Sunday 30 August 2009

Great* Lines From The Movies *Interpretations of "great" may differ from mines, Part 8

"Like a midget at a urinal I'd have to stay on my toes"

Frank Drebin, Naked Gun 33 1/3

Saturday 22 August 2009

Inglourious Basterds



Historical accuracy isn't something Hollywood does well. In fact it mainly doesn't bother with it at all. According to Braveheart the battle of Stirling Bridge took place in the middle of a big field, the clue to the true location is in the title. One of the biggest bugbears tends to be with American depictions of World War II. Too often the only accents on show are Yank or OTT Kraut. All of those other nationalities involved? You wouldn't know there were any. That isn't a problem in Tarantino's latest, indeed it's awash with Euro-talk, even in their own languages for much of the time. History isn't treated with quite as much regard. Inglourious Basterds' depiction of the Second World War isn't so much The Big Red One, more Operation Dumbo Drop, obviously with less elephant but much more scalping.

This is Tarantino's war movie but true to tradition it isn't actually a movie about war. This is a movie about other movies about war, a war film film if you will. Inglourious Basterds makes no grand statement on the folly of war, the pointlessness and senseless waste of human life, but then that's not the point. It has more to say about the use of something as tragic as World War II as the setting for rip-roaring entertainment. Not a great deal more since this is also a film that does that, but it's all, you know, tongue rammed in cheek clever, or something. Frankly it's a Tarantino film which means all the good and/or bad thing that usually means.

What it means is snappy dialogue and stylish violence and Inglourious Basterds is as full of those as Gordon Ramsay is as full of himself. The whole shebang opens with a twenty minute scene that mainly consists of the former as Col. Hans Landa, AKA The Jew Hunter, interrogates a French farmer. It's a fantastically tense scene and it introduces us to the real star of the film, sorry Mr. Pitt. Christoph Waltz's performance is really quite special, but the character he is playing is equally as brilliant. Landa is Tarantino's main achievement and showcases the director's writing at its absolute best. By the way that's not to say Brad Pitt isn't good, quite the opposite. He's clearly having a bawl as Lt. Aldo Raine, all Kentucky accent and bravura. He's also the comic focal point of the movie, something that Pitt showed he was capable of in Burn After Reading. The best comic moment comes as Raine and two of his men have to pose as Italians when they know maybe five phrases between them and none of them can do the accent. It's okay though as it turns out that Germans can't tell the difference between a Roman and someone speaking cod-Italian in a thick Kentuckian accent.

The thing is that those positives also act as problems. While the dialogue is great much of the time Inglourious Basterds suffers from too much of it. Huge swathes of the middle chapters feel like they should have been cut. As tense as the opening chapter is the trick isn't quite repeated later in two separate segments set in a restaurant and a bar respectively. Both chapters contain much to like but they feel overlong. It's as if Tarantino has fallen in love with the sound of his own voice when spoken by one of his characters. It was a major problem in his last film Death Proof, too much chatter, not enough stunt woman hanging off a car bonnet. Things are thankfully not as drastic here. Another problem is the humour. It is used sparingly and well, until the finale that is. It's an audacious, visually stunning scene, but there's also a sudden lurch into slapstick. One character even trips and falls whilst making his way past fellow cinema patrons. Upon reflection there is some advance warning during one of those overly talky scenes. When Nazi Fredrick Zoller attempts to woo Shosanna Dreyfus he goes on about French silent comedy and how it compares to Chaplin. Here was me thinking it was just ol' Quentin showing off his knowledge of early European cinema, kind of like that Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich stuff in Death Proof. We get it, you like cool music. Turns out it was actually very clever foreshadowing for the mass outbreak of stupidity at the end. Maybe.

This inconsistency is something that plagues the entire film. For everything that works in it there's something that doesn't. As great as the characters of Landa, Raine and Shosanna are pretty much all the rest are either one-note or have nothing to do. B.J. Novak's Utivich doesn't even speak until about fifteen minutes from the end. And as great as some of the casting is Mike Myers feels a little too in-jokey, Michael Fassbender isn't in it enough and there's Eli Roth. Roth is perhaps the luckiest man in Hollywood. If you though he was a disaster as a director wait until you see him act. Being chums with a hugely successful director clearly has its rewards though as here he plays a pivotal role, while infinitely more talented actors shuffle about in the background doing the square root of hee-haw. It's a woeful misjudgment by Tarantino.

