Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds ends its two-and-a-half-hour run time with one of the main characters smiling directly into the camera, addressing the audience and stating proudly, "I think I may have just made my masterpiece." To say that the line is meant to reflect director Tarantino's mindset in regards to this, his sixth film, is apt (although I beg to differ: I still consider Jackie Brown to be his best film to date...let the arguing begin!) but somewhat premature. This isn't Tarantino's best film, but it's right up there, right next to Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. Like that film, Basterds unwinds slowly, methodically, perfectly paced and with the characteristic dialogue and set pieces and ratcheting of tension that climaxes into one of the most perfectly staged, purely cinematic endings in recent memory.

However, don't let the title or the trailers fool you: this isn't a men-on-a-mission story. This isn't necessarily about the Basterds (they're in maybe one third of the film's run time). Their story unfolds tangentally along with that of the film's protagonist, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent, who looks suspiciously like Julie Delpy), who owns a cinema in Nazi-occupied France (under the assumed name of Emmanuelle). The two stories intertwine when the Basterds plot to sabotage the premiere of Joseph Goebbels' newest propaganda film, Nation's Pride, starring Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl playing an oddly sympathetic Nazi war hero/movie star in the line of Audie Murphy), which will not only be attended by every high-ranking Nazi in the war (including Hitler, played as a caricature by Martin Wuttke), but is also being hosted at Shosanna's cinema. While the Basterds plot to sabotage the premiere by blowing up the theatre and everyone in it, Shosanna plans to likewise sabotage the film by igniting the highly flammable nitrate film negatives archived therein. That is the entire plot. Not exactly the "men-on-a-mission" film the trailers and posters suggest.

What is left to enjoy (or wait in anxiety for) are scenes of the Jewish-American Basterds killing and scalping Nazis and trying to acquire information on the location of Goebbels' premiere from the German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), Frederick Zoller's seemingly innocent courting of Shosanna, or Col. Hans Landa's (the incredible and charismatic Cristoph Waltz) suspicion of Shosanna after being introduced to him by Zoller at a luncheon with Goebbels. That, essentially, is the plot of the film. There are, however, moments when the film stops so Tarantino can indulge in several instances of characteristic pop culture masturbation.

I know, I know: pop culture is what Tarantino "gets", but the problem with this script (his second weakest, following the scripts for Kill Bill) is that there are scenes where people talk about 1940's-era pop culture just because. There is one scene which is a prime example: while the Basterds are waiting for von Hammersmark to arrive at a bar, the action cuts to the interior of the bar, where a group of Nazis are playing a drinking game. The game consists of writing the name of a character or famous person on the back of a card, passing the card (unseen) to the person on the right, and the person has to stick the card on their forehead and guess what character they are. The game comes into play later when the three German-speaking Basterds play the game with a Nazi corporal, but prior to the introduction of those Basterds, we don't need to see the other characters playing the game.

The above example is the singlar scene that I remembered, and the only time in the film where I actually felt the film's length and just wanted the action to begin again (I actually looked at my watch to see how long it took for the plot to get moving again). However, the opening scene (which introduces us to both Col. Landa and Shosanna) plays out just as long and "slow" (I guess "slow-burning" is a more apt description), but is infintely more suspenseful on virtue of the fact that what the two characters (Col. Landa and Mnsr. LaPadite, a minor character who is hiding Shosanna) are talking about is actually important to the story. This opening scene, along with the final forty minutes, features Tarantino writing with utmost skill.

For such an epic movie, the action seems very contained, and most of the exteriors are shot in medium or long shots, making the film seem a lot smaller in scale than the story itself is. Whether this was intentional on the part of Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson (who otherwise does a typically amazing job) is unknown, but seeing as the film felt slightly rushed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was scaled down simply due to scheduling.

Those squabbles aside, though, I did enjoy the film immensely, and it's only now, after having been able to mull it all over in my head and converse and find others' points of view that I think I understand The Point of it. In the August 24th & 31st issue of Newsweek, reviewer Daniel Mendelsohn laments that Inglourious Basterds, with its penchant for brutal violence perpetrated against a brutal regime, sells a message of "visceral pleasure of revenge" by "...turning Jews into Nazis". What he seems to warn against is the act of audiences internalizing and applauding such behavior and thus extraxt a deep emotional satisfaction from the revenge meted out by victims to their perpetrators. At its lightest, Basterds makes its protagonists as thuggish as its villains; at its worst, it's distorting the past and representing the victims as overpowering their oppressors (which is reflective, so Mr. Mendelsohn suggests, by our cultural tendency to find meaning and empowerment from tragedy: as he writes, "...it may be that our present-day taste for 'empowerment,' our anxious horror of being represented as 'victims' - nowadays there are no victims, only 'survivors'- has begun to distort the representation of the past, one in which passive victims, alas, vastly outnumbered those who were able to fight back."

