Film Gauge - Fletch, The Archers and Orson Welles Kick Cinema's Ass

I watch too many movies, and I want to write about all of them. This impulse usually results in me feeling overwhelmed, and by the time I have sorted out my feelings on new releases like Kick-Ass I'm worried that the national conversation has moved on (or stalled completely).



Suffice to say, I feel that Kick-Ass tried to have its cake and eat it, too, and ended up betraying the spirit of the comic with a boring action climax that squandered the movie's pretty strong start. I like Christopher Mintz-Plasse a lot, and the Hit Girl character plays to my affinity for angry but resilient fictional kids who are awesome in spite of a cruel adult world that is trying to destroy them at every turn. I just would have liked it had the movie not shied away from the sociopathy of Nicolas Cage's character, and Hit Girl's by proxy. Nicolas Cage was certainly playing Big Daddy as a kook, in yet another amazing feat of scenery-chewing. I just wish the script would have followed suit.


Anyway, from now on I'm going to narrow my focus and write up three movies a week. I'll try to keep it balanced between mainstream fare (depending on the release schedule) and one of the "film school" movies that I slept on and that are currently clogging up my Netflix queue. Finally, I'll round off the week with a left-field genre surprise like Christopher Smith's mindfreak thriller Triangle, which I loved and will write up soon. It's on Netflix Instant right now.

In the meantime, I'm catching up on the classics:



Fletch


I gave this movie a spin recently, flush with goodwill for Chevy Chase from his creative resurgence on NBC's Community and after reading an Entertainment Weekly article about the Fletch reboot currently languishing in development hell. Wow. A major studio nowadays wouldn't allow a movie of this kind to be so unfunny for such long stretches. I was surprised by how straightforwardly hardboiled this movie was, as it is mostly remembered for Chevy Chase concocting ridiculous aliases and daydreaming about playing for the Lakers. That's how I remember it from my childhood, anyway. If this were a Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller vehicle, Fletch would be a fucking moron much more often than a competent reporter. That being said, Fletch doesn't quite work for me. It's cool that Chevy Chase is often revealed to be the smartest guy in the room, but why is he also such an incompetent master of disguise? Is it just because he's an unrepentant smart-ass? But why would he endanger his investigation by hiding behind such a thin ruse? Why am I looking for verisimilitude in a Chevy Chase movie? It was interesting to watch this movie as an adult. I kind of respect it, but I can't really say that I liked it very much. Its disdainful view of the rich scores big points with me, of course. Put it on the Underhills' account!



I Know Where I'm Going


Watching I Know Where I'm Going, I was shocked to realize that this movie could very well represent the nexus point and pinnacle for modern opposites-attract romantic comedies as we know them. It bears a striking thematic resemblance to 2009's Leap Year, in particular. The film, an early effort from The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), follows a goal-oriented, upwardly-mobile young woman on course to marry a wealthy industrialist only to find love with a Naval Officer in a magical land called Scotland. Sure, that kind of plot was around long before The Archers made this movie in 1945. Furthermore, it's not exactly high-praise to compare it to an Amy Adams vehicle (which most likely traffics in regressive gender stereotypes staler than those on display here). The point is that 65 years later I Know Where I'm Going still feels fresh, infinitely fresher than the latest iteration of Katherine Heigl as a plucky single gal who falls down a lot. Powell & Pressburger were so ahead of their time both visually and in the way they directed actors that I Know Where I'm Going transcends the formal disconnect modern audiences feel when watching old movies. In many ways, it presages the "indie-quirk" of the post-Wes Anderson landscape. Again, I'm damning this movie while trying to praise it. Basically, it feels not like a product of 1945 but rather some sort of elaborate, Steven Soderbergh-ian pastiche. Star Wendy Hiller resembles Michelle Williams in period garb. I can't recommend Powell & Pressburger enough. Seeing The Red Shoes at Film Forum recently was a landmark movie-going experience, and Black Narcissus is next on my list.



