Category / Film

by Edward Champion

Review: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

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The important thing to understand about Quentin Tarantino is that, as an artist, he has no interest in real life. (Mr. Tarantino’s excellent Crate and Barrel adventure from 2004 does not help his cause, but perhaps there is a reasonable explanation.) Several dour and dense critics, most over the age of 50, cannot see this clear truth before them and have been spending the past few weeks willing their collective blood pressure to rise because they cannot pigeonhole Inglourious Basterds into that neat higher category they desire. (One wonders whether the late Don Edmonds, who gave us the first two Ilsa films, would have faced similar reception in the mid-seventies had he possessed Tarantino’s allure.)

I’ll get to these mostly humorless critics later. They include the normally astute Jonathan Rosenbaum (not this time), Daniel Mendelsohn (who is closer in his assessment, but, not nearly close enough), and the characteristically pompous Ed Gonzalez (who doesn’t seem to ken that Tarantino’s talkathons are part of the point).

The important thing to understand is that Tarantino has never been real. This is the man who didn’t see the humanity in Kirk Blatz’s Reservoir Dogs improvisation. (Blatz played a cop and blurted out the line, “Don’t burn me. I’ve got a kid.” Michael Madsen then told Tarantino, “Quentin, I cannot fucking touch him after he says that to me.” Tarantino’s response? “No, no, I think it’s great. I think it’s wonderful. It brings a whole new element to it.”) This is a man who introduces a kid into the Bride’s domestic brawl with Vernita in Kill Bill Vol. 1 for similar reasons. Character development? Oh, hell no. The kid brings a whole new element. And in Death Proof, when Stuntman Mike is asked why he spends so many hours drinking club soda and lime in a bar, Stuntman Mike says, “A bar offers all kind of things other than alcohol. Women. Nacho grande platters. The fellowships of fascinating individuals like Warren here.” Stuntman Mike turns out to be a psychotic. And it’s easy for any person with a remote understanding of life to see why, given this superficial explanation.

But one should not blame Tarantino for all this. He has, after all, been trying to tell us this for quite some time. Here’s Tarantino in an Entertainment Weekly interview for Kill Bill, Vol. 2:

But one thing that was semi-annoying to me in reading a couple of the reviews for ”Vol. 1” was, ”Oh, this is a very wild technique and style is cranked up and the technique has gone up, but it’s a clear retreat from ‘Jackie Brown,’ and the growing maturity was in there.” ”Clear retreat” says I’m running away from what I did in ”Jackie Brown.” I’ve done it. I don’t have to prove that I can do a [mature character study], all right? And after ”Vol. 1” I don’t have to prove that I can do a good action scene.

Maturity? Leave that for the elder statesmen. Tarantino has done it already. No need to repeat it. So what does Tarantino have to prove exactly? And why does filmmaking have to involve “proving” anything? We expect such claims from a high school jock, not a man in his forties. Maybe it’s because the critical and commercial audiences have expected Tarantino to be real, in the same way that they want Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and world peace to be real. Or perhaps Tarantino’s films prove so intoxicating that we really want them to be real. It’s a testament to Hollywood’s failings that Tarantino’s grab bag of cinematic references and outright theft (see Scorsese’s American Boy and Ringo Lam’s City on Fire just for starters) have managed to seem real, particularly for those who cannot see the real before them.

But if Inglourious Basterds were real, then why would we accept Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Henrich Himmler, and Martin Bormann hanging around 1944 Paris for a film premiere? Innumerable history books refute this. Why would we accept Lt. Aldo’s Apachesque hunger for Nazi scalps? Or his ridiculously inept effort to impersonate an Italian late in the film? This is a movie that presents Goebbels, sitting with a woman who is not his usual French interpreter. The scene itself equires no additional explanation. It is abundantly clear to any thinking mind that this woman is his fuck buddy. And yet Tarantino feels compelled to insert a quick scene of Goebbels schtupping her. Why? Because this film, contrary to all the high-minded talk, isn’t really about the Holocaust. It is more about America’s cathartic response to violence. There’s no need for the Goebbels scene, but we wouldn’t mind seeing it. After all, when our bloodthirst rises, we won’t remember. And what does this say about us?

There’s no need for a long scene in which the thwacks of one vigilante’s baseball bat carry on at an absurd length — to the point where a histrionic Jeffrey Wells, who clearly has his cardiologist on speed dial, called it “one of the most disgusting violent scenes I’ve ever sat through in my entire life.” More disgusting than the Saw movies? We only hear the sounds. “Morally disgusting, I mean.” Oh. But how?

