Basterds of a New Color

Attention all cinephiles: have no fear. The 2009 movie year has officially begun. If you're like me and you've been trying to "make do" or pretend to be satisfied with the summer's current offerings, Quentin Tarantino's audacious Inglourious Bastards will rescue you from your movie blues. The premise is essentially a fantasist's vision of the second world war.

A group of Jewish Yankee soldiers, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), land in German-occupied France and proceed to take the lives and scalps of as many Nazi soldiers as they can. Before long, word spreads throughout the Reich, earning the men mythic names such as "the Bear Jew" and "Aldo the Apache." This is only the beginning of Tarantino's labyrinthine story which also involves a German actress spying for the allies, a Jewish film projectionist who was orphaned by the SS, her ebony lover and a particular effete Joseph Goebbels. Rounding out the cast are an almost unrecognizable Mike Meyers and Rod Taylor as British General Ed Fenech and Winston Churchill respectively -- just two of Tarantino's many in-jokes. Special mention is also owed to Christoph Waltz, in an Oscar-worthy turn as they oily, machiavellian Col. Hans Landa.

"Basterds" will no doubt have many detractors. It is easily the most reckless and irreverent war film I have ever seen. Some will find it crude, disrespectful and without redeeming virtue, but these are the very same traits that make it provocative, relevant and very fresh. Tarantino fans will not be surprised by the violence in the film, but they may be taken with how unglamorous it is. Although previous Tarantino films have aimed to titilate us with their criminality, I believe the writer/director is after a different game here. Inglourious Bastards is an anti-war film. Thankfully good old QT is just too sly to admit it.

The biggest challenge audiences will face is defining the moral objective behind the film. Unlike the countless scores of tributes we have seen to soldiers of the great wars and their sacrifice and struggle, the filmmakers dare to examine the issue from all sides. Both the allies and the Nazis are portrayed as complicated creatures, sometimes gallant, sometimes cruel. Tarantino understands that war is merely a collision of egos, ids and super-egos. It's often morbidly funny and without redemption for any side. That's what the ending is intended to signify (for those who leave the theatre scratching their chins in puzzlement). The picture is a mockery of war and the films that celebrate our battle-frought heritage and yet it also pays homage to our favorite war films. This is no small task and if it sounds contradictory it is.

Tarantino has created a war film for people who have become desensitized to the structure and meaning of conventional war films. He goes for broke and gleefully sidesteps the pratfalls of the genre. He doesn't try to inspire us with sweeping vistas and noble ideals. He doesn't try to make pacifists out of us with harrowing battles and cruel violence. Instead, he boldly lampoons everyone and everything onscreen, while simultaneously holding us in his grip.

There are so many flourishes and textures in a Tarantino picture that it may be easy to overlook his brilliance in creating (yet again) two strong, memorable, female roles in a genre that rarely honors our mothers and daughters. The female leads, Shoshana Drefyus (Melanie Lawrence) and Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) are nothing short of extraordinary. Bastards also features several trademark QT scenes, including a standoff at a tavern that ratchets up the tension as only he can. Some scenes run so long that they begin to overstay their welcome, until just as our eyes begin to glaze over the story takes a turns and surprises us.

In certain circles, I'm sure these heavily padded scenes will be dismissed as indulgent and unfocussed, but this is missing the point. Regardless of whether the film jives with your personal taste, Inglourious Bastards assures Tarantino's status as a master filmmaker in complete control of his story at all times. He plays with structure, style and rhythm to keep us gloriously off guard (no pun intended) and he packs his film with layers of meaning, ambiguity and bravura filmmaking -- not to mention in-jokes. This is Tarantino's most triumphant entertainment since Pulp Fiction. It's a movie for anyone who loves the movies. It is also a delirious, imaginative, masterpiece--provided that you're willing to accept that war is one big, fat, joke.

**Note: The B&W film clip denoting the flammable properties of nitrate film is from Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), from a screenplay by Charles Bennett, Ian Hay & Helen Simpson, and E.V.H. Emmett, based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent.**

The Drama of Harry Potter

Steve Kloves' screen adaptation of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the most streamlined film in the series yet. So streamlined, that much of the spectacle has been exorcised to make room for the complicated interrelationships of the central characters. Director David Yates demonstrates a fine grasp of nuance and tension but eventually the film begins to wear thin, culminating in a limp climax that is too little too late. Still, it's fun to witness the shifting politics of Hogwarts on the big screen. Equally fun are the scenes in which Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ron's sister Ginny get their "snog" on, wizard-style, but the real pleasure of reading the book was the central relationship between Harry and Dumbledore and to this end, unfortunately, the newest film does not deliver. In the book, Dumbledore assumes the role of a father to Harry, but we don't know why and the mystery behind his actions fills the story with a sense urgency. In the movie, they don't have enough screen time together to generate the same tension. As a result, the would-be harrowing climax (which I will not disclose) feels rushed and does not leave us with any of the lingering impact of the book. In the end the latest Potter is efficient, subtle and well-detailed, but more memorable for its smaller moments than its big ones.