F for Fake


What a delightful and, like much of The Archers' oeuvre, oddly prescient movie. F for Fake is a surprisingly ahead-of-its-time meta-essay film. Orson Welles re-edits and re-contextualizes documentary footage of famed art forger Elmyr de Hory and biographer Clifford Irving shot as Irving's exclusive biography of Howard Hughes was very publicly revealed to be a hoax. Welles paints Elmyr and Irving as magicians, charlatans, and the filmmaker spins this examination of fakery outward to include Welles' film itself, classifying film editing as a form of sleight-of-hand. Welles imposes himself upon the narrative, casting himself as a rogue-ish conman wandering the streets in a long, black overcoat. He discusses his own career as a cinematic charlatan in lightly egotistical fashion, but he is ultimately a charming and ingratiating host. He's like a fascinating, if overbearing party guest. Turning the camera on himself, Welles animatedly recounts to his dining companions the tale of Irving's meticulously-crafted hoax, occasionally stopping mid-sentence to ask the waiter to clear away some dishes. Bits of obviously-staged reality like these, while amusing, also subtly remind us that we're watching a movie, cleverly skewering the presumed veracity of documentary film. Unfortunately, the movie's lightning-paced editing and florid narration is so entertaining that it may have accidentally given birth to the lightweight pop-documentary bullshit of people like Morgan Spurlock.

Film Gauge - Top 10 Movies of 2009

Year-end lists are unreliable, subjective, kind of pointless. They are not an exact science, but are rather governed by the momentary whims and fleeting fancies of their makers. Of course this is true. And it is no more true than in the case of movies. No list could purport to outline the "best" movies of the year, because who could agree on the criteria? Going by the numbers, Transformers 2: The Squeakquel is the best movie of the year. I don't know about you, but that hurts my feelings. Now, I'm not one to bash populist entertainment. The phrase "popcorn movie" is not a pejorative, in my opinion. But who says a movie has to be an artless, brainless mess in order to appeal to a mass audience? Where is this generation's Raiders of the Lost Ark? Is it all up to JJ Abrams now? Star Trek was an incredibly fun, satisfying and guilt-free spectacle. It accomplished the impossible task of making me interested in Star Trek mythology, and it is most likely the consensus favorite here at Lowbrow Media. It is for this reason that I have left it off of my list, so that I could highlight some other, less-heralded movies. Ultimately, I decided to try not to overthink things. This list is made up of the movies that surprised me the most this year, the movies that evoked the strongest emotional reaction. I regret not being able to include Where The Wild Things Are, a highly-anticipated movie that fell just short of the mark for me. I believe Jonze and Eggers were perhaps too committed to getting inside the head of a 7-year-old, at the expense of giving the audience a sufficient emotional foothold. The wordless coda between Catherine Keener and Max Records is admittedly wonderful. I wanted more of that. I also wanted Richard Kelly's The Box to follow through on Southland Tales' promise of utter insanity. It came close, but not close enough. I'm still not sure if he is a genuinely idiosyncratic filmmaker, or if he is just using cult film Mad Libs. Anyway, here's my list. Have fun with it, and please disagree.

-Mark

Top 10 Movies of 2009


10) Observe and Report (Jody Hill, 2009)

Coming as it did on the heels of Seth Rogen's two-year block of ubiquity, Observe and Report suffered from the public's fatigue for the film's leading man (not to mention its proximity to Paul Blart). Moreover, Rogen's playing against affable-stoner-type as a fascistic, bipolar thug (and implied murderer) didn't score highly with the Knocked Up fans who came expecting the good-natured raunchiness of Judd Apatow. The movie is dark, but not "dark" like the cartoonishly profane Bad Santa. Writer-director Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way, HBO's Eastbound and Down) grounds his over-the-top narrative in the realities of our trash culture, giving the comedy weight and avoiding empty provocation. Nodding to the simmering racial tensions and voracious consumerism of modern life, Hill makes the film's gradual validation of Rogen's post-millennial Travis Bickle that much more disturbing. Oh, yeah, the movie is also funny.