Mendelsohn is right in asserting that the film is, indeed, a revenge film. But where I disagree with him is his assertion that this distortion of history (so obvious and blatant that you must have been living under a rock if you didn't notice it) is damaging to our society. The final 40 minutes of the film, where (SPOILERS!!!!!) the entire Nazi high command and Adolf fucking Hitler get machine-gunned to death in a burning theater (END SPOILERS!!!) speak volumes to the power of cinema as a weapon (both literal and figuratively). Hitler and most of the high command escaped justice, opting to take their own lives instead; at least in one film they get theirs (I almost want to count Raiders of the Lost Ark in this capacity also: there is nothing more satisfying than watching Nazis get their faces melted and heads detonated by the wrath of God Himself.)

The sight of Eli Roth pumping bullets into Hitler brought a cheer from the audience: this is something that, deep down, we'd wanted to see happen. Tarantino has already rewritten history by making a period film (face it: nearly every period piece - based on actual events or not- is embellished and, thus, a product of imagination. Did The Dirty Dozen receive such condemnation for Lee Marvin's detonation of a Nazi high command gala? If not, why?), so he might as well go all-out.

The aforementioned cheer, though, was unnerving in retrospect: it occurs after a scene in which the Nazi high command is watching a propaganda film based on Zoller's single-handed sniping of 80+ Allied infantry. As the bullets ring and buzz on screen, the audience cheers emphatically. Zoller, however, leaves and later tells Shosanna, "I don't really like those parts." Once the real bullets start flying and the Nazis start burning and the audience of which I am a member start cheering...how different is my reaction to those of the Nazis onscreen? Maybe that is the transitive power of film: to encite emotions we would otherwise not express.

Maybe Mr. Mendelsohn is right: revenge is a visceral pleasure. Maybe that's the point Tarantino was trying to make with the aforementioned juxtaposition. When the victims are just as ready for violence as their perpetrators, that reveals a lot of human nature, of our desires and our emotions. (And what would Mendelsohn say of this fact: the film is fucking HUGE in Germany. CHUD.com's Devin Faraci reports on that story over at his site, and I sympathize wholeheartedly with his interpretation as to why the success might have occurred.) If I didn't want violence, why, in any scene containing the Basterds and Nazis and there was TOO MUCH dialogue, why would I want a gun fight to break out? Why did I find the dialogue to go on for too long? Was it that I was expecting a different type of movie, or merely that the anticipation of violence overpowered my need to see characters exist in a fictional universe?

To be honest, I think Tarantino just thought it'd be fun to show Jews killing Nazis (something my Israeli coworker complained wasn't in the film enough). But I'm glad he left some room for discussion in there. I recommend it for anyone looking for a good late-summer entry.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker (2009, by Kathryn Bigelow)

