On the Big Screen: ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)

The ninth film by Quentin Tarantino has become slightly controversial for a bit of historic revisionism. It appears to assert that Bruce Lee was not the greatest fighting machine ever to live, but rather more of a pretentious braggart than most who knew him recall him being. In the film, stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) fights Lee (Mike Moh) to at least a standstill after throwing the martial-arts master into the side of a car, having caught him in mid-flying kick. This brawl, provoked by Lee claiming that he could beat "Cassius Clay" in a fight, gets Booth blacklisted as a stuntman, forcing him to work full-time as a chauffeur, handyman and overall stooge for Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the actor for whom Cliff doubled on the western series Bounty Law. But before we get too deep into the main story of the picture, let's linger on the Bruce Lee scene. It's interesting that, while Booth is a co-protagonist of the movie, Tarantino doesn't make him the obvious good guy of the scene by having him, unlike Lee, call Muhammad Ali by what was then his proper name. The writer-director shows impressive discipline here, since by showing Hollywood 1969 from the point of view of two white male has-beens, he adopts a reactionary perspective that's not necessarily his own. There's no objective corrective to Booth's implicit disdain for Lee's kung fu prowess, for instance, nor for Dalton's disdain for spaghetti westerns or both character's contempt for hippies. Tellingly, Hollywood is the first Tarantino film in almost forever with no participation whatsoever by Samuel L. Jackson, whose footnote-narrator function in Inglourious Basterds is taken over by Kurt Russell, who also has an onscreen role as the stunt coordinator who blacklists Booth. It actually surprises me that people don't think of Hollywood as a Trumpian film, though I have no idea whether Tarantino sympathizes to any extent for the current President or his agenda. This is a film which, like Basterds, rewrites history on the assumption that history is already changed by the existence of the auteur's creations, though the extent to which history is rewritten is left unclear at the end.

Why Tarantino stops where and when he does no doubt means something, but let's stick with Bruce Lee a bit more. In his pretentious speech to the Green Hornet stuntmen, Lee complains that martial-arts exhibitions are mere stylized fakery compared to the genuine mortal combat in the boxing ring. While Tarantino's Lee is wrong to say that boxers like Ali and Sonny Liston literally are trying to kill each other, his distinction between fakery and reality sounds like a thematic statement for the film as a whole. This seems most apparent in the central section of the film, which intercuts between Dalton's struggles on the set of the Lancer show, where he plays a villain, and Booth's visit to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where old-timer George Spahn (Bruce Dern) is held a virtual prisoner by the Manson Family. A hungover Dalton suffers some existential lunchtime agony after blowing his lines a couple of times, but nails his last scene of the day. Oddly, while Tarantino has shown us clips of Bounty Law and other Dalton TV appearances in a realistic pastiche of Sixties techniques, he films the Lancer shoot with no regard for realism, framing the action to fill the widescreen and magnify the moment to suit its presumed significance for Dalton's career. Meanwhile, Booth rides into a scene of real menace, a lone hero against a potential mob (albeit without its leader; Manson himself only appears once in the picture). The sense of danger is real and strong, and yet it's fair to say that this scene above all establishes Hollywood as Tarantino's third consecutive western, even if it also serves as a bookend companion to Basterds bracketing the two more obvious westerns, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. In any event, Booth seems to embody a reality principle -- he's a real-life killer as both a war hero and the reputed murderer of his wife -- while Dalton represents a fantasy TV world. By establishing Dalton as the next-door neighbor of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Tarantino seems to be setting up the ultimate intrusion of lethal reality into the TV star's fantasy world by giving Dalton a front-row seat to Tate's murder. It should be clear by now, however, that Tarantino plays by his own rules, but we still need to find the point of his doing so this time.

