"I think this might be my masterpiece"

possible spoilers

These are the last words in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, and they're so gloriously cocky spilling from the lips of Brad Pitt as Tarantino's doppelganger, Lt. Aldo Raine: brash, foul-mouthed, scarred and uglied up and from an unsexy part of the USA and constantly smirking, unruffled by anything that happens to or around him, that I think he might be right. Tarantino, that is, speaking through Aldo Raine.

Despite the early trailers that made much of cartoonish violence and Pitt's cartoonish accent, it's certainly Tarantino's most mature movie--despite those easy gags, it's a mile away from the diatribes that revelled in tossing around taboos and dropping n-bombs in his earlier movies.

Pitt, though he gets the last word, isn't even the star of the movie--that would be Melanie Laurent as Shoshana, a Jewish cinema owner who saw her family killed at the orders of Oscar-nominated Christoph Waltz's Col. Hans Landa, after betrayal by the man who hid them. The garish revenge of Raine and the Basterds is nothing compared to her steely resolve, and she gives the movie emotional heft that sneaks up on you and only hits you when you realize how far she's willing to go.

Really at its heart this isn't a movie about revenge--Tarantino already did that, glorifying and personifying revenge in The Bride in Kill Bill--but about movies, about the power and the joy of movies, but mostly the power. The way cinema can destroy, can inspire, can write and rewrite history. It's not enough to kill Nazis--Shoshana must make a movie and splice it into one of Goebbels' propaganda pieces, asserting her self, her freedom through cinema.

Tarantino's greatest strength as a filmmaker has always been that he's a film junkie: he can reference layer upon layer of high and low art. But the strongest references here are to his own movies--a closeup on Shoshana's lips nearly identical to one from Pulp Fiction but with stakes much higher, and a drop-in grindhouse title on top of a German Basterd (who despite his cartoonish intro also lends weight--Til Schweiger is dangerously, broodingly dominant onscreen, emanating as palpable hatred as Shoshana's every time he's onscreen with the Nazis).

Even the Basterds, who start off as Jewish revenge porn (a crew of Jewish soldiers from the USA dropped in behind enemy lines to destroy as many Nazis as possible?), remind you where the film is really going. Eli Roth, nicknamed "The Bear Jew" and lovingly shot (never thought I'd find the man responsible for Hostel sexy) evokes a remark from Raine that watching him beat Nazis to death "is the closest we get to going to the movies."

They strike back through spectacle, if not explicitly through cinema. They don't just kill Nazis; they scalp them (how American-cinematic!) and leave mutilated bodies to be found, and carve swastikas onto the foreheads of those they let live--in a way, a nod toward what he owes to real victims of the Holocaust--a reminder that all this happened and no one should forget, and a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words gesture both of mercy (and the word "merci" is never translated in the subtitles, a move that I can't help but think was intentional, particularly in the intro scene between Landa and LaPadite) and of continuing revenge. The story of the Basterds is their real strength, making them outsize cinema-villains. Storytelling is power.

The film cartoonizes Hitler, defanging him not just through violence but by making you laugh at him. It humanizes other Nazis, though, while not forgiving them--Daniel Bruhl as the young soldier who crosses over into cinema and stars in his own life story is almost likable in his flirtation with Shoshana and his need to flee the larger-than-life sight of himself on the movie screen, the dramatized version of his real-life exploits.

Bruhl's character isn't the only one that crosses the borders there--Diane Kruger also does as an actress turned double agent: film into politics into film again. The lines of reality and cinema, for Tarantino, are suddenly more porous, while the rest of his work has always been hyperconscious that it is film. Basterds rockets from the improbable--Mike Myers in heavy makeup recruiting a plummy-accented film critic to go behind enemy lines to meet the Basterds--to the poignantly real, but here it's not just celebrating the fun that movies are, it's making a stronger point about them.

Tarantino's political statement here is that cinema is political. Indeed, the movie wouldn't have to be about Nazis at all but for the fact that no other regime in history so successfully embraced and used film to create and tell its own story.