The vigilante in question, known as the “Bear Jew” by none other than Hitler himself, is played by Eli Roth, known predominantly for helming the Hostel movies, which some have described as “torture porn.” But I don’t think his casting is an accident. This is, after all, a movie in which one Frenchwoman says, a few years before the Cannes Film Festival and Cahiers du cinéma have been established, “I’m French. We respect directors in our country.”

But Tarantino can’t be respected in America. Jonathan Rosenbaum ridicules the film’s title, lambasting it with sics and many other charges, but doesn’t remember that Tarantino’s debut, Reservoir Dogs, bastardized the title of Au Revoir Les Enfants. Rosenbaum suggests that Tarantino’s film is “morally akin to Holocaust denial” and doesn’t understand why Jews are giving Tarantino a free ride for this apparent travesty. Maybe Rosenbaum hasn’t lived a second-generation life of nagging and incessant reminders about the Holocaust. (It’s worth noting Lawrence Bender’s reaction to the script. He called it “a fucking Jewish wet dream.”)

Door #2 reveals Daniel Mendelsohn, a critic so lost in the classics that he can’t familiarize himself with the rampant exploitation film violence of the past four decades. Mendelsohn fixates on the scalping as “post-modern fun,” and reveals his true cathartic cards. Mendelsohn just loves seeing the scalped Nazis, thus proving Tarantino’s point — that we are all equal at the cinema. Mendelsohn is smart enough to determine that Basterds is not real life, but he sees this more as a problem than a possibility. Mendelsohn is also wise enough to pinpoint “the visceral pleasure of revenge,” but isn’t willing to come to terms with his own clear pleasure in seeing the Nazis tortured. Here is a high mind who has fallen into Tarantino’s trap, clearly reveling in the violence. One can see Lt. Aldo recruiting Mendelsohn, had he been born only a few decades earlier, and Mendelsohn capitulating his civilized and critical perch for the “fun” of revenge.

This is not, as Mendelsohn suggests, Tarantino’s “taste for vengeful violence,” but the audience’s. If you find the film’s violence fun or cathartic, you will likely wilt into Tarantino’s snare. But is this really so bad as pretending that you don’t have it in for somebody? Perhaps this is where the virtues of catharsis might be found.

Various film people have been raving about Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa, and with good reason. He offers the most compelling performance in this film, and Tarantino has made him the focus of our rage. Here is a man who asks permission to enter a home but who, like Stuntman Mike’s eating habits, will wolf down a strudel without pausing to taste the meal. (When this occurs, and a Jewish woman disguised as French is forced to eat the strudel, Tarantino lingers through closeups on the cream being served atop the strudel, insinuating a kashrut violation.) Is it so wrong to cheer on the despicable Landa’s inevitable fate (comparable as it is to our blind acceptance of waterboarding)? Or are we complicit, as the film suggests later, in approving of the inevitably real results of our cinematic catharsis?

When the four major Nazis attending the cinematic premiere arrive, Tarantino is quick to highlight their names with optical arrows pointing to their location. Here they are! suggests the underlying semiotics. Do you want me to kill them for you later on in the film? If you have a problem with such underlying autocratic flourishes, this film is probably not for you. But if you are a regular filmgoer, then you might wish to consider these questions anyway.

Since Tarantino has spent a lifetime insisting that cinema may very well be the only focal point that he can start from, I found Basterds‘s candor refreshing and I was able, at long last, to accept a Quentin Tarantino film for what it was. Ed Gonzalez, whose review lede reads like a Philip K. Dick protagonist contemplating the paranoia around him, sadly could not, despite his four star rating (which I suspect I agree with). If you’re determined to see everything as “an allusion” or “a pose,” rather than accepting the visceral discomfort before you, then this film is not for you. Which is not to discount Tarantino’s hubris. A film that dares to call into question our cathartic response is arrogant by its very nature. But if we’re so content to feel outrage about whether a film may or may not be exploiting us, one wonders why we’re so determined to put such energies into the duplicities of narrative rather than the more salient (and fixable) cons before us in the real world. If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people may eventually come around to believing it. Especially in cinema. Tarantino has told a big lie. And if the town hall lunatics believe that Obama is Hitler, then I suspect that even our most nimble critical minds will have similar thoughts about Tarantino’s vision. For those of us who have accepted (and enjoyed) exploitation films all along, revisiting this source may prove a strange panacea. And if this anodyne lasts beyond our immediate epoch, then it will be Tarantino who has the last laugh. And for this grand illusion, he may rightly deserve the spoils.