So, to spoil the ending a month after the film's release, Dalton's mere existence as a drunken TV cowboy diverts the Manson killers from their original mission. After he berates them for stalling their noisy car outside his house, the Mansonites decide that Dalton is a more fitting target since he and his generation of TV stars taught the hippie generation to kill. Their attack on chez Dalton ends in happy disaster thanks to the presence of an acid-addled Booth and his pitbull buddy, though Dalton himself gets to carry out the coup de grace with a flamethrower left over from one of his movie projects. His reward is to be admitted into the presence of Sharon Tate and her un-doomed friends, while the wounded Booth is taken to a hospital. During the first half of the film, Tate has been a rising star while Dalton has struggled to arrest his decline. While they are next-door neighbors, Dalton actually sees Tate and Roman Polanski for the first time on the February 1969 day that takes up the film's first act. It's like having a version of A Star is Born where the falling and rising stars actually don't know each other. Unlike the hippies who so bother Dalton and Booth, Tate is a benign embodiment of the youth movement that's driving the likes of Dalton out of the spotlight. Tarantino finally finds an artistic use for his foot fetish by having Tate kick off her shoes while watching her performance in The Wrecking Crew on the big screen, linking her with the barefoot girls who both tempt and repel the middle-aged protagonists. I'm not much younger than Tarantino so I can testify to the scandalous symbolic power of bare feet in this period, even if it isn't something the protagonists themselves comment on. In her idealized form here, Tate represents a reconciliation of youth with old Hollywood. By changing history to rescue Tate, Dalton reconciles old Hollywood with now-grateful youth on a fantasy level, after gratifying a darker fantasy by helping exterminate less-grateful youth. Tarantino presumably depends on us knowing that all of this was not to be, and assumes that he can indulge in this fakery precisely because it's only a movie. It's the sort of fantasy men like Dalton and Booth might have more than it is Quentin Tarantino's own fantasy, and while Kurt Russell occasionally speaks up to correct Dalton's misstatements, this final fantasy is allowed to stand, presumably out of sympathy for the Daltons of real life who continued to decline -- unless they lived long enough to be embraced by Tarantino himself. The director has given us not an unreliable narrator but an unreliable narrative or an unreliable experience of how things might have been had some people had their way, or if the world worked the way they presumed it would.

Whether the exercise was worth the effort, posterity will judge. That being said, Hollywood boasts what may be Leonardo DiCaprio's greatest performance to date, a total immersion into a character to a point, once Dalton adopts a new hairstyle, where the star almost ceases to be recognizable. Playing a more conventional hero type, Pitt isn't as impressive but is still convincing as a man's man of the time. Overall, the film's a dense audio-visual collage combining a wide range of soundbites with detailed recreations of the 1969 cityscape with inevitable echoes of Zabriskie Point, while the violent climax owes something, at least, to the conclusion of Last House on the Left, another attempted exorcism of violent youth. While it's a long film, in some ways it feels less Tarantinian than previous films, with fewer digressive conversations, though Rick Dalton's attempt to describe the novel Ride a Wild Bronco (is it real???) to a precocious child actor is a poignant moment. A day after watching it, I'm not sure how I'd rank Hollywood in the Tarantino canon, or among films in general. Whether it's a point in its favor or not, this one, more than the others, feels like one that needs to be seen more than once to be fully understood or appreciated -- yet I could understand people not wanting to give it that extra time. It's definitely a more ambiguous film than its apparent popularity indicates, and I expect that discussions of it will get more interesting as the momentary controversies subside.

On the Big Screen: THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015)

Unlike Quentin Tarantino I won't keep you waiting. The Hateful Eight is a considerable improvement over Django Unchained and if still not on the level of his best work it's reassuring proof that Tarantino hasn't lost his skills. While the film boasts of its epic cinematic trappings, down to the overture and intermission music in select theaters, it's also the writer-director's most theatrical film in many obvious respects. More significantly, it indicates that Tarantino may be moving tentatively away from his obsession with revenge stories. If anything, and as a pleasant surprise, it's ultimately a tale of reconciliation, albeit arguably the sort of reconciliation that can come only at the point of death. While Samuel L. Jackson sports a costume reminiscent of Sartana, the new Tarantino film finally feels less like a spaghetti western and just a little more like a Sam Peckinpah picture, its shiny new (or almost new, according to some reports) Ennio Morricone score notwithstanding.

This is another Tarantinian experiment in suspense, trapping its cast of suspicious characters in a "haberdashery" while a blizzard rages outside for most of the film's expansive length. The one fact we can trust is that bounty hunter John "the Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) -- so named because he always takes his men alive, so they can hang -- is trying to bring his woman, Daisy Domergue (pronounced "Dahmer-goo" and played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the nearby town of Red Rock, where he'll collect a $10,000 bounty. As the blizzard bears down, he reluctantly takes on extra passengers before reaching the haberdashery. Major Marquis Warren (Jackson) -- named after midcentury writer-director and authentic pulp fiction author Charles Marquis Warren -- is a fellow bounty hunter with victims of his own, dead, to collect on. Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) is the son of a Quantrell-like Civil War guerrilla commander, improbably appointed the new sheriff of Red Rock. Of the three, Warren is the most familiar with the haberdashery and the first to find it strange that the proprietors have left the place in charge of a stranger to him, Senior Bob (Demian Bichir). Hunkering down with him are Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), who conveniently introduces himself as Red Rock's new hangman, Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), who announces that he's writing his life story, and an elderly ex-general of the regular Confederate army (Bruce Dern). Ruth is disinclined to trust any of them, and Domergue encourages his suspicions just to annoy him. The two bounty hunters join forces to protect their bounties against all comers, but fall out when Warren's honesty -- he claims to own a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln -- is thrown into question. To go further into the story, however, would be to spoil things.