09) Big Fan (Robert D. Siegel, 2009)

Filmmaker and former Onion editor Robert D. Siegel is quickly establishing himself as something of a De Sica for our new, crumbling America. In his directorial debut, Big Fan, as well as in his script for Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Siegel nails the stifling drabness of life on a low economic rung. However, where The Wrestler found an oddly life-affirming uplift in the crushing sadness of Randy "The Ram" Robinson's return to the ring, Big Fan sustains a dreadful air of inevitable collapse in its exploration of the deeply disturbed Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt). Oswalt's bravura performance embodies the misplaced priorities of our aggressively self-destructive age, and Siegel's observant, unobtrusive style builds to a stomach-churning intensity as we witness Paul preparing to commit a desperate, horrific act in the name of his team.


08) The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)

Much has been made of The House of the Devil's stylistic homage to late 70s-early 80s horror films, from the foreboding synth score and freeze-frame title card to the grainy cinematography. But Ti West's film is not an ironic, Planet Terror-esque wallow in the surface-level milieu of retro schlock. The House of the Devil is a return to a deliberate, assured method of horror filmmaking that simply no longer exists in the Saw era. Gore aficionados will most likely complain that nothing much happens, but West lulls us into his drowsy rhythms so that the shocks have infinitely more weight than any bullshit millennial slasher movie. He builds unbearable tension just by observing our heroine, Sam (the delightful Jocelin Donahue), as she bops around the house with her walkman. Never has The Fixx's "One Thing Leads To Another" caused so much anxiety.


07) Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)

Wes Anderson's reputation as this decade's king of the auteurists has soured somewhat over his previous two efforts, The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. In these movies, his once-lauded wide angle compositions and intricate production design seemed to be threatening to snuff out his considerable heart. So who could have guessed that Anderson would find renewed vitality and surprising emotional depth in a format that would seem only to exacerbate his control-freak tendencies? Despite the odds, the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox is a pleasant surprise on many levels, both as a rebirth for Anderson and as an antidote to the pervasive crassness of "family films." Leaving behind his Salinger-esque fascination with the gloomy idle rich, Anderson recaptures the underdog spirit of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore while creating his characteristically beautiful and textured dioramas. As the titular Mr. Fox, George Clooney proves once again that even when speaking through a puppet, he is the last of the great movie stars.


06) Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

Freed from the 20-ton weight of the Spiderman franchise, Sam Raimi produced hands-down the most purely fun moviegoing experience of 2009 in Drag Me to Hell. Essentially of a piece with the Evil Dead series, Drag Me to Hell continues Raimi's house style of horror with visible quotation marks. It's not scary, nor is it meant to be. It is self-conscious filmmaking at its finest, a celebration of making a movie. Drag Me to Hell achieves a delirious, near-hysterical tone and pace from the first scene and doesn't let up until it reaches the fire and brimstone conclusion the title promises. The highlight is a violent, disgusting, hilarious and seemingly unending fight in a parking garage between the wonderfully game Alison Lohman and Lorna Raver.


05) Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009)

As The Velvet Underground's "Here She Comes Now" plays over the opening montage of twinkling amusement park lights, Adventureland quickly establishes a strong sense of time and place. Building on the potent mix of laughs and messy, intruding adulthood present in Superbad (the best of the Apatow bromances), director Greg Mottola nails both the dull pain and instant nostalgia of post-collegiate wheel-spinning. Essentially a feature-length flinch before the plunge into adulthood, Adventureland is steeped in the contradictory feelings of superiority and longing that one feels as they start to outgrow their childhood home. Jesse Eisenberg proved himself maddeningly adept at portraying a shithead in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, so his sympathetic lead performance here is a pleasant surprise. Outside of a regrettable attempt to catch McLovin in a bottle in the form of dick-ish sidekick Frigo, the casting is uniformly excellent. Ryan Reynolds escapes the nauseating smugness of his Van Wilder persona, Kristen Stewart transcends her Twilight blankness, and Martin Starr does his best work since Freaks and Geeks as a wonderful smart-ass on a heartbreaking trajectory. I saw this movie in the months leading up to my move to New York, as I was preparing to say goodbye to my beloved hometown of Pittsburgh. Kennywood, the Pittsburgh amusement park that served as a set for the Adventureland crew is a vaunted childhood landmark. Timing is everything.


