I don't know how to write a "So I've decided to lay my thoughts down on the internet for your reading pleasure" opener without sounding completely solipsistic and douche-y, so I'll be brief: my girlfriend and mother (different people, thank God) thought I should write a weekly movie blog to keep my mind sharp, and since I live in constant fear of my mind turning to mush, I'm inclined to agree. That's the skinny. My goal's a piece a week. Sometimes it may be more; sometimes it may less. In the end I hope it evens out. Luckily, I'm not too worried about coming off like a self-absorbed twat since a) I'd say those that know me best came to that conclusion long ago, and without the aid of the internet, and b) I'll wager five people end up reading this on a regular basis.
Here's to swimming with bow-legged women, and writing for oneself!
A couple of ground rules:
1) If you comment, please try to maintain some semblance of grammar. Spell-checking's nice. So's capitalizing things. Remember: you're writing on the Internet. You're not fucking retarded.
2) Disagree with me? Great. Conflict is the essence of drama. But do debate me. "You eat cock" is not quite in that league.
3) Don't troll. I'll ignore you. And if anyone else notices a troll, just ignore them. I don't want this turning into the IMDb message boards.
4) Don't ever kiss my ass just to curry favor with me. Nothing pisses me off more than reading comments on movie websites and seeing posters lovingly fellate the webmasters. It's pathetic. Just 'cause I like/hate something doesn't mean anyone else needs to think likewise.
In exchange for that, I promise to:
1) Not talk shit about other movie bloggers. There's nothing quite as sad as watching a pissing contest online.
2) Never preface an opinion with the phrase "We all know..." This isn't math. It's criticism. You know what they say about opinions.
3) Never judge a movie based on its trailer. If I don't like a trailer, I'll critique it. I reserve judgment on the film until I see it.
4) Not blindly attack nostalgia. Simply put, I'm not that big an asshole.
5) Never say obnoxious and provocative things just to generate hits. I make no money off this, so there's no need for me to troll for comments.
6) Never talk about my personal life. I wish to write about movies. I do not wish to detail my every move and feeling. This is not Facebook. I don't use Twitter. The last thing I want is this to go from "movie blog" to "Diary of a sociopathic narcissist."
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
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A word on the blog name...
It's a reference to a line from a Tales from the Crypt episode.
(Side note: I'm rewatching the show and am having a ball with it. I'd forgotten how much like The Twilight Zone it is, assuming that Rod Serling had the libido and attention span of a fourteen-year old boy. Irony is, Tales from the Crypt aired on HBO at 10:30 P.M., two conditions that made it awful damn hard for a fourteen-year old boy to watch it. But I digress.)
This rich feller refers to L.A. as the "pussy, booze, and bullshit capital of the Western World." I wanted that to be my blog name, but it wouldn't fit. So, even though it says otherwise, those in the know will get what I mean.
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Anything but Inglourious.
Color me surprised.
I read the screenplay for Inglourious Basterds a few months ago and wasn't terribly impressed. It was a fast enough read with some juicy dialogue and a great ending, but it didn't have that great "kitchen sink" feeling of Quentin Tarantino's best work. Tarantino thinks in set-pieces, in grand details, and his best work luxuriates in that stuff, makes you swim through it. When he's cooking, the man acts like he doesn't have another film left in him, and so he'd better get everything right now on-screen before it's gone forever. By comparison, the Inglourious script felt spartan and ill-focused, the skeleton of a more promising WWII story.
The movie is the second best genre example I've seen all year (after Pixar's Up). It's suspenseful and thrilling and hilarious and weird and original and brilliantly shot and engagingly acted (with one exception). I'll allow--my expectations weren't high, so maybe it just hopped over those modest goals. But I'm still on a high from it, so let's play the expectations game another day, shall we?
As for the genre, that's simple: this is a great fantasy film. That's not a slight. I think Tarantino probably thinks of his film that way. Hell, you could argue that all films are fantasy. "Film is lies at 24 frames a second," I once heard said (or was it, "Film is lies that tell the truth?"), and the more I think about it, the more I like the expression. You're limited by the frame, you're limited by time, you're limited by a hundred limitations, and what shows up on screen is, at best, an interpretation of reality rather than the real thing.
What Tarantino does that's so brilliant is find the freedom in that fantasy. This is his WWII "Man on a Mission" entry where the eponymous men on their mission occupy only a third of the total screen time. It's his thriller where language scars as much as knives or bullets. It's his big movie star movie where the most potent star performance comes courtesy of a relatively unknown Austrian actor. It's his war movie with zero battle scenes.
Fuck, it's his war, and what he does with WWII is funny and a little awe-inspiring. You look at the most popular WWII entertainments, going back to Man Hunt, through Where Eagles Dare and The Dirty Dozen, all the way up to Saving Private Ryan or Valkyrie, and they are all constrained by time. History reigns supreme. No matter how surprising or exciting or interesting the war movie is, inevitably it will butt up against history.
And history always wins.
In his greatest conceit, Tarantino has liberated the WWII film from history, and I promise you, you don't know where this one will go. Not by a long shot. Because in a world where anything could happen, why would you?
I don't think the movie is perfect. This movie proves, conclusively, that Eli Roth has no business acting. Ever. His Bear Jew character is a cool part ruined by Roth's frat-boy demeanor and hammy, mannered posturing, and I weep thinking of what original choice Adam Sandler might have brought to the part (the idea of Happy Gilmore going ape-shit on Nazi brains gives me satisfaction in a way few things can). Roth also ruins the Audie Murphy-inspired movie-within-a-movie, "Nation's Pride." What few clips we see look like modern footage, replete with blood squibs and shakicam, retrofitted with B&W tones, rather than authentic 1944 movie shots. Tarantino would know the difference, had he shot the footage. But he's so in love with Roth, he farmed those scenes out to him to direct, and they stick out like a sore thumb. Roth's attention to period details is about as good as Hostel: Part Two was. Moving off the subject of Eli Roth, while all the scenes in the flick are good, for pacing purposes I'd trim the midsection somewhat. Not a lot. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, tops, and only from the third and fourth chapters. Again, none of these scenes are bad, but they are not as hypnotically paced as the first, second, and fifth chapters.
Furthermore, Tarantino's works demand repeat viewings, and this one is no exception. I've no way of knowing now if it'll hold up, if I'll always find the dialogue rich and original, if I'll come to see the film as five admittedly stunning set-pieces rather than a cohesive story, if I'll cool on the originality/power of the last segment.
But right now, I feel pretty great. I'll be seeing this one again shortly.
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Quote of the Week
"I think Con Air is like if you were to explain Frankenstein's monster to somebody. It might sound like a really good idea, 'I'm going to get the best bits of all these people, and put them together into one person. It's going to be amazing.' Con Air is kind of like that."
--Simon Pegg for The Onion A.V. Club, 2 October 2008.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
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