Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is an exceptional film. It's a tribute to film, a film fanatic's crowning achievement, a celluloidic lapis lazuli heuristically annihilating the Third Reich. Strong performances all around, Christoph Waltz (Col. Hans Landa) trying to steal the show ala Frank Booth unsuccessfully due to Brad Pitt's (Lt. Aldo Raine) non-Jeffrey Beaumontesque counterpoint. Aren't these names simply outstanding: Lt. Aldo Raine, Col. Hans Landa, Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), Marcel (Jacky Ido). Set up and executed like a post-modern fairy tale, Basterds unreels like a quaintly distinct incandescent extremity, bluntly interdicting fictional necessities in a multicultural absurdist panorama. Every introduced character is compelling; every scene an odd mixture of frank subtlety; the pipe, how about that pipe!; and I really don't know what else to say. Don't want to go into too much detail and ruin it (especially considering that I'm reviewing it six weeks later) and know that I won't have enough time to analyze it until at least mid-December. So I'll just say that, those things, and hope you like it, or don't.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button chronicles the life of its title's hero (Brad Pitt), born an old man who grows younger as he ages. Throughout his travels, he meets many a quirky character with an idiosyncratic tale to tell, including an artist (who dies with cigar in mouth [Captain Mike played by Jared Harris]) and a sirenic swimmer who tenaciously challenges the English Channel (Elizabeth Abbot played by Tilda Swinton). These minor characters leave major impressions on both the film's and Benjamin's personality ("it's funny how sometimes the people we remember the least make the greatest impression"), placing this curious case in the realm of other magically realistic narratives such as Forrest Gump, Big Fish, and The Princess Bride. Benjamin's innocent love for childhood sweetheart Daisy (Cate Blanchett) parallels that cultivated by the heroes of these films as well, and as their roundabout romance ties together each successive movement, we're left to examine the alimentary affects which valedictory events have on the development of an individual.

Benjamin doesn't spend much time moralizing about right and wrong or the difference between the correct way and the highway. Instead, it elevates happenstance and making the most of what you have, much to its credit. One theme which reverberates throughout emphasizes that it's "not about how well you play, it's about how you feel about what you play," a theme which encourages and applauds disenfranchised forms of artistic expression, while coincidentally displaying them all the while. It also provides several neat little particular tidbits of avuncular advice for puzzling situations that arise throughout life, such as the three rules for Benjamin's first love affair (never look at me during the day, always part before sunrise, and never say I love you) amongst others.

While I found The Curious Case to follow Forrest Gump's heels far to closely, providing a sedately sensational story that left little room for outstanding acting, it's certainly multidimensional enough to inspire myriad interpretations depending upon the disposition of the viewer in question. And it's romantic and fun. Probably not Oscar's choice for best picture of the year, but it's worth checking out if you like films that present profiles of charismatic offbeat people in a fantastically realistic fashion. In tune, in touch, quite different from the other Fincher films I've seen, Benjamin's buttons are sewn on tight with a sentimental style that's laid out just right.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The entertainment industry's propensity to reinvestigate saintly and criminal cultural (and pop-cultural) icons is substantial. Again and again and again. Superman in high school, the Joker's back, the Legend of the Omega Man. I personally love how Space Ghost from Coast to Coast and The Brak Show interfilmically respond to this tendency using staple Western narrative tropes like “Hamlet” and “Psycho” to playfully expand the sublimely inter-dimensional terrain (we don't have to always focus upon Superman or Batman if we're not going to invent new characters). Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford examines this propensity and exposes the formal underpinnings regarding the ethico-historical content of supposed criminals. By engaging in this dialogue, Dominik manages to draw a sharp parallel between Jesse James and Jesus Christ, while also showing how the ethical formal influence of the tragedy of Jesus's life and times can be reformulated politically (with seemingly contradictory content).

It's as if Dominik's stating that the crowd loves an outlaw and the elite love exploiting the crowd.

Within Dominik's film, we are introduced to a gang of crooks lead by the James Brothers (Brad Pitt and Sam Shephard). They are contrasted with the more cowardly Ford Brothers (Robert - Casey Afflek and Charley - Sam Rockwell) who end up killing Jesse. Further, while Jesse is a God-fearing religious man when he's not robbing trains, Robert is a weaselly opportunistic wretch. Throughout, we see Jesse's dementia getting worse and worse and the film subtly suggests that Jesse tricked Robert into shooting him (having grown tired of living like an outlaw, knowing his final years would be drenched in madness) (hence, Jesse isn't shot in the back, he's shot in the back while looking in the mirror). Solid performances all around, played to a haunting, morose score which simultaneously reminds one of Aranofsky's Requiem for a Dream and a made for t.v. historical drama (music being used to ironically deconstruct the seriousness of Dominik's content?). Affleck's performance also juxtaposes the austere and the commercial, at moments poignantly portraying the conflicted, tortured Ford, at others, coming across like an out-of-place, starving hack (is Dominik encouraging this juxtaposition in order to suggest that fluctuation leads to cowardice?).

In the end, Robert Ford is set up like a Judas: the coward who murdered his friend. Jesse James becomes somewhat of a legend, simultaneously revered, feared, and cheered, a heroic outlaw for the people. Ford, having murdered this figure, is outcasted, and his murderer eventually pardoned and released. The people asked Pilate to free Barabbas thereby condemning Jesus. Jesus was condemned and his memory resonates prominently to this day, his betrayer’s name eternally contemptuous. But within the legend we have Pilate (politics) asking the people (ethics) to free either a sinner or a saint (remarkable individuals, regardless of whether they are wicked or just). If the saint dies, his murderer is derided. But, as Dominik relates, if the criminal dies the perfidy of his betrayer results in his derision as well (popular criminals becoming Saintly). Dominik has picked up on the ancient cult of the exception, the cult of the wicked: treachery is still treachery in any state or form, and culture is generally unkind to the treacherous.

In some ways, it's a shame that Dominik took on this project, seeing how his debut Chopper chronicled the contemporary beginnings of a legendary outlaw, thereby tilling the ground from which subsequent subjective interpretations can be planted and objectified (rather than situating himself in an old-fashioned crop whose tradition has been cultivated for over a century). But his presentation of the legend does lend itself to meta-legendary insight, cutting the head off of snakes, shot in the back while looking in the mirror.

The cinematography by Roger Deakins is brilliant as well, but I've grown tired of qualifying films shot in gorgeous mountainous regions as having brilliant cinematography. If you chill in the country for a prolonged period with a photographer's eye, it isn't hard to shoot pristine shot after pristine shot. Afterwards, the beauty of these shots is exaggerated by urbanites who don't get to spend much time in the country and forget that solid cinematography comes from applying an artistic filmically-photographic eye to a seemingly empty panorama, coaxing split-second beauty from a derelict domain, a seemingly hollow yet enlivened reverberation.

Then again, I suppose this is precisely what Deakins was doing when he filmed the fish swimming beneath the ice.