04) A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)

The Coens are often accused of regarding their characters with disdain, of whiling away their career running a procession of pathetic rubes and dimwits dispassionately through the wringer. A Serious Man, the brothers' God's-eye view of a suburban Physics professor's existential unraveling would seem at a glance to affirm these criticisms, but the film is unexpectedly humane and resonant as a result of its grand themes and Michael Stuhlbarg's nuanced performance. A Serious Man is a distinctly Coen brothers film, but one marked by a continuing maturation in their work first seen in No Country For Old Men. Doing away with the usual crime plots that tend to serve as their go-to narrative spine, the Coens filter modern anxieties through the prism of religious allegories and folklore, reducing humankind's fundamental search for meaning into a dead end. Sounds frustrating. It is, but in the best, most devastating way possible.


03) Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

In the grand triptych of allegorical sci-fi films released this year, with Avatar on the far end of the on-the-nose social message spectrum and District 9 not knowing quite where to go after its stellar first act, Duncan Jones' Moon wins the day. Boasting a remarkable dual performance from Sam Rockwell, the film couches a sly commentary on working class identity and self-worth in the face of corporate indifference into an engrossing Twilight Zone concept. Jones is so assured in his direction that he all but throws away the big twist, which is easily discernible from the trailers. The real power of Moon lies in the nagging ideas that the twist dredges up, and Rockwell's gradual realization of the truth surrounding his three-year mission is utterly absorbing. Like The House of the Devil, Moon harkens back to a golden age of genre filmmaking. Jones' utilization of miniatures and spare, grubby sets creates an evocative, lived-in atmosphere that can't be achieved with CGI. Points also for Clint Mansell's haunting score.


02) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Whether writing about botched robberies, philosophical hitmen, drug-running flight attendants or revenging assassins, Quentin Tarantino is always first and foremost writing about movies. His storytelling and filmmaking calls attention to itself, which tends to rankle purists. To some tastes, his referential preoccupation with filmic technique comes at the expense of relatable human characters. But Tarantino deals in archetypes, and with Inglourious Basterds he makes the ultimate case for painting with broad strokes. Using the title card "Once Upon A Time in Nazi-Occupied France" as a mission statement, Tarantino utilizes the iconography of WWII films to make a grand statement about how storytelling helps us to understand and transcend our own ugly natures. I'll throw some more praise at Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent's feet, two standouts in an extremely strong cast. Just try not to get too hung up on Mike Meyers' appearance as an English General.


01) In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009)

Profanity connoisseurs, a robust Cabernet of obscenity awaits you in the form of In The Loop, British comedy mainstay Armando Iannucci's big-screen semi-sequel to his BBC series The Thick of It. Elevating the frenzied scrambling of The Thick of It's low-level bureaucrats to the world stage, In The Loop is a lightning-paced meditation on the power of language and the elasticity of truth in global politics. It is also an astonishingly filthy quip machine, and hopefully a star-making vehicle for veteran Scottish character actor Peter Capaldi, who weaves a poetic blue streak as spin doctor Malcolm Tucker. Malcolm is a bully, gleefully stoking the anti-intellectualism of our 24-hour news-cycle culture to suit his own needs, but he manages to emerge as a strangely heroic figure when stacked up against David Rasche's Rumsfeldian psychopath. Easily the funniest and most pleasant surprise at the movies this year.

Honorable mention:


Up In The Air (Jason Reitman, 2009)

Jason Reitman's Up In The Air is many things. It's an of-the-moment snapshot of life in an economic tailspin, a Hal Ashby-esque societal-critique-cum-character-study, a Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell screwball comedy, and a heartfelt paean to human connection in an increasingly technologically-isolated society. George Clooney is top notch, as usual, and Reitman sets you up for the cliched romantic comedy denouement before skillfully pulling the rug out from under you. Ultimately, though, it is probably too slick. Worth watching.