Oddly absent here are the really long Tarantinian conversations, inspired by George V. Higgins, Elmore Leonard and Sergio Leone, that expand the space of suspense in most of his films. While I was relieved to find that the dialogue was not as banal as trailers and commercials suggested, it still isn't quite up to Tarantino's standards. Interestingly, though, he uses action -- or, to be more accurate, activity -- to expand that space. He and cinematographer Robert Richardson do a great job of establishing the atmosphere outside in the opening chapters -- yes, he still has that chaptering tic -- but Tarantino reinforces that atmosphere by emphasizing the labor characters have to perform in the thick of the storm, from tending to their horses in the barn to repeatedly hammering shut a front door with a broken latch. He calls our attention to the arduous process of establishing a walkway from the haberdashery to the outhouse, giving his setting a feel of authenticity more likely to be appreciated by fans of American westerns than fans of spaghettis. The activity is interesting enough, or filmed in interesting enough ways, and the character interplay is intriguing enough that Hateful Eight never seemed to me as slow or boring as some critics have charged.

Another crucial element in establishing suspense is Daisy Domergue, whose rough treatment by the bounty hunters may be the film's most controversial element. Handcuffed to Ruth most of the time, Domergue is repeatedly subject to physical abuse: punches in the face, elbows to the nose, etc. Worse will come as the film lurches inevitably into Grand Guignol territory. Initially, Ruth's violence raises questions Tarantino clearly wants us to ask. What has Domergue actually done, both to have such a bounty and to make Ruth treat her that way? How dangerous is she, really? Leigh plays the character with deceptive superficiality as Domergue often plays the clown through a mask of blood. But in the film's disappointment, Domergue never develops into much more than a cipher, if not a Macguffin. If Tarantino seemed to have begged a question of what specific evil Domergue had perpetrated, he never bothers answering it. To spoil things just slightly, we learn that she is the sister and partner-in-crime of an outlaw gang leader, but we never learn whether she's done anything in particular apart from be in the gang and the family to justify the price on her head. You spend time wondering where Tarantino is going to go with the character -- whether he wants to build sympathy for her under Ruth's misogynist assault, only to reveal her as a legitimate monster, for instance. While she is the villain of the piece by default, she never quite develops into the epic villain she might have been, and that failure raises the question of whether Tarantino put Leigh through the mill just as a provocation, to dare the audience to call him a misogynist on top of all his other sins.

Marquis Warren's character arc is hard to figure out, too. Being Samuel L. Jackson, and Jackson being top-billed, he's presumably our point-of-view character, but being one of the Hateful Eight as well, Warren does things to alienate the audience and the other characters, most of whom already look at him slightly askance due to his race. Under pressure from the skeptical Mannix, Warren admits that his Lincoln letter is a forgery that he justifies by claiming that it serves as a sort of safe-conduct pass for a black man. He admits to carrying out an atrocity during the war, having burned down a prison to escape from it and killing fellow Union soldiers as well as his Rebel captors. Suddenly on the outs with most of the others, he takes his frustrations out on the old general, provoking him with a vicious account of killing the general's son after stripping the young man naked and forcing a blowjob from him. Given what we've just learned, we may wonder whether Warren is lying again in order to goad the most obvious racist in the room, even though Tarantino flashes back to the event in almost-unflinching detail. This episode nearly took me out to the picture, mainly because I still can't quite believe that even the most hateful 19th century people would brag of such loathsome antics in the slangy terms Warren uses. It came off as if Tarantino were subjecting the entire western genre to Norman Mailer's turd test, especially since it was unclear whether he wanted us to see the story -- either the incident itself or the telling of it to the old man -- as a despicable act or whether he was still in Django mode, in which racists are fair game for any reprisal blacks may have in mind. On the other hand, it may simply have been Warren's ploy to see whether the general was part of any conspiracy with Domergue, the idea being that, were that the case, he would not raise to the bait Warren flaunted at him. I suppose it's a virtue of the film that you can speculate that way about it after the fact.