by Edward Champion

Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

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“Come with me if you want to love.” I expected that line at several points, and I confess that great expectation as a man who wanted to believe in this film. You see, aside from being a geek, I am also known to be something of a romantic sap. But the line never came. Henry, our buck naked SNAG and presumed protagonist, has this troubling tendency of emerging in some random time period, often fumbling around for fresh clothes, sometimes smashing in a car window, but always speaking in that deep and dependable Christian Bale-style Batman voice. (Such circumstances cause him to approach a preteen girl naked, and one wonders why he isn’t listed on the Megan’s Law database. If only Jean-Claude Van Damme were around to play Timecop.) Here’s a guy who seems to have found the time to smoke a few cloves before disappearing into the void (how else to explain his vocal affectations?), but who is incapable of drinking. You see, all that wine causes him to jump about from year to year too frequently.

But he isn’t interesting. He isn’t the Henry that I read and enjoyed in Audrey Niffenegger’s novel a few years ago. (But to hell with him. What of Clare?) But he does look an awful lot like Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese, and he does shout the line, “What year?” as if some California governor is on his trail hoping to collect some tax revenue to salvage the plummeting state budget. (Not a chance. This film is set in Chicago, but lacks the late John Hughes’s gift for showing off the town.) But then this is Eric Bana, an actor never known for great depth. He’s the guy you call when Christian Bale isn’t available, or when you need some one-dimensional Romulan heavy for a reboot of a profitable franchise. I’m sorry to be so prejudicial, but it’s the truth. I want Eric Bana to wow me, but he reminds me too much of Michael Paré in the 1980s.

And it’s difficult to take any movie that includes a line involving “the most serene gestation on the planet” too seriously. As much as it pains me, we can blame screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin for such colloquial absurdities. The man did give us, after all, Jacob’s Ladder and Ghost — two perfectly respectable flicks. Because I’m feeling generous, I’ll even give Rubin some plaudits for the Wes Craven joint, Deadly Friend, which had the decency to feature a silly basketball beheading scene. But Rubin isn’t that writer anymore. Or, rather, the system won’t allow him to be that writer anymore. When Henry meets his future father-in-law, he’s Philip Craig playing Philip Abshire playing Christopher Walken in The Wedding Crashers. You can imagine, at times, a bunch of screenwriters trying to cut and paste bits from other commercially successful films. Henry and Clare aren’t afforded the time to establish their relationship. The book had the decency to keep things cheerfully foggy, in large part because Niffenegger knew very well that the high-concept premise needed to ride on how Clare perceived this forever-shifting man of mystery. But the film version pins much of the perspective on Henry. And it’s almost as if a bunch of marketing guys had the following conversation:

MARKETING GUY #1: Dude, not only do we get the rom-com crowd, but we can get an entirely different audience!

MARKETING GUY #2: What?

MARKETING GUY #1: Time travel, dude!

MARKETING GUY #2: Stop calling me, dude. Sir is okay. But not dude.

MARKETING GUY #1: Whatever, man. Anyway, you’ve got all these sad fucking guys who have to take their girlfriends to some piece of shit rom-com.

MARKETING GUY #2: Okay.

MARKETING GUY #1: But we get them too!

MARKETING GUY #2: We already have them.

MARKETING GUY #1: No, no, no! Time travel! You’re not listening.

MARKETING GUY #2: Some of that sci-fi stuff?

MARKETING GUY #1: Dude, I totally got some action in San Diego.

MARKETING GUY #2: Dude, don’t call me dude.

And so on. Insert swagger and comparison of penis sizes. But the point here is that Marketing Guy #1 and Marketing Guy #2 seemed to think that The Time Traveler’s Wife could work as both a science fiction movie and a romantic comedy, thereby killing two demographics with one stone. But the book wasn’t designed this way.

See, here’s the thing. Niffenegger’s book is good, but don’t burrow into the damn novel hoping for deep insight. We needed to believe in the time travel plot. Indeed, it’s essential we believe in the time travel plot. Because, truth be told, the behavioral observations — which include the couple’s two best friends (one played in the film by the dude from Office Space!) — are about as dimensional as the regulars on a half-decent but instantly forgettable sitcom. It’s more Monica wondering what Chandler is up to this week, rather than John Cassavetes nuzzling his shaky camera into Gena Rowland’s soul. But in the book, we don’t care about the narrative shortcomings. Because the time travel plot is pretty damn cool and the perspective is told mostly from Clare. And we want to know what happens.