It's these misjudgments that ultimately stop Basterds from being the rip-roaring killfest it should be. The pacing is all over the place separating the fun action stuff with long, dull scenes. Stylistically there are many nice little touches, look out for the subtitles and how they work in relation to which characters are on screen and how much they understand. Sadly Tarantino can't help doing, well, "Tarntino-y" stuff. Doodling things on screen, breaking a scene to give a character an introduction that looks like a screen from the Street Fighter character select, it's all a bit trying too hard really. The most alarming aspect of his last couple of films though comes in the shape of narrative. Death Proof didn't have one. Basterds attempts to readdress that by returning to the complex multi-narrative structures of his earlier films but he just doesn't pull it off. The strands fail to come together in a satisfying way, instead they simply collide thanks to setting of the finale. After the carefully intertwining plots of Pulp Fiction it feels somewhat slapdash.

Inglourious Basterds could have been something special. As it stands there's a great film in there, sadly to see it you need to also watch a boring, self indulgent, Eli Roth starring one. there's enough here to say it's worth seeing but how much you love it will likely depend on your pre-existing opinion of its director. All in all Inglourious Basterds is a bit of an inglorious mess.

Jewish Critic's Take On Inglourious Basterds

Ahead of Splice's review of Tarantino's latest I felt I had to provide a link to this post on the IMDB about what Jewish critics thought about it. I do so purely because the phrase "Jewish revenge porn" is simply brilliant and thought credit where credit's due.

So well done to the critic at the Jewish Daily Forward that. Consider it hereby nicked by Splice. Let us herald a new genre of film, the Jewish Revenge Porn. Work will now start on a script that can do the genre name justice. Something about a horny plumber seeking revenge for his lack of a foreskin maybe.

Brace yourself for a bidding war major Hollywood studios!

Friday 21 August 2009

Avatar Footage

Well the build up to the "biggest most revolutionary thing since someone took a knife to bread/most overhyped pile of poo from an over-the-hill formally great director with too much money to burn" has hit overdrive with the screenings of some footage from it. Being a pleb I haven't seen that but the trailer's cutting about now too.



I think I'm most alarmed about the fact that it looks like a 2009 update of one of those early 90's animated shitfests:



Avatar: The Last Rainforest is out in December in spangly faddish 3D. It might look better then.

Tuesday 18 August 2009

Moon



Moon's one of those story based films that's a bit difficult to review. How do you go about it without ruining the story for those who haven't seen it? Even a wee tidbit could set someone's mind in a certain direction before viewing and end up somehow ruining it for them. As such if you haven't seen it it's probably best not to read a full review but rather go and see it first. That's right I'm encouraging you not to read on. What I will say is that Moon's a pretty darn good little film, one that manages to overcome its small budget thanks to creativity and a fantastic performance from Sam Rockwell, who is on screen himself for pretty much the entirety of its running time.

If you don't know anything about it then it's best to stop reading now.

FULL REVIEW

Modern science fiction films tend to be huge, crash, bang wallop affairs. You know the kind of thing, directed by Roland Emmrich, White House being destroyed in an effects scene so convincing you're sure that the scene greeting you on leaving the cinema will be of utter devastation. It's the cinema of the spectacle, all eye-candy and no brains. 2001's unbelievable visually, but thankfully it also looks to explore complex issues about humanity and stuff. Sadly it looks like that's not the type of thing that's going to get the audiences in, it seems they'd rather have a robot's ballsack swung in their collective face. As such the low key delights of Moon will more than likely pass the masses by.

Director Duncan Jones is clearly a fan of those intelligent sci-fi films and as such has performed a small miracle in presenting his own entry to the list. I say a small miracle because he has managed to overcome a minuscule budget of $5 million, which, to put it into perspective, is the same budget of the latest "Worst Film Ever" The Room, to produce a brilliant looking little movie.