Film Gauge - "A Serious Man" (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)

What: "A Serious Man" (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)
When: Sunday, October 11th, 2009 9:30 PM
Where: Landmark Sunshine (143 E. Houston)

"When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies..."

-Jefferson Airplane

The trials and crises of faith that beset physics professor Larry Gopnik, the harried protagonist of Joel & Ethan Coen's A Serious Man, are more or less the same that have beset countless Job-like literary schlubs throughout the centuries, albeit tinged with a distinctly late-1960s existential malaise. And although the mise-en-scene may have changed, in the Coens' latest there is still a flash of the Biblical amongst the banal suburban Minnesota landscape of F Troop and roadside motels. But what sets A Serious Man apart, both as a parable and as a "Coen Brothers film" (in many ways, it is the film the brothers' entire career has been building toward), is its discomfiting lack of answers.


It is nothing new for the Coens to eschew the traditional storytelling beats of conflict and resolution. The hauntingly abrupt, lyrical conclusion to No Country For Old Men is a prime example of their unconventional approach. Moreover, this sequence seems to have signaled a new direction in the brothers' work, deepening their sometimes hermetic formalism and exploring more earthbound anxieties. This contemplative style is intriguingly furthered by A Serious Man. While the particulars of the setting (an insular, Jewish community in 1960s suburban Minnesota) allow the Coens to indulge their interest in playing with colorful regional dialects, and in this case religious customs, the narrative is markedly divorced from the genre trappings they normally explore in their films. Here, the botched criminal enterprises that permeate the Coens' earlier works give way to an exploration of the ways in which striving to lead a decent life is the greatest swindle of all.


Larry Gopnik, who in many respects is a prototypical Coen brothers sad-sack in the tradition of Fargo's Jerry Lundegaard, stands out in their oeuvre in his desire to play by the rules. He resists the corrupting force of money that befell many a past Coen anti-hero, from Llewelyn Moss to Lundegaard himself, significantly refusing a bribe from a student seeking a passing grade. As portrayed by the superb stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg, Gopnik is well-meaning and principled, yet ineffectual. He tries to be "a serious man" and is dumped on by fate at every turn. For all the criticism leveled at the Coens for the supposed disdain with which they regard their characters, they and Stuhlbarg imbue Gopnik with relatable fears concerning the value of the life he has built. As Larry is relentlessly steamrolled throughout the film by his wife's desire for a divorce, a contested tenure hearing at work and his inability to understand his eccentric brother and jaded children, his dawning crisis is embodied by Stuhlbarg through an assemblage of effectively subtle tics and stutters. The decisions of the filmmakers and the actor to internalize Larry's struggle and resist their more histrionic characterization tendencies proves surprisingly powerful and marks another step forward in the Coens' evolution.


As Larry seeks psychic refuge in the counsel of a series of Rabbis on the eve of his son's bar mitzvah, we arrive at the thematic core of A Serious Man. The Coen Brothers are using the very specific predicament of Larry Gopnik of Minnesota to meditate on the fundamental question of existence: What does it all mean? As expressed in the Jefferson Airplane song that continually wafts through the earbuds of young Danny Gopnik's transistor radio (symbolizing the tidal wave of social change barreling toward their suburban street), the Coens are exploring what happens when everything we hold true is suddenly challenged. Where does one go from that moment of realization? The filmmakers resist easy answers, opting instead to coyly ignore the unknown. In a sequence that serves as some sort of skewed thesis statement for A Serious Man, one of the Rabbis relates to Larry the story of "The Goy's Teeth." The tale concerns a dentist who finds cryptic Hebrew characters etched into the teeth of a gentile patient. He is consumed with figuring out their origin and his life quickly falls apart in the wake of this obsession. Larry understandably and eagerly awaits a resolution to the story that never comes, as the Rabbi trails off, explaining that there are things in life we will simply never understand. Some may argue that this is the film's maddening shortcoming, but it is unmistakably deliberate, and a thought-provoking, though admittedly dour approach.

The closest perhaps that Joel & Ethan Coen come to explaining existence in A Serious Man is in the chilling final sequence, a moment of utter dread that shows us that regardless of purpose, life's various challenges are coming for us and we are powerless to stop them.