But in the film version, we know about Henry’s backstory. Because it’s told almost entirely from his perspective at the outset and there really isn’t room for speculation. And, again, he’s played by Eric “Hunk of Meat” Bana. If I wanted to spend 100 minutes with a hunk of meat, I’d waste my time in a meat locker. Bana gives us constantly blinking eyes and that husky voice of emo certainty. The makeup people can’t even age the dude with any verisimilitude. A streak of gray indicates that he’s in his early forties, but his wrinkles stay the same.

I can’t fault director Robert Schwentke for this, because he does his best to make this movie visually interesting. There are endless shots of hallways and doorways, establishing an interesting spatial quality that matches Henry’s time-traveling. But the cheesy Spielbergian handprint on the window had me howling for the Subtlety Police, as did the obligatory growing-up montage. I want to ensure anyone who is reading this that I’ve seen worse films of this type, but truthfully, I had more fun with the 2001 time travel romantic comedy, Kate & Leopold.

“How dare you! You tricked me!” “I never had a choice!” Not exactly the most nuanced dialogue centered around a vasectomy for a couple that knows each other over many years. But then this is a film that lacks the guts to take on the maturity or even the blossoming of romance, which I did find within Niffenegger’s novel in spurts.

The upshot is that you’re probably better off reading the book, which doesn’t have to contend with this obeisance to the marketing team and manages to make improbable moments work because of context, including the infamous lottery ticket scene. Speaking of striking paydirt, I’m not sure if Niffenegger deserved $5 million for her second novel, but at least she has passion. The team that put this movie together is more interested in getting you excited about young, attractive, and ultimately superficial people. I’ve complained about the Hunk of Meat, but Rachel McAdams wins my approval and deserves better than this. So too does the audience.

by Edward Champion

Review: Taxidermia (2006)

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I don’t know if I would go so far as to call György Pálfi our next Fellini (circa late 1960s), our next Pasolini, or even some predictable filmmaker going out of his way to offend us — even if the visual cues for his most recent film suggests all this. But he does have talent. And Taxidermia, which finally gets a limited and long overdue American release this Friday, is certainly not for weak stomachs or limited-minded men who cloak their shallow prejudicial insights inside the sheltered caverns of higher education. The distinguished critic sitting behind me, not the type to sit through a Saw installment, made numerous sounds of disgust. I kept slouching downward in my seat so that the remnants of some half-digested lunch wouldn’t hit me unexpectedly in the back of my head. But thankfully the critic was civilized.

The New York people may not get this film. But then again, they might. For my own part, I feel inclined to applaud it. For there is a regurgitation-heavy eating contest here that makes the “Lardass” scene in Stand By Me look as innocuous as a Disney film. Two men, having just finished shoving spoonfuls of some disgusting stew in their mouth, are now regurgitating their stomachs out of view of the audience. They then begin discussing a woman they’re trying to impress in the audience, all the while puking their guts into a bucket. When they return back to the competition, Pálfi’s camera sweeps through the crowd with an unexpected excitement. I was both disgusted and galvanized by this, and it is a rare film indeed that can dislodge two entirely differing feelings like this at the same time. And this audacious emotional combo made the Hollywood movie I saw afterward seem notably limp by comparison.

But Taxidermia isn’t just a film of scatological shock value. If you’re willing to give this film a chance (and, again, I hesitate to recommend this to those of flaccid constitutions), it offers some inventive visual ideas. A joyful man pisses fire. A camera circles across a floor containing a bathtub, revealing yet another matching bathtub, which houses any number of strange sights in its cavity (an animal carcass, a recently born infant, et al.). An act of bestiality has the violated animal transforming into various women. An enormous man — that champion eater, pictured above, a few decades later — sits permanently in an apartment with endless boxes of chocolate bars. There are giant cats he keeps in a cage and that he keeps big by having his son — a taxidermist — constantly feed them butter. Should I mention the ejaculation mass that shoots into a starscape? Or the creepy pederast we discover in the landscape of a pop-up book? Or, for that matter, the cock (penis) that gets pecked by another cock (animal)?

If such sights trouble you, you should probably blame Lajos Parti Nagy, whose short stories provided the source material for Pálfi to go crazy here. And while the last ten minutes of the film does feature some minor torture porn and the results, on the