Jones has created an aesthetic that echoes those 70's films in the sense that everything in Moon looks like a future as designed by someone forty years ago. It also appears that everything was built that long ago thanks to a general sense of decay in the setting. Even the futuristic technology somehow feels dated. The masterstroke is the use of models for the exterior scenes. If done well, such as in 2001 and the Lord Of The Rings films, models can look great, and that's the case with Moon. One of the biggest problem with CGI is that it can feel somewhat light or airless, something that good models don't suffer from thanks to there being an actual physical object in front of the camera. They fit Moon's retro-future look perfectly and like much of the film act as a refreshing alternative to pretty much everything being released right now.

The spirit of films like Silent Running is not only evident in the design but also in the plot. Sometime in the future we've started mining the moon after burning all of our fossil fuels, something to do with the sun's energy being trapped in them. The mining operation is overseen by one man, Sam, whose only company in the moonbase is GERTY, a computer in the grandest HAL tradition. Sam's mission is almost at a close when he finds himself suffering from hallucinations. After one causes an accident Sam comes face to face with his doppelganger. What follows is an exploration on what it means to be human, particularly the idea of memories and what they are and mean.

The central performance of Sam Rockwell, and by central I basically mean only given the amount of time he is acting on screen himself, is simply brilliant. Rockwell's always been one of those quirky, underrated actors. He's a big star who most people probably can't picture in their mind. Not to matter as he does projects such as this and his performance really is a treat. For most of the film all he has to act against are video transmissions from his wife, his shady corporate bosses, the GERTY puppet, voiced perfectly by Kevin Spacey or the special effect version of himself. A bigger star may have given Moon a greater public profile, but it's doubtful the results would be quite as good.

Moon is by no means an original film, rather it's a very well done mix 'n' match of many other great sci-fi films cobbled together to make a very good little picture. Sam Rockwell truly is fantastic and the brilliant visual design and tight direction set Duncan Jones out as a talent to watch. In a summer of confusion inducing CGI and plotless destruction Moon shows the way forward, funnily enough by looking back.

Thursday 6 August 2009

RIP John Hughes

Sad news and quite a shock, mainly because his name suddenly returning to the limelight is because of this. It's also quite a stunning fact that his last movie as director was eighteen years ago. A bit of a shame, especially as it means his last movie is Curly Sue.

Well as the man who gave us Ferris Bueller he'll always be considered a legend 'round Splice way. For years I thought it was a documentary on what cutting school's like so imagine my disappointment that there was never a major parade cutting through the middle of Paisley, and doubly, if there was they'd never let me hijack it:



You don't even want to know what happened when I saw Home Alone, but needless to say my uncle still won't talk about the "stapler mishap".

Rest ye well sir.

Monday 3 August 2009

Spielberg Does Harvey

It's being reported that Dream Weaver (or whatever other wanky term for director you want to insert) Steven Spielberg (heard of him?) plans to remake the 1950 classic Harvey which starred Jimmy Stewart and a giant invisible rabbit:



Speculation is rife as to what shape this will take. Personally I hope he makes the character of Harvey like that other great invisible Spielberg character Truck Driver Bloke (check the credits, that's really his name, I think):



Personally I'm now really exited about this. Seeing Shia LaBeouf in the Jimmy Stewart/Dennis Weaver role (for it will be he if LaBeef isn't too busy off wanking into his Xbox 360) do battle with a six foot invisible rabbit who drives a big truck and has murderous tendancies could be the best film of 2010.

Make it so Dream Weaver!

Saturday 1 August 2009

Futurama: Crisis Averted

Good news everyone! Billy West will be delivering those words in the new Futurama episodes!

The news is out that the entire voice cast of Futurama have been re-signed meaning that we now don't need to boycott the new episodes! Looks like the reports of them being replaced was a Fox scare tactic.

Don't know exactly what changed the Fox executives minds but this may have been the bargaining chip used by those representing the actors:

Normal levels of excitement about the twenty six new episodes can resume.