But if Warren's encounter with the general reopens wounds of war and slavery, his evolving relationship with Mannix points toward an alternative outcome. As the guerrilla leader's son and an unapologetic apologist for The Cause, Mannix should be as irreconcilable an enemy to Warren as the general is. Yet when circumstances force him to choose sides, he sides with Warren. You get the feeling that his ability to see through Warren's occasional bullshit makes it easier for them to get along, or at least work together. They're both still haters -- Warren often dismissively refers to Mannix as "white man" -- but there's also a degree of respect on a no-bullshit level that warriors presumably share. At a crucial moment, Mannix rejects a moral equation of his father's guerrilla army with Domergue's gang. Mannix's Marauders, or whatever they were called, were probably worse than any outlaw gang by modern standards, but by the standards of the story, or Mannix's own standards, the guerrillas fought beyond any hope of victory in order to claim an honorable defeat, while all notions of honor are presumably alien to Domergue and her cohorts. At the end, Mannix can see through Domergue's lies while gaining some appreciation of Warren's need to lie, and Mannix and Warren can agree with Ruth that people like Domergue deserve to hang because shooting -- the mark of war -- is too good for them. Many westerns from classic Hollywood stage some sort of too-good-to-be-true North-South reconciliation through combat with outlaws, Indians, Mexicans, etc. The Hateful Eight takes that trope to another level by pitting a black man and a virtually unreconstructed Reb against the outlaw nihilism represented by Domergue. Neither man really changes, much less improves, but in any setting like this one somebody has to be the least hateful, and in Tarantino's hard world those are our heroes. Or at least they're heroes the way the old lady is a good person in the Flannery O'Connor story, as long as someone has a gun to her head. And for all the expected gore (much less than in Django) and toilet talk there's an appreciation of mortality, if not morality, that may signal a belated maturation in the veteran enfant terrible of Hollywood.

On the Big Screen: DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

The new film by Quentin Tarantino is a poor excuse for a spaghetti western in many ways, whatever its other virtues may be. Consider: the great fan of the genre forgot to include a climactic mano-a-mano gunfight between the hero and a villain. Yes, not every spaghetti western has such a scene, but just about all of them have villains who are good with guns -- but Django Unchained does not. It actually has a couple of great villains in Leonardo DiCaprio's decadent plantation master and Samuel L. Jackson's loathsome sycophant of a major-domo, but neither of them shows any prowess with firearms. Tarantino saw no need to endow either character with gun prowess, nor any need to stage a classic showdown. As far as the big action scenes are concerned, Django often resembles Asian films in which the hero, whether armed with a sword or just with kung fu, slays multitudes. Even most of those films, however, have some sort of one-on-one showdown involving an evil master, a worthy antagonist who allows the hero to show off his ultimate skills. The absence of such a figure in Unchained is glaring. It's not as if Tarantino's hero Sergio Corbucci eschewed such showdowns; the face-off in his Il Mercenario between Jack Palance and Tony Musante is one of the best of the genre. Such scenes don't figure so much, however, in the revolutionary westerns, usually set in Mexico, which certainly influenced Tarantino.

In the teaming of Jamie Foxx's title character and Christoph Waltz's Germanic bounty hunter Django echoes the archetypal pairing of "primitive" bandit and foreign "expert" in films like Damiano Damiani's Bullet for the General and Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dynamite. Those movies usually involve some sort of consciousness raising, but that element is strangely abortive in Unchained. That's unfortunate given the potential for rich backstory for Dr. King Schultz, an immigrant who despises slavery and proves less capable than Django the ex-slave of restraining his disdain for the slavemasters. The bounty hunter may be German only because Waltz is playing him, but the casting raises the possibility that Schultz might have been a refugee from the suppressed 1848 revolutions in Germany and the rest of Europe and thus a liberal if not an outright leftist. Schultz's past goes unexplored, however, and in general Django has fewer of the digressions that define Tarantino's work. It's the most rhetorically subdued film the director has made to date. The only truly characteristic Tarantino moment comes with DiCaprio's impromptu lecture on the phrenological proofs of Negro inferiority, illustrated with his hacksaw dissection of a former servant's Yorick-like skull. Otherwise, Waltz's occasional grandiloquence hardly holds a candle to the arias Tony Kushner gave to some of Dr. Schultz's contemporaries in Spielberg's Lincoln.  As my original complaint might indicate, Django Unchained lacks much of Tarantino's usual genre magic. That may be because the spaghetti western as a genre is a form of pastiche, and one that embraces a certain superficiality -- or sacrifices depth to achieve other, often impressive effects -- so that a pastiche of spaghetti westerns starts at one further remove, at least, from any kind of spontaneity. Unchained is lovely to look at, but that's the least you could expect from a cinematographer like Robert Richardson on some epic locations. But there's less feeling of seeing something with new eyes here than you'll get from any other Tarantino film except for Death Proof. If anything, the new film feels redundant, its ultimate resort to slaughter differing little from Inglourious Basterds, as if that's how Tarantino movies are going to end from now on -- not with showdowns, not even with revolutions, but with executions. Even his sampler soundtrack -- including an original song contributed by Ennio Morricone -- sounds relatively uninspired. As a fan of Jacopetti & Prosperi's Goodbye Uncle Tom, I found the absence of cues from Riz Ortolani's tremendous score for that film conspicuous. Maybe the use of the theme song in Drive last year made it poison for him.