The Sound of Gunfire: Michael Mann's Public Enemies

Michael Mann is fascinated with the mythic nature of society and the power struggles between men. His Public Enemies bristles with the excitement of these myths, which he celebrates through style, texture and explosions, and yet the film does little to reveal meaning behind our myths. Mann is a brilliant craftsman and stylist. Students of film will appreciate his dizzying camera and terse editing. There is life to almost every frame, especially when the cops and robbers are shooting it out, using big, loud, guns, but there is also a gaping hole at the center of the movie where there could have been so much more.

John Dillinger was a man of the people, a national folk hero during the Great Depression, known as much for his gregarious personality and charisma as his criminal efficiency. Unfortunately the three writers credited with the project (including Mann) couldn't figure out a way to work this out. Johnny Depp's Dillinger is cool, remote and sociopathic. We see nothing of the community support he worked so hard to earn. We never get a sense of the exhiliration behind his bank heists and as a result he is mainly joyless to watch.

This Dillinger takes pleasure in nothing except for his 'moll' Billie (Marion Cotillard), who is either drawn to his charisma or threatened by his ruthlessness. Either way, she's along for the ride. Their romance is the only beacon of humanity in the film but it has no weight or credibility. Most of the time Dillinger just floats through scenes like a badass automaton.

Fighting for the other side is Agent Purvis (Christian Bale), a stoic and meticulous lawman who leads the manhunt for Dillinger. Their cat and mouse interplay never really catches fire. Mann is too preoccupied with the manly bravado and macho posturing of his leads, to dig beneath the surface as he did so brilliantly in Heat. There isn't a single scene that shows us Purvis in his private life outside of the job, and if there had been his epigraph might have had impact.

What ultimately makes the film work is the crackling soundtrack and the ending. There's something profoundly unsettling about the way the manhunt for Dillinger comes to a close. Public Enemies may be the first gangster film in which the villain is gunned down and somehow the police come off as the guilty ones. If only the writers had worked a little harder to bring us to this point. Like so many recent and inscrutable movie protagonists (think Benjamin Button or Harvey Milk), this Dillinger drifts through history without actually impacting it.  As a consequence, you may leave Public Enemies remembering the sound of the gunfire more than anything else, but what dazzling gunfire it is.

David & Allen: Tepid Bedfellows

Whatever Works doesn't work for all of it's momentary brilliance and good intentions. Woody Allen's latest film tells the diverting tale of Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) an agnostic, and self-proclaimed hater of people, who almost won a Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics, but now spends his time either teaching chess to youngsters or hermiting in his rat-trap apartment. One night he's climbing his back fire escape, when he stumbles across Melodie St. Ann Celestine, a dewy-eyed Southern Belle (Evan Rachel Wood), camped outside his flat, begging for food and lodging. Against his judgment Boris invites her in and it doesn't take long before the two of them decide to get married. Matters only get stranger when Melodie's mother and father (Patricia Clarkson and John Gallagher Jr.) show up to bring her back home, but wind up discovering their own repressed layers of self-expression.

Boris is the kind of curmudgeonly New York Jewish character that Allen has made a career of writing. Getting Larry David to play the part could have been a marriage made in comedy heaven, but unfortunately the script keeps us at arm's length. David's comedic soliloquies in which he expounds on the meaning of existence have the stuff of vintage Woody, but they run on too long. Patricia Clarkson and Evan Rachel Wood play their southern parts admirably, but they feel like they belong in a different movie, as does Randy James (Henry Cavill), the Englishman who Wood has an affair with. Many of the gags fall flat and all of the competing cultural archetypes throw off the timing of the film, preventing it from gaining a consistent rhythm or momentum. Rabid Allen fans will find the movie amusing, but this is a bitter disappointment after Vicky Christina Barcelona.