Click here to see the "A Serious Man" trailer

Film Gauge - "District 9" (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

What: "District 9" (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)
When: Friday, August 21st, 2009 11:15 AM
Where: AMC 34th St. (34th St. & 8th Ave.)

It is not a common occurrence when in the throes of blockbuster season to be confronted at the movie theater with ambiguity and issues of great social importance. Amid the sequels, reboots and romantic comedies of summer, it is even stranger still to find these ideas packaged in the Trojan Horse guise of an action-packed alien thriller. But District 9, for good or ill, is just such a film. By virtue of its odd dichotomy of political commentary and popcorn thrills, the experience of watching District 9 is a strange one, intermittently rewarding and cringe-making. First-time director Neill Blomkamp's film is bursting with style and ideas, and most surprisingly a rather bleak outlook on human nature that is constantly at odds with the conventions of the action genre. Ironic, then, that such a unique project resulted from the demise of one of the more uninspired-sounding projects buzzing around Hollywood these days: the motion picture adaptation of the videogame Halo.


The film, set in the uneasy environs of Johannesburg, begins as a rather clear-cut allegory for the apartheid system in South Africa. A defenseless alien ship becomes stranded over the city, and the government corrals the thousands of impoverished alien inhabitants into a horrific shantytown called "District 9." We are presented with a series of talking head interviews - government agents, reporters, politicians and locals setting the scene and expressing their opinions on how best to deal with the "Prawns" (a slur for our extraterrestrial visitors). These docu-style sound bites combine with a mix of staged and archival news footage to create a queasy verisimilitude. It is a bravura opening, to be sure, but one that continually skirts the line of exploitation. We see the computer-generated aliens integrated seamlessly into unmistakably real footage of rioting black South Africans alongside staged scenes of township dwellers watching a "dog fight" between insectoid alien creatures. These images, in service of the allegory, are often too glib for comfort.


It is soon made clear, however, that Blomkamp is making a larger point about the oppressive forces that converge on District 9, though the pitilessness with which even supposedly sympathetic figures are portrayed is astonishing. The film's ostensible hero, Wikus Van De Merwe (portrayed by the charismatic acting novice Sharlto Copley) is one of the most selfish and cowardly protagonists in recent cinematic memory. Wikus is a low-level bureaucrat charged with evicting the residents of District 9 and moving them to even more sinister accommodations (an outwardly "humanitarian" effort spearheaded, in a twist emblematic of the film's pitch black view of government, by an independently contracted weapons manufacturer hell-bent on co-opting Prawn firepower). As Wikus goes about his duties, he comes across an alien nest, destroying the gestating fetuses with the dispassionate interest of a hobbyist, laughing for the camera all the while. In moments like these, Blomkamp muddies his film with real life - there are no heroes, and even those underdogs that we may want to root for occasionally do ugly things.


Coming as it does on the heels of such an intriguing and morally ambiguous first half, the third act of District 9 is somewhat disappointing in its more simplified tone. As Wikus finds himself on the wrong side of the conflict between the Prawns and his employers, the film shifts focus from documentary realism to more straightforward action setpieces. A McGuffin is introduced that holds the key to the aliens' salvation, and Wikus forms an unlikely alliance with a Prawn named Christopher who may be the closest thing the film has to a truly heroic character. Of course, in keeping with Blomkamp's cynical view, Christopher is swiftly betrayed by self-interested humans and his plan to return home goes awry. No matter how close the filmmaker comes to conforming to any sort of genre convention, it is not in his nature to give us the clichéd happy ending.

With District 9, Neill Blomkamp has found a middle ground between escapist entertainment and the evening news, an intellectually stimulating but often uncomfortable place to visit. Nonetheless, it is a creative oasis in the blockbuster desert.

Click here to see the "District 9" trailer

Film Gauge - "Inglourious Basterds" (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

What: "Inglourious Basterds" (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
When: Friday, August 21st, 2009 1:30 PM
Where: AMC 34th St. (34th St. & 8th Ave.)