Worse, Tarantino may have joined the ranks of directors who've forgotten how to end movies. You'll think you're seeing the wrap-up of Django Unchained in one very violent sequence, but you'll see that the film has about a half-hour to go. Django is one of Tarantino's most linear movies -- it plays out in chronological order, apart from brief flashbacks, and there's only one of the director's compulsive chapter breaks -- and it may show why he prefers to go non-linear. At nearly three hours, it lacks pace along with much urgency in the first half. It picks up considerably once the heroes begin their journey to Candieland, DiCaprio's plantation where Django's beloved remains enslaved. Tarantino has suggested that Apocalypse Now is a structural model for his film and you do get a sense of descending into an abyss as DiCaprio and Jackson reveal their evil. But perhaps out of some misplaced sense of historical or social realism, Tarantino's villains aren't made for single combat, and beyond that he fails to make the most of their menace. As a case in point, I was expecting Jackson's Stephen, made up as Uncle Tom's evil twin, to be a sexual threat to Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), Django's wife, but that threat never materializes, and as an elderly, lame man Stephen is no one to get into physical fights with Django. He falls somewhere between Grima Wormtongue and Edward G. Robinson's Dathan from The Ten Commandments, with a volume of Tarantino-Jacksonisms thrown in. Jackson and DiCaprio give the film's best performances but the film still seems to underutilize them, while Tarantino may have plotted a climax and filmed it before realizing that, while he might do without a climactic gun duel, he couldn't dispense with another key spaghetti trope, the capture and torture of the hero. It couldn't come at a more awkward time. Overall, Django Unchained feels surprisingly haphazard, especially since we know that some scenes are pointless whimsies (the dreadful business of Don Johnson's proto-klansmen kvetching about their ill-made masks) while others (retained in the graphic-novel adaptation) were cut out or never filmed.

Tarantino may have been too full of a sense of historical mission. He's told Henry Louis Gates that Django Unchained is to some extent an exorcism of John Ford, a director he affects to despise for his alleged offense of wearing a Klan hood as an extra on Birth of a Nation and his supposedly-unreconstructed racism, as if Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn had never existed. He seems really to want to blow bloody holes in a cinematic heritage he deems tainted by bigotry. His intellectually-admirable anti-racist agenda is even more sweeping, if you think about his appropriation of the Siegfried-Brunhilde myth most often associated with the anti-Semite Richard Wagner. Django is as much a self-conscious countermyth as Oliver Stone's JFK, and as such it has already been criticized. Inevitably, he's drawn fire from Spike Lee and fired back, dismissing Lee's insulted sensibilities as ridiculous. The exchange is telling. Lee protested against the idea of addressing slavery in a spaghetti western context, while Tarantino assumed that Lee insisted on some politically correct standard of dignity in any cinematic portrayal of slaves. This point came up in a different way during the actual shoot, as Tarantino had to persuade Foxx that Django could not be a Jim Brown-like badass superhero from his first appearance. The director had to know he was playing with fire by emphasizing the abjection of slaves, since someone might take it as a reflection on the character of slaves' descendants. But it's one thing to accuse detractors of demanding a false ideal of dignified resistance and another to caricature slavery for sensationalism, and by stating bluntly that slavery was not a spaghetti western Lee (who has admitted not seeing or intending to see the film) was probably criticizing some inevitable caricature, not flinching from some uncomfortable truth. Tarantino's slavedom is a realm of extensive collaboration by the likes of Stephen or Candie's apparent concubine, an arena for "mandingo fighting" and a venue for depravity by masters and slaves alike. If "slavesploitation" as a genre, from the epochal Goodbye Uncle Tom to Hollywood's lurid fantasies like Mandingo, has a defining fault, it's the generic focus on depravity rather than drudgery. You hardly see slaves working in the fields in slave movies. They are seen to exist as objects of their masters' fantasies and whims and become fantasy objects for audiences as well -- so goes the general critique. That extends to films that envision slave insurrections or the more personal revenge played out in Django Unchained.  I can imagine Tarantino offering his film as an empowering myth, but I wonder what he thinks the moral is.