I had sworn off Nazi movies before this one hit, but I am also a sworn Tarantino fan. So I may say instead that I hope this is the Nazi movie to end all Nazi movies. After all, it's so conclusively rewritten history--something perhaps only safe to do with history both as well-known and as disputed as that of Hitler's Germany. Just the fact that he can make this movie leaves you wondering what kind of movies we'd have had the Nazis won. You get the feeling that for Tarantino, one of the most poignant scenes in the film is Shoshana's statement that she has no choice but to play German films.

There are a million tiny perfect moments here--a montage set to David Bowie's "Cat People/Putting Out Fire" with Shoshana putting on her makeup-as-war-paint, a cigarette flying in slow motion through the air to set a pile of film on fire, a request by Landa for a house on Nantucket that I can't help but interpret as a dig at the Bush family's own connections to the Reich, Roth's exuberant outburst after bashing in a Nazi skull complete with Ted Williams references.

I did long for a comeback moment, a la Kill Bill or True Romance, a gesture of personal physical violence from one of the film's female characters. But perhaps the lack of it is an odd gesture for some sort of peace, at least for Shoshana.

Peace. It's not really a theme here, but neither is war. Violence certainly is, but for all the vicarious thrills (and heck, I'm Jewish, I enjoy them as much as anyone) the feeling given is less that violence is good and more that those thrills SHOULD be vicarious. Bashing people's heads in with a baseball bat isn't actually a solution to a problem, and if you want to burn down the theater to take your enemies out, you may well go out with it.

Still, I haven't left a movie theater with a wicked grin like I did tonight in a while, and that's the pleasure Tarantino has always given--lines to quote, laughs to remember later, visuals that stick with you, and stories, always stories.

It's just that here, his story actually says something.

There Is No "Golden Age" of Film (Or, "Why Movies Now Are As Good As They Ever Were")

Last week, Erik and I were discussing a set of posts we're planning for the end of the year that offer our top albums, movies, and other "bests" of the decade. As should always be the case with pointless list-making, I have given it way more thought than the subject should ever have merited, and, looking back at the last 10 years, there have been some remarkably great movies (but I'm not going to say which ones - that's what the year-end list will be for, so you'll just have to wait). And I was thinking, "you know, for all the proclamations of great film-making in other decades, this decade arguably has been as good as any previous decade."

Apparently, I'm not alone in thinking this. While I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call the 2000s a "golden age" of cinema, it's not because I think other decades have been "better," but rather because any notion of a "golden age," contemporarily or in the past, just reinforces false nostalgia that tends to lead to people overlooking what's great presently. And I certainly wouldn't call Joel Schumacher a "popmeister" - "shitmeister" seems far more appropriate for his dreck. Movies can be silly and fun and popular and Hollywood driven, but still be excellent - just ask Sam Raimi or Judd Apatow.

All that notwithstanding, though, this decade has just reminded me why I hate when people look back to the 60s or 70s (or 40s) as when cinema was "really good." The only reason we've forgotten the "Transformers 2" of those eras was because, like any lowest-common-denominator crap, it has been flushed away over time. And when people harken to movies by Scorcese, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, etc., fine - yes, they directed amazing, artistic, all-time great movies. But look at the last 10 years - Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Fernando Meirelles, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, Wes Anderson, Ang Lee, P.T. Anderson, Charlie Kaufman......and I'm undoubtedly forgetting many others, or haven't yet seen some movies that are almost certainly artistic masterpieces ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" springs immediately to mind).

All of this is to basically say, I wish people would acknowledge how great current cinema not only can be, but is. Among the many minor aggravations in life, the canonization of previous decades or eras at the expense of current artistic production, be it musical, film, photographic, literary, etc., is garbage. Thinking about how many all-time great films have come out of the last 10 years only reinforces that.

Greatest Living Actor? Actress?

While trying to pass time at work yesterday, I came across a blog that said Robert DeNiro is the greatest living actor. (I unfortunately don't remember where I saw it - some down-home blog like this one. Nonetheless, here's a poll from 2004 that also said it was DeNiro, followed by Pacino). I didn't think much about it at the time, but it's an interesting question.