Since his left-field debut with 1992's Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino has been a divisive figure, simultaneously heralded as a bold and singular voice in contemporary American film and derided as a human jukebox of regurgitated junk cinema signifiers shot through with Gen X irony. What the latter criticisms miss about Tarantino, and what the post-Pulp Fiction tidal wave of shallow "Tarantino-esque" shoot-em-ups have only served to reinforce, is the supreme confidence and control present in his work, the assuredness of his own voice. Much ink is spilled about the referential nature of Tarantino's films, as well as the meandering, often pop culture-infused soliloquies he places in the mouths of his characters. However, he rarely gets the credit due to him for his ability both as a visual stylist and as a director of actors to create an atmosphere of tension, crackling with the power of what is left unsaid amidst the arias. Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest effort, the sprawling, intimate WWII fantasia Inglourious Basterds.


Basterds, by virtue of its epic development history, perhaps couldn't help but confound expectations when it premiered at Cannes in May. Certainly, the trailers focusing on Brad Pitt and his titular platoon (who, in truth, are but a single piece of a larger tapestry) didn't help matters. Some viewers seemed flummoxed by the predominantly dialogue-heavy nature of the completed film, but the main criticism appears to center on Tarantino's interpretation of history. The question of artistic responsibility arises when dealing with the dramatization of real-life events, especially events as atrocious as those surrounding the Holocaust, and Tarantino's seeming reduction of this moment in time to a Jews vs. Nazis spaghetti-western has ruffled some feathers. There is perhaps a case to be made against Tarantino's championing of a battalion of Jewish-American soldiers who engage in the same grisly inhumanity shown by the Nazis toward the Jewish people with no discussion of the moral cost of vengeance. However, that seems to be missing the point.


Ultimately, it is unwise to approach the film on such literal terms, and the genuinely thrilling climax that Tarantino so skillfully builds toward [spoiler redacted] should dispel any notion one may hold of the filmmaker's designs on historical or sociological accuracy. With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino is painting in broad strokes, making a movie not so much about the particulars of WWII history but of WWII iconography, and moreover the ancient storytelling trope of the underdog turning the tables on its oppressor. He is propagandizing the moviegoing experience itself, the pleasure and satisfying simplicity of righting humanity's wrongs through fiction. Basterds, in fact, may be Tarantino's most reverent celebration of the power of cinema in a long career steeped in the cinematic. Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), another fantastic Tarantino heroine in the grand tradition of Uma Thurman's Beatrix Kiddo, and arguably the true hero of the film, literally uses the movie theater she operates as a weapon to bring down the forces responsible for the extermination of her family. This subplot, the culmination of which dovetails in the finale with the exploits of The Basterds and Col. Hans "The Jew Hunter" Landa (a sure-to-be Oscar-nominated Christoph Waltz), holds the key to Inglourious Basterds.


In his reimagining of the events of the second World War, Quentin Tarantino has achieved something akin to the period piece version of Werner Herzog's "ecstatic truth." Herzog coined this term to describe his documentary work, wherein he attempts to find a truth that is beyond facts, deeper than facts, and it can be said that Tarantino has done something similar here. Putting the real-life fates of Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and Bormann aside, and disregarding the fact that Shosanna Dreyfus, Lt. Aldo Raine and Col. Hans Landa never actually existed, Basterds hits upon a truth about humanity and our relationship to art that transcends the details of history. Tarantino shows us that, although mankind has a tendency toward cruelty that we can never truly disavow (just as the Nazi soldiers that The Basterds encounter are left with a permanent reminder of their actions), we are just as equally capable of great artistic expression.

For that, Inglourious Basterds may just be, as Pitt reflects in the film's final line, his masterpiece.

Click here to see the "Inglourious Basterds" trailer

Film Gauge - "The Holy Mountain" (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)

What: "The Holy Mountain" (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)
When: Saturday, August 1st, 2009 12:00 AM
Where: IFC Center (323 6th Ave.)