Despite all I've said, Jamie Foxx's Django makes an intriguing spaghetti hero. His consciousness-raising arc is the closest the film gives us to something new in the genre. It's not the usual arc taking a "primitive" hero from selfishness to revolutionary consciousness. Django seems mostly indifferent, or else sometimes contemptuous, towards other slaves -- more so, in either case, as he adopts the role Schultz assigns for him as a "black slaver," an appraiser of mandingo fighters. Schultz talks anachronistaclly like an acting coach encouraging his charge in Method technique, while Django threatens to prove too good a student, his assumed arrogance toward whites and blacks alike threatening Schultz's delicate scheme to secure Broomhilda's manumission from Candie. To spoil a few things, however, it's Schultz himself who sabotages the plan at the last moment. They've been found out and forced to pay a high price for Hildy, but it looks like Candie will let them have her as long as he's got the money. As a last condition, however, Candie insists that state law requires the deal to be finalized with a handshake, but Schultz can't bring himself to shake hands with the vile slaveowner and can't stop himself from precipitating a disaster. You can't help thinking that had it been up to Django alone, he'd have shaken Candie's hand and left with Hildy.Whatever his political heritage, Schultz succumbs to moral indignation while Django seems able to restrain his -- despite several shots of him reaching toward his holster when he sees evidence of Hildy's suffering. This is a significant distinction, though for all I know the full significance of it may be lost to Tarantino himself. In simplest terms, the distinction may be between an idealist and a pragmatist, but Schultz remains too vaguely defined for me to guess where his fault lies exactly. Suffice it to say that his acte gratuite is where the film goes off the rails, but there may still be a point to his impulse making the rest of the movie's violence necessary. More than the monotonous flow of blood in the last reels, this mystery keeps me from dismissing Django Unchained as a genre botch, but it remains a disappointment. Tarantino has talked about quitting while he's ahead, but despite many positive reviews for this one, it may already be too late.

Slavesploitation: the second wave?

One of the most anticipated films of 2012, promised for a Christmastime release, is Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, the writer-director's melding of the spaghetti western and "slavesploitation" genres starring Jamie Foxx. In a sign that Django might start a trend, the Saratogian newspaper reports on the plans by Brad Pitt's production company to make a true-life slavery movie. Plan B Entertainment is still in pre-production on Twelve Years a Slave, which would be the British Steve McQueen's directorial follow-up to his highly acclaimed features Hunger and Shame and will reportedly feature Michael Fassbender, the star of both films, along with Pitt in a role to be determined and  UK star Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, a man who lived through an African-American nightmare. Born free, Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery, which he endured for the title duration before managing to escape and publicize his ordeal. It seems such a naturally cinematic story that you wonder why Hollywood hasn't done it before.

So do two films make a genre? Hard to say; the pedigree behind Twelve Years doesn't imply an exploitation approach but the material is potentially so provocative that any treatment might qualify as an exploitation film. In cinema, slavesploitation denotes an allegedly insensitive emphasis on the degradation of slaves, particularly the violence inflicted on them and the sexual servitude to which they were reduced. Its roots are in literature, from William Styron's ambitious Confessions of Nat Turner to Kyle Onstott's Mandingo and its sequels, as well as global interest in the U.S. civil rights movement and race riots of the 1960s. Its magnum opus is Jacopetti & Prosperi's time-travel shockumentary Goodbye Uncle Tom but its best known product remains Richard Fleischer's 1974 film of Mandingo -- though some might include the Roots TV miniseries as part of the trend. The genre as a whole has a bad reputation because of the subject matter's provocative and potentially prurient nature, the horrors of slavery allegedly arousing some viewers while enraging others. I expect just such a response to the Tarantino film, as no doubt Tarantino himself does. Whether Twelve Years a Slave, or whatever it finally gets called, will position itself as the respectable, responsible slavery picture, or whether it will milk the outrage that any viewer should feel over Northup's story to controversial effect, is impossible to say right now -- it's still possible that the film will never get made. Still, it's an interesting coincidence to see two slavery films in the works all of a sudden, and I wonder what it says about 2012 compared to the combustible years when slavesploitation first cast its shadow across theater screens.  I look forward to finding out in either case.

Who Won the War?

(Spoiler Warning: plot details of the movie Inglourious Basterds and the history of World War II are mentioned in this article)

Who won World War II in Europe? That's easy: the Allies. But who really won the war? You know, who made the most important contribution? Who deserves the most credit? Who was the most valuable player? Bring the question to this level and the answer may differ depending on whom you ask. There are several answers to choose from.

1. The U.S. America's money, material and manpower overwhelmed Germany while the money, in particular, kept Britain and Russia in the game when Hitler may have otherwise overwhelmed them.

2. The U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the worst Nazi attacks, took more casualties, and killed more German soldiers. Their engagement of the largest part of the Wehrmacht made it easy for the Americans to invade late in the game and surge eastward, but if not for Russia the U.S. might never had made it into Europe.

3. The U.K. By holding out alone against Hitler for a crucial year Britain bought time for both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and their persistence made it impossible for Hitler to apply his full force against Russia in the summer of 1941, when the country might well have cracked under greater pressure.

Some students, scholars and history buffs will take the arguments further, claiming credit for specific generals or political leaders while downplaying the role of others. Russians often minimize the American and English contribution, for instance, while Americans of my father's generation had special contempt for Field Marshall Montgomery-- and my dad wasn't even in the European theater. As well, people in France and the former Yugoslavia might credit "the Resistance," those countries in particular preferring to claim as much as possible that they liberated themselves from Nazi rule. Within each resistance, of course, the credit due to different factions and leaders continues to be debated.