Mendes goes organic

Away We Go surprised me. It made me think twice about every snide comment I've ever made at the expense of director Sam Mendes. It's like the anti-Mendes film. Archetypes are replaced with real characters. Grand moral statements are traded for honest uncertainty. There is something unpredictable if not inevitable about the way the screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida unfolds. The movie has a breezy, melancholy, spirit of discovery -- we feel as though we are discovering the world all over again through the eyes of John Krasinsky and Maya Rudolph, as they prepare for the birth of their first child and contemplate what kind of parents they'll be. Touring North America from Albequerque to Montreal, they encounter various couples who have devised their own unique child-rearing strategies and are now facing the consequences of their decisions.

The story is episodic, but the episodes add up to a refreshingly inconclusive perspective on parenthood. It's like Mendes has gone organic and traded in the stagy artifice of his previous work (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road) for something disarmingly raw and authentic. This little movie succeeds where many fail by showing us who we really are: erratic, complicated, confused creatures. At times the script meanders and there doesn't always seem to be a point, but the denouement ties everything together. Away We Go speaks to a generation of 30-somethings who are disillusioned with the state of the world, skittish about bringing children into it, and yet forced to go blindly forth without knowing whether or not they are up to the task. The performances are funny and at times achingly poignant. This is a fresh and relevant new indie film and history may be far kinder to it than some critics have been.

Clint

Clint Eastwood started as an actor on TV's Gunsmoke. Boyishly handsome, he stood out. He grew to manhood and stardom in Sergio Leone's "Dollars trilogy" with A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. He was the man with no name and an international player, but he wasn't especially well-respected. There was little to suggest the things to come. Then, in the 70's, Clint Eastwood the icon arrived in the form of Dirty Harry Callahan. Dirty Harry was an uncommonly primal cop film. It inspired a legion of inferior spinoffs and provoked us with a brand of justice that wasn't simply black and white. Eastwood made four other Dirty Harry pictures, each based on hot-button, morally provocative, situations. They were slickly made and unabashedly exploitative. They worked...well, all but The Dead Pool.

Clint climbed into the director's chair for Sudden Impact, the most complex film in the series. Throughout the 70's and 80's he continued to top himself, delivering high-octane entertainment in various action and suspense thrillers. He toyed with audience perceptions by befriending a monkey in Every Which Way But Loose and putting the cowboy hat back on in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Just as he started to catch fire, he would reinvent himself -- restless for new creative challenges.

Now at age 79, Clint has become one of the most talked about American directors. His last two films, Changeling and Gran Torino, both released last year, are among his very best and he shows no signs of slowing down. Since Unforgiven, his greatest film, Clint has assembled a remarkably diverse and consistent filmography. Several films have entered the cinematic pantheon (A Perfect World, The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima). As a director, his work is sobering, honest and authentic. Some of his films suffer from sluggish pacing and an obvious didacticism, but even his misfires offer compelling themes and uncommonly intimate acting. Clint is a keen student of the human condition. He probes deeply into the fabric of society, without ever drifting into pretension or stylistic excess. Could he be one of our greatest living directors?

Remembering Holiday

George Cukor's Holiday is an enchanting, old fashioned, romantic comedy with a premise as irresistible today as it was when it premiered in 1938.  Cary Grant is a free-spirited dreamer, engaged to Doris Nolan, an upper crust socialite from one of Manhattan's wealthiest families.  When he makes a killing on the stock exchange and announces his intention to retire from law so he can sail around the world, he draws rancor from Nolan and her family.  The question then becomes whether he will compromise by taking the desk that his would-be father in law has offered him, or pursue the life he truly wants.  Enter Katherine Hepburn, Nolan's sister, a very modern woman hemmed in by her stuffy, elitist family.  Hepburn responds to Grant's youthful ideals and quickly makes it her mission to hold onto him -- on her sister's behalf.  

It's plain to see that she and Grant belong together, but Donald Ogden Stewart & Sydney Buchman's script is truly a crash course on how to write your characters out of a potentially unsavory triangle.  Somehow Hepburn manages to steal her sister's beau without betraying her trust and Grant wins our sympathies after quitting his fiancee in favor of her sister.  Cynics may dismiss this as romantic pablum, but fans of the genre will be hard-pressed to find a film that is as funny and genuinely romantic as this one.  Cukor keeps things moving, Grant somehow makes even the clumsiest acrobatic flips look dashing and gallant and Hepburn tugs at our heartstrings without resorting to maudlin theatrics.  Watch for peerless character actor Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Grant's closest friends, who realize before anyone else that he and Hepburn are made for each other.  Sparkling and timeless.