Is DeNiro really the best living actor? Certainly, his work at its peak (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Heat) is among the greatest ever, and he salvaged a lot of movies that had no business being anywhere near as decent as they were (Awakenings). But he's done a lot of crap, especially in the last 10 years (Righteous Kill, Godsend, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle). I realize some of this is terrible script-writing and/or directing, but it's also terrible choices on his part and not exactly amazing acting. Ditto Pacino. Does that recent history take away from his status? Are there others out there who perhaps have a relatively smaller body of work, but of a higher overall quality, like Daniel Day Lewis or Philip Seymour Hoffman?

So - who is the greatest living actor?

And is Meryl Streep the greatest living actress? (I have a harder time coming up with a good alternative here, though I could just be tired).

Slumdog Millionaire

(I've tried to keep this as spoiler-free as possible. See the damn movie, will ya?)

If this movie was any indication, it's going to be a good movie season.

I haven't seen a movie in a while that sent me this deep into film-geek heaven. The last one might even have been Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. From the opening scenes, with cameras behind the rotating cameras of India's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and Dev Patel sweating under the lights, I was sucked into a world that Danny Boyle has no right to have created so perfectly.

Boyle might not have grown up in the slums of India, but he understands the streets and feels for the kids and knows how to make you feel for them too. At heart, Danny Boyle is a romantic, which might sound funny for me to say of a man best known for Trainspotting and 28 Days Later. But it's true.

All the gritty realism of those films, the swirling action and heady plunge into an alien world, is here, plus a deeper love of humanity that showed up better in A Life Less Ordinary (and possibly Millions, which I haven't seen but which also revolves around a child). Slumdog Millionaire pulls together all the threads of Boyle's career into a movie that easily tops them all.

So many horrible things happen to Jamal (Patel) but he still manages to hope and love, and that's the deepest message of this film and the one that resonated and left me grinning like an idiot as I walked out of the theater. But it's also a movie about class and capitalism, not so much about the clash of East and West as it is the clash of money with humanity.

Jamal wins 10 million rupees on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," but since he's a poor kid from the slums, he's arrested for cheating. The movie flashes back through his life, explaining how he knew the answer to each question, and showing a life that would've turned a lesser kid hard and mean. That did turn his brother Salim hard and mean.

Salim as an adult is lanky-sexy and hard as nails, and we see in him all that Jamal could've become. But Jamal had Salim as a barrier against the world, and had Latika to love. So he remains wide-eyed and trusting and awkwardly charming, and with each bit of pain he endures we pull for him a bit more, like the Indian audience that tunes in to cheer for him on "Millionaire." He is, after all, a piece of all of them.

I could talk at length about gorgeous overhead shots--a market, a train, the Taj Mahal--or a scene in which the boys' clambering up a set of bleachers to steal purses is ten times more beautiful than the opera the rich folks are watching. I could talk about the kids from actual slums in India, who do an amazing job carrying much of the movie. There's just so much here that begs to be seen again, and again.

The movie takes on lots of weighty subjects and themes through the lives of the boys. Their mother dies in anti-Muslim violence, they have to learn to fend for themselves, and fight off a gangster who is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to turn kids into better beggars (in one of the movie's most horrific scenes).

And the boys learn to make money. One of the questions that Jamal answers correctly is which U.S. statesman is on the hundred-dollar bill, and Salim crawls into a bathtub filled with money at the film's end. Money is always there, but ultimately it's not what Jamal wants. He wants the girl, and when it comes down to the ending we're all reminded that the money more often than not is what hurt the boys the most (though plenty of other things do as well).

The coolness with which the police officers torture Jamal and then are captivated by his story and become the good guys is chilling, and a commentary on the willingness of good people to do bad things that sets up later events perfectly.

Of course, the obvious theme is that what Jamal learns on the streets sets him up for success more than anything he could've learned in school. That knowledge and wisdom are not things that can be bought and sold with a degree or a fancy house or any other trinket of privilege. What it says that his final question on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" is one about a classic of Western literature is something I'll have to think more about, and I wonder if it was the same in the novel the story came from. But the question also relates to Jamal's life, his bonds with his brother and the girl he loves, and these are the true meaning of the film.

Because Jamal is willing to throw away the money he's won at every turn, just to stay on TV a bit longer, just in case the girl he loves is watching.

(Cross-posted)

"...Only I didn't say 'Fudge'"....

He may not have been Orson Welles, but the loss of the director of A Christmas Story is still a terrible thing. Thanks, Mr. Clark.