Art cinema is a world often concerned first and foremost with the filmmaker's "vision." The likes of plot and character development are secondary to the allegorical. As such, stripped of the more tangible delights of narrative storytelling, an art film lives or dies on the strength of said filmmaker's point of view. "The Holy Mountain," Alejandro Jodorowsky's incredible 1973 work, is certainly not at a loss for ideas. An assemblage of beautiful, disturbing, indelible images, it can be read as any number of things, from a sledgehammer-symbolic screed against imperialism (religious, capitalist and otherwise) and the marginalization of minority cultures, to an absurd sketch comedy, to an epic-scale middle finger extended at Art itself. Jodorowsky proves to be a rather prickly character, and ultimately quite hard to pin down.


The director undoubtedly has big things on his mind. From the outset, the film follows protagonist Hector Salinas (billed as "The Thief," a sort of Christ-like, Forrest Gumpian straw man) into an unidentified city flanked by gas mask-clad soldiers. Hispanic civilians are executed by firing squad for the benefit of ecstatic Caucasian tourists, who chatter away, snapping pictures. A female tourist is raped by one of the soldiers as she urges her husband to get a good shot of the action. Following this display, The Thief happens upon an all-frog production of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire that ends in torrents of blood. Later on, the film profiles a war toy manufacturer that conditions children to attack "brown native vampires" and to worship a superhero named Captain Captain who fights "The Peruvian Monster." The concern Jodorowsky expresses about imperialism and the demonization of "The Other" through these outsized, darkly humorous setpieces is genuine, as is his view on the commodification of art. In an extended montage that presages the condensed visual exposition of filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson, we meet a man who runs an "art factory" that features an assembly line of people pressing their paint-covered asses to canvas.


Every bona fide "point" Jodorowsky makes, however, is undercut by a moment of flat-out comedy. In a bit reminiscent of the absurd internal logic of a Mr. Show sketch, the art dealer shows us his "love machine," a device that is impregnated by a giant metallic phallus and gives birth to a smaller love machine that screams and cries like a newborn baby. He even includes some cartoonish moments that seem to poke fun at the kind of heavy-handed political satire featured prominently in the first act of the film. A grotesque couple first seen in various sexually deviant and bathroom-related tableaux (for whatever reason, their toilet is about 5 feet tall) are revealed to be financial advisors to "the president." After suggesting exterminating the population to save the economy, they retreat to their poolside villa to bottle-feed their baby snake. As the war toy manufacturer discusses her company's clientele, Jodorowsky has some fun with such generic phrases as "the politics of the government," which is represented by a shadowy group of mismatched world leaders.


Though, rather than trying so hard to parse Jodorowsky's intentions and what it all means, perhaps the best course of action is just to let the parade of awe-inspiring images wash over you. Jodorowsky is a gifted visualist, and the film boasts many scenes of odd, startling beauty that would seem only to be cheapened by over-analysis. In the fantastic opening sequence, Jodorowsky (as "The Alchemist") shaves the heads of two twin girls in some arcane ritual. A flock of sparrows burst forth from a gunshot wound. An old man removes his false eye and presses it adoringly into the palm of a ridiculously young, Mary Magdalene-esque prostitute. A man is chased through an M.C. Escher-inspired house by a group of children dressed as mice. An old, naked man with half a beard and jaguar heads in place of his nipples screams as the jaguars spit milk into another man's face. With images like this, who cares what they mean?

Ultimately, Jodorowsky himself seems at a loss, deciding that the entire enterprise is meaningless. As The Thief, The Alchemist and the whole crew make their trek to the titular Holy Mountain to find the secret to immortality, they come across a bar peopled by travelers who have given up on the quest and turned to various false idols. One man, brandishing an assortment of drugs, explains that his Holy Mountain lies within his pill bottles. Another opines that he can't climb the mountain because he can only move horizontally. The road to enlightenment, it seems, leads to a tourist trap. Ever the smart-ass, Jodorowsky goes one step further, drawing our attention to the artificiality of the film itself, urging us to leave the theater as "real life awaits." The final moment, while prankish, is somewhat poignant, giving us permission to find our own meaning in the journey of life.

Click here to see the "Holy Mountain" trailer