those reviewers pay their $15 like everyone else?”

(b) “I’d shown it dozens of times, all around the world. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Aside from doing close to $60 million, it got an A Cinema Score with people under 25. No matter what the critics say, the under 25 crowd is what’s most important.”

(c) “I know it sounds cliche, but I don’t read [reviews]. Why would I? I make the kind of movies critics love to hate. They love dark and depressing movies. If you make those, you expect they will love you, you need them to love you. The kind of movies I make? They don’t enjoy commercial or popular movies. I would say that geek love is hard to earn, and I got that in mounds. All the internet movie-haters love this movie. To win them over was something.”

Sommers sounds the way I expected him to sound. Like a polluting chemical plant owner or some sort of defensive Palinesque reactionary who talks in simple-minded us-vs.-them terms. Guys like Sommers are what that book, “When Good Things Happen to Bad People,” was all about.

Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow‘s creative partner and all-around wing man, reportedly told an interviewer during the promo lead-up for Knocked Up that “we make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue.”

Rogen “was half-joking, of course, and it’s safe to say that you won’t see Apatow and his merry men at the next Christian Coalition fundraiser,” writes N.Y. Times Op-Ed columnist Ross Douthat. “But the one-liner got something important right. By marrying raunch and moralism, Apatow’s movies have done the near impossible: They’ve made an effectively conservative message about relationships and reproduction seem relatable, funny, down-to-earth and even sexy.

“No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism.

“No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as Knocked Up, Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. And no movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as The 40-Year Old Virgin, whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

I know you look at the column, Judd, so I’ll just ask you straight-out — is this guy talking shit or have I been reading you wrong the whole time? I’ve always thought that a brainy Jewish comedy director-writer who’s into subversion and dick jokes would naturally be a pinko-lefty of some kind. That’s what you more or less are…right? A lefty? I just don’t know if I could handle hearing that you’re a closet conservative and that you’re friendly with Jon Voight.

I don’t presume this to be the case. I’d just like to hear from you personally that you’re cool and that you don’t, you know, belong to the NRA and play golf with Clint Eastwood (who, by the way, I personally like and is an excellent human being). I’m just mildly freaked by the possibility, no offense.

In his latest Future of Classic posting, amctv.com columnist Bilge Ebiri points out several similarities between G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s puppet-animated Team America: World Police. “There are so many similarities between the two movies that it’s almost impossible to keep track of them all,” Ebiri writes. On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely is it that G.I. Joe writers Stuart Beattie and David Elliot never saw Team America? Just asking.

So to recap, in the space of the last three days Bill Maher, Roger Ebert and N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott have all deplored abundant indications of rank stupidity and infantilism among the general public — Maher addressing diminished or nonexistent political awareness levels and Ebert/Scott pointing to increasing popularity of idiot-level CG paintbox/dada movies and the kneejerk avoidance among the under-25s of films with even a smidgen of adult texture or provocation.

Which is what I’ve been bemoaning in no uncertain terms in this column for years, and which is entirely about my own personality and spiritual shortcomings and nothing to do with what’s actually happening out in the culture….right, naysayers?

As I stated yesterday, American moviegoing youths have essentially become Eloi. Scott paints an image of ticket-buyers as “mewling, incontinent little bundles of id with dirty minds and mouths — that’s pretty much what the major studios think of us.” Either way they’re seen as subjects for relatively easy manipulation and brain-washing by the junk-food-dispensing and junk-movie-dispensing Morlocks — i.e., corporate owners of movie studios, studio-chief henchmen, slash-and-profit producers like Joel Silver and Lorenzo di Bonaventura and (they’re all serving the same goal and the same gods) fast-food distributors.

Today’s Eloi are not lambs waiting to be led to the slaughter, as H.G. Wells and George Pal envisioned, but under-educated ADD pudge-bods looking for steady weekend slurps of cheap-drug highs. Nothing lasting or profound, mind, but tasty and dumbly enjoyable enough to create appetites and addictions.

“What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing?,” Scott asks in his 12.7 article, titled “Spoon-Fed Cinema.” “A child, of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one! Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer.

“But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.

“A movie that people will go and see, almost as if they had no choice, is a safer business proposition than one they may have to bother thinking about. In this respect Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is exemplary. It brilliantly stymies reflection, thwarts argument, arrests intelligent response. The most interesting thing about the movie — apart from Megan Fox‘s outfits, I suppose — is that it has made nearly $400 million domestically.

“There is nothing else to say. Any further discussion — say about whether it’s a good movie or not — sounds quaint, old-fashioned, passe. Get a clue, grandpa.

The new Hollywood climate is one in which “middle-aged actors and critically lauded directors look like extravagances rather than sound investments,” Scott concludes. “Forty is the new dead. Auteur is French for unemployed. The Hurt Locker — the kind of fierce and fiery action movie that might have been a blockbuster once upon a time — is treated like a delicate, exotic flower, released into art houses and sold on its prestige rather than on its visceral power.”

Why is it that every time I make a particular and referenced point about some current topic of interest or intrigue, 90% of the reader responses always meander off-topic or bring up their own curious crotch-scratch issues or generally downgrade the discourse? I put some thought into these pieces, dammit, and 90% of the time people go, “Yeah, whatever…but I have something else to discuss of a more coarse and common nature.”