In the opening minutes of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, we're introduced to Bravo Company, a bomb disposal unit stationed in Baghdad in 2003. With a month left into their tour of duty, Bravo Company loses their chief bomb disposal engineer (played by Guy Pearce) in a deftly constructed sequence that illustrates just how harrowing an experience the battlefield is, as well as the unforeseen toll it takes on those involved.
The opening scene shows a routine bomb disposal mission that gets botched when a piece of equipment breaks and the squad leader (who is also in charge of defusing the makeshift bombs) is killed. Replacing him is the volatile Staff Sergeant William James (played by Jeremy Renner...more on him in a bit), a man who is less hardened by spending every waking moment in the field expecting something to kill him as he embracing of that lifestyle. The other men in his company are Sergeant JT Sanborn (played by Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (played by Brian Geraghty), and while at first impressed by James' skill at his job, soon realize that that their new leader is unhinged, impulsive, and increasingly reckless. The story, as iterated earlier, involves Bravo Company's last few weeks into their rotation, and whether they can stay alive long enough to return home.
Kathryn Bigelow is a revelation here. The director of k-19: The Widowmaker and the mid-90's actioner Point Break (yes. The One with Keanu Reeves) deftly balances taut action with a character-driven plot (true, the events in which the characters find themselves are dictated by outside factors, but how they react to those mitigating factors set up moments for deeper poignancy later on in the film). Also refreshing is her lack of political agenda: this isn't a story about the factors leading to the war, or whether it is "justified" or not, or even an argument that we "should" be there: this is a story about the people who are there in the shit, doing the work that none of us are doing and not getting enough thanks, praise, or recompense, and rarely waver in their devotion. The apolitical stance the film takes is refreshing, as the heavy-handed messaging of "the war is a mistake and unjustified" makes one view the soldiers overseas almost as the villains, when in fact they're just doing their job. Bigelow cuts out all the preachy bullshit and just lets the soldiers' stories speak for themselves.
The devotion, Bigelow observes, is not purely to ideology or country, but to each other. Walking out of the theatre I felt as I had when I went to see Black Hawk Down and Eric Bana says to another character, when asked why he keeps going to the front, "When I go home people'll ask me, 'Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?' You know what I'll say? I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it. That's all it is." That's what this movie could be boiled down to as well: just three men who keep going in for each other, just to keep the other safe. And the best part? The movie allows you to come to that conclusion on your own, the characters don't have to say it.
With that out in open, Bigelow is free to display some extremely tense scenes. The first time that Staff Sargeant James diffuses the IEDs (a scene that is used as the poster image) illustrates not just the danger of the battlefield, but also the suspicion by the soldiers of the Iraqi citizenry, as well as showing the second-nature attitude of Staff Sargeant James towards his work (a last-minute hunch clues him into a bundle of IEDs, and he sets about disarming them knowing full well they could blow any second).
While the main story is about Bravo Company's final days and their subsequent attempts to work together and trust together (an effort which only seems to pay of in a tense sniper shoot-out involving some mercenaries and insurgents), one of the most lasting and important subplots involves Sergeant James' instability and recklessness (which culminates in one of the team members getting injured and being forced out of action).
Refreshingly, each character is three-dimensional and relatable, expertly acted and distinct in personality from one another. Sergeant Sanborn (Mackie) is a resolute, proud, no-nonsense leader, doing his utmost to look after each of his men. But throughout the course of the film James' recklessness forces James to reevaluate himself: at first he hates James for his insubordination, then loathes him for his recklessness before trusting him for his expertise. By the end, Sanborn is unsure even of his reason for being in the front, and finds that James' attitude is the only thing that keeps him alive in the battlefield.
Eldrigdge (Geraghty) suffers most throughout the film, as he is the most emotionally weak of the group. He depends on his psychiatrist, Col. John Cambridge (Christian Camargo), while at the same time openly hating him for not knowing exactly what risks are out in the field: Eldridge is unstable, blaming himself for the death of his prior company leader, and his connection to Col. Cambridge is the only stable relationship he has in an otherwise unstable world. When James comes to rely on him (again, during the sniper battle), Eldridge slowly becomes more confidant, particularly when he saves Bravo Company by shooting a lone insurgent.
However, James is the star of the show, and Renner owns every scene he's in. He is at turns reckless, reliable, cooperative, independent, unstable, commands a unique sense of knowing his enemy, and even expressing some remorse and friendship to a young Iraqi boy named Beckham (Christopher Sayegh) who James befriends when the boy sells him bootleg DVDs. It is Beckham's friendship with James which proves to be James' emotional undoing, and provides one of the more emotionally rending sequences in the film.
I would comment on the music, cinematography (which, to Barry Ackroyd's credit, is stunningly beautiful) and production design, but all worked so seamlessly as to go unnoticed (and that's a compliment, don't get me wrong.) Actually, Ackroyd's cinematography is effective in several instances. While in Iraq (which is most of the movie) the camera is constantly moving, never set up on a tripod, so as to convey a never-ending sense of movement and instability; in instances of dramatic events (during the first explosion which kills Bravo Comapny's prior bomb technician, to a beautiful shot showing a spent bullet casing bounding on the sand) the camera slows down, highlighting the dramatic importance of the event. When James returns home near the end of the film, the camera is stable, static, the framing cramped with borders (such as a supermarket asile, a doorway, the bars of a crib). This is the real imprisonment, where life is static, cramped, and claustrophobic. James' inability to even decide what breakfast cereal to buy showcases just how impossible it is for him to readjust to civilian life, something which, so I've heard from second-hand accounts, is sadly common (but not as common as you'd think).
James' speech to his son, in the penultimate scene, is apt not only to other men and women in his position and with his experience, but also to anyone to find meaning in his or her life"

"You love your mommy. And your daddy. You love your pajamas, and your crib. You love your toys. You love everything. But you'll grow up and realize that your toys are just pieces of plastic, and you won't love them as much. You'll maybe find four or five things you love. And soon, when you're older, you'll maybe have one thing you love."

I remembered that speech out of everything in the movie. Writer Mark Boal's script is able to relate the story of everyone, not just those of the soldiers. And that's incredibly refreshing. In understanding them, we understand ourselves. And in doing both, hopefully we'll be able to treat our soldiers with the respect and consideration they fought and trained to deserve.
This is one of the best movies this summer, and is high in the running for best of the year. This is a film that has great character work, amazing acting (I wouldn't be surprised if Renner earns himself an Oscar or Golden Globe nom. He is the show here, and I can't wait to see what else he can do), and tense action. And it has all this while being true to its subject and not pandering to the audience, nor to any ideology.
I couldn't recommend this any more. Do yourself a favor and watch it.

Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King

Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King (2009)

Big Whiskey is the oddly named new album by the Dave Matthews Band, a follow-up to the reserved, toned-down, dense, yet extremely listenable Stand Up (2005). The album is also the first released after the death of lead saxophonist and founding member LeRoi Moore following an off-roading accident last year. With Moore's unfortunate passing, the band seems to have lost most of the lofty, free-flowing jam-session-esque sound that has characterized them for the past 15 years. Also gone, it seems, is any cohesion to the album, and what we're left with is a jumble of songs that sound extremely similar and sedate yet also, paradoxically, thematically unrelated to each other. Compared to the band's past efforts (especially Before These Crowded Streets, the Grammy nominated album that weaved a tapestry of melancholic sounds that segued into each other; and the aforementioned Stand Up, which kept up a dark, morose, yet ultimately transcendent theme throughout), Big Whiskey is like the aural equivalent of a poorly planned theme party set in a Southern mansion where, inside, each room of the mansion portrays and entirely separate theme ("You got alligator in my whiskey!" "Yeah? Well, you got time bombs in my squirming monkeys!" "Whare's the groogrux? What's a groogrux? WHERE THE FUCK IS THE GROOGRUX?!") The few songs that offer related and complimentary sounds and themes are buffered by a slew of songs that seem as if they were recorded right before the band went to sleep, and offer no topical relation to each other. (Why is that a problem? Well, I tend to think about the comparison with another band I listen to, Gorillaz: whereas their first, self-titled album is a disjointed hodgepodge of listenable tracks, their 2005 sophomore effort, Demon Days, is cohesive funky, apocalyptically catchy, and one can listen to the songs individually or as a whole and come out with a favorable result either way. Not so with Big Whiskey.) After the streamlined beauty of Stand Up, it's a shame the band stumbled back a few steps with this album.
To its credit, though, Big Whiskey does offer some listenable tunes, just nothing I can describe as jam worthy (I can only seriously picture 2 or 3 songs of the album's 13 being added to their concert set lists). The opening track, "Grux", is a one-and-a-half minute solo by the late LeRoi. The track starts slow and melancholic before building to a pitch, while in the background we faintly hear a band starting to tune up softly: the final high note holds, lingering, and fades away, instead transforming into Dave's energetic yowl which throws us into the next track, "Shake Me Like A Monkey". "...Monkey" sounds and feels like classic Dave Matthews: free flowing, lofty, and and an energtic tempo (also: the song is about sex. Shocking!) The next track, "Funny the Way It Is", is comparable in tone to the band's previous "Mother, Father".....only slower. And more somber. Much, mich slower. "Funny The Way It Is" lacks the energy or impact of "Mother, Father", and it suffers for it. Unfortunately, the successive tracks fare no better, and it isn't until the quadfecta of "Spaceman", "Squirm", "Alligator Pie", and (my favorite of the album) "Seven" that an overall theme and cohhesion actually appears. "Squirm" sounds like the opening track to Sgt. Pepper, where a fictional band starts performing at a fictional venue...but here it is unfortuantely stuck in the middle of the album instead of the opening (or at least the follow-up track to the excellent "Grux"); it just feels incredibly out of place here. It's hard to even describe the sound of the songs other than the four I just named, since they have the energy of a Benadryll fiend hopped up on horse tranquilizers, and I honestly can't remember a single tune from any of them, even having listened to the entire album 6 full times since July (although the chorus to "Why I Am" is prettty good...considering what a tepid song it is.)
But in an album of 13 songs, I've listed less than half of those that I actually like. Is it enough to have only 6 songs, barely half the album, that actualyl sound as if they have any life, energy, and "umph" to them, that I might actually want to listen to over and over again? I don't know. I don't think it is enough for me. Hell, I can listen to Stand Up and Before These Crowded Streets the whole albums through, but I can't see myself doing that very often for Big Whiskey.
Perhaps LeRoi's passing put a sombre tone to the rest of the band members, and therefore the album (although he was alive to record/collaborate most of the songs of the album before saxophonist Jeff Coffin covered for him for a few songs), or perhaps his death made the remaining band members contemplate their own mortality and actually mature a bit and break out of the college-frat-rock demographic with which they're associated. But, dammit, that's what makes them who they are. And, to be honest, they did that with Before These Crowded Streets and Stand Up, both to killer effect. One can mature without cutting outthe energy and verve (I'm looking at you, Green Day). Hell, the Beatles grew up a bit and wound up releasing fucking Rubber Soul and Revolver. Maybe this is the Dave Matthews Band's Rubber Soul. Just a lot less good.
It's a stumble and a misstep, but the hardcore fans will find at least a few songs to like here. I did.

P.S. --- if you can find the bonus track, "Beach Ball", it's SO much better than any other song on the album. Take that from what you will.


Enjoy a remastered version of the song "Seven", my favorite of the album, and featuring a ridiculous picture of Dave on a giant screen at some concert.



And the aforementioned bonus track, "Beach Ball":