War is a collective endeavor, but since it isn't exactly a spontaneous phenomenon each war bears the stamp of strong individuals. There's a temptation, irresistible for many people, to see personal agency at work in clashes of nations. We want to be able to say that World War II, for instance, was won, for all intents and purposes, at this time and this place, and to credit the people who were there. Many people believe in decisive moments as well as decisive personalities, and their belief influences their perception of warfare.

In Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino imagines perhaps as decisive a moment as can be imagined. Quite to the surprise of first-time viewers, Hans "Jew Hunter" Landa and Aldo "the Apache" Raine find themselves negotiating the effective end of the war in Western Europe, if not the entire European conflict. Raine has been captured, but two of his men remain inside a movie theater, poised to blow up the Nazi leadership. Landa thinks he can thwart them with one phone call, but taking the long view he thinks his postwar chances are better if he cuts a deal with the American to be in on the victory by turning traitor. He proves to be very demanding, but both Raine and his superiors think his asking price a small one to pay to pull off a decapitation strike against Hitler. Neither man knows that another plot is playing out in the same theater, where the proprietor, Shoshanna Dreyfus aka Emmanuelle Mimieux, has barred the exits and arranged for nitrate film reels to be set ablaze, turning the cinema into a deathtrap. Both plots succeed.

So who has won the war? As in history, it's a matter of perception.

1. The Allies. Tarantino's account is not as completely counterfactual as it could be, after all.

2. The Basterds. Their improbable infiltration of the movie theater makes a decapitation strike possible independent of Shoshanna's plot, but because of Raine's capture the remaining Basterds are vulnerable to Landa's phone call. But the mere fact of their infiltration makes Landa realize that he has multiple options, the best one being to play along with the plot. Even if Landa remains loyal to Hitler, however, the Basterds can still blow up the place if they see things getting hot. In such a scenario, Aldo Raine himself probably ends up a dead man, but he could still receive posthumous credit for the decisive stroke of the war.

3. Shoshanna. Her arson plot is likely to succeed regardless of the negotiations between Raine and Landa. It isn't dependent upon the Basterds, though the confusion sown once they take the offensive only helps fulfill her desire that no one escape the theater.

4. Landa. He has the power to thwart the Basterds, either by having the two men in the theater taken out (at admitted risk to everyone inside), or more reasonably by getting word to security to arrange a discreet exit for Hitler and Co. without the Basterds noticing their departure, the rest of the audience being left to take their chances. It's also possible that in the process of closing a trap on the Basterds, the men tipped off by Landa might discover Shoshanna's plot and thwart that as well. His treason at the least allows the Basterds freedom of movement, and is arguably the absolutely essential act before anything else can happen. The Medal of Honor may be a bit much for him to ask (not to mention the money, property, immunity, etc.) but the Allies definitely owe him something -- perhaps plastic surgery, at least.

The easiest answer would be "All of the Above," but my point has been that some people aren't satisfied with that kind of explanation. I think it partly suits Tarantino's purposes to leave audiences asking just the question I've asked and debating it through future viewings of his film. The intriguing thing about his achievement is that, despite his blatant fictionalization of a too-decisive-to-be-true moment in history, Inglourious Basterds insists that we recognize the role of contingency and coincidence in the film's fantastic victory. Basterds is no "one man army" story; no one wins the war singlehandedly, and no one's role is purely autonomous. After all, Shoshanna is in a position to strike a deathblow against Hitler only because of Landa's perverse decision to let her run back in 1941. Tarantino has presented a comic-book representation of the actual complexity of war, including the fact that some of the people who get credit for victories are hardly heroes, while some of the people most deserving of credit aren't around to receive it.

On the Big Screen: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009)

To the layman, "Once upon a time" means "fairy tale." To the movie buff, it means "Sergio Leone" or, perhaps more generally, "spaghetti western." The new film by Quentin Tarantino is advertised on some posters and announced in its opening chapter as "Once Upon a Time in Occupied France." While the story is structured according to Tarantino's peculiar preference for breaking things down into chapters, some of the fundamental elements of the classical spaghetti remain apparent. Most obviously, there is a division of characters into good, bad and ugly as in Leone's film of that name as well as Once Upon a Time in the West. The good is Shoshanna Dreyfus aka Emmanuelle Mimieux, lone survivor of a Jewish family harbored by French dairy farmers yet brought down by the bad, "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa, in the opening chapter. Shoshanna is the story's avenger, but her prominence in the story is obscured to the point of false advertising by the emphasis given to the ugly, Aldo Raine and his band of "Basterds," in the ads for the film.

Understanding Brad Pitt's actual role in the film goes a long way toward solving the riddle of his performance. Some reviewers get it, others don't. The latter blame Pitt for clownishness, which seems unfair when Raine is meant to be a clown. He's Tuco to Melanie Laurent's Shoshanna as Blondy, though they never interact and aren't aware of each other's existence; he's also Cheyenne to her Harmonica. Pitt is meant to be crude and brutal and to be funny doing it, and he succeeds admirably. He is an unheralded comic genius, as he first intimated in his previous performance of a Tarantino script in True Romance and demonstrated again more recently in Burn After Reading. Pitt and Laurent are counterpoints as Tarantino challenges himself to juggle tragedy and comedy while the two plots play out in the same movie theater.

Basterds doesn't play entirely by spaghetti rules. Shoshanna appears less interested in avenging herself on Landa (though she assumes he'll be among her victims) than on Nazi Germany in general. That's appropriate in a war story, since war isn't supposed to be about individuals. That in turn makes adapting spaghetti formulae into a war-movie framework a tricky business. Tarantino complicates things further by making most of the well-rounded characters Germans, whether it's ambivalent war hero-turned-film star Frederick Zoller, Wilhelm the common soldier who celebrates the birth of his son in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the brave officer who defies the Basterds at the brink of death by baseball bat.

I leave Hans Landa off this list, and I confess that I find Christoph Waltz's lauded performance somewhat overrated. I suppose that's because he just doesn't match my idea of a Nazi villain. That idea allows for considerable range, but Landa seems too much like a glib Tarantino villain rather than a Nazi. I know: it's a Tarantino movie, so what's my point? My point is, that while I understand that Landa is less a Nazi than a spaghetti archetype in a German uniform, which he proves by ultimately looking out for himself rather than the Party or the Fatherland, Waltz just doesn't ring true for me in a way I feel he should. Having said that, I think he gives a fine performance as a glib Tarantino villain, and that goes a long way toward selling the twists Landa makes along the way.

Spaghetti westerns weren't known for their historical accuracy, but they also weren't known for borrowing characters from history very often. Tarantino's claim of similar if not greater creative license in the context of World War II has shocked some reviewers and provoked accusations of inappropriate frivolity or insufficient engagement with the evil of Nazism. On the other hand, I've seen at least one reviewer argue that Tarantino's license restores some of the necessary unpredictability to World War II dramas -- the sense that anything can happen identified with a certain type of thriller. With Basterds, Tarantino has made a distinctive verbal thriller. He fills the space in which suspense builds with his customary verbiage, but he's figuring out how to use his verbosity dramatically. Reviewers have made a lot of the initial scene of Landa chatting with a French farmer, but Tarantino's skill really shines in the tavern scene at the center of the film. With the grumbling title characters relegated to the basement, the celebration of the aforementioned Wilhelm and a "what's my line" type of card game share space with a crucial meeting between a British spy and a turncoat German actress, the problem being how soon to leave without attracting suspicion and how long to stay without attracting suspicion. That scene may be Tarantino's best work to date as a writer.

The final half hour of Basterds is pretty much indescribable if I don't want to spoil things for the uninitiated, but it is spectacular stuff, shocking and cathartic. Those who think there's something inherently wrong (historically speaking) with it should remember the "Once Upon a Time" sign up front and attempt to recall whether they were expecting a true story or not.

The acting: Waltz is overrated and Pitt overrated, but both are good. Laurent should be a global star, while Diane Kruger as the actress makes up for Troy. The guy who really impressed me was Til Schweiger as Hugo Stiglitz, a renegade German recruited into the Basterds. Schweiger plays his part in a perpetual slow burn that marks him as the most dangerous man in any room he enters. He does this without a lot of dialogue, which is a testament to his own talent and to Tarantino the director as opposed to the writer. At the other extreme, Mike Myers as British General Fenech makes a fortunately brief appearance that had the local art-house audience giggling just at the sight of him and the sound of his voice. Whether this was the desired effect of casting him I'm not quite sure, though I was happy to see Rod Taylor as Churchill sharing the scene with him.

I'm not quite sure yet of where to rank Basterds among Tarantino's films. It's definitely an improvement on Death Proof (which the director himself now seems to dismiss), and if I have to treat the two parts of Kill Bill as one film then I'd lean toward saying Basterds is his best work since Jackie Brown. At the same time, some aspects of his style are starting to wear on me, and for all that I liked a lot of what I heard on the soundtrack, if I had the man in a room and could make one request of him, I'd challenge him to commission an original score for a film. Tarantino remains a brilliant yet problematic filmmaker and, despite his detractors, one who's still evolving and perfecting his style and remains worth watching while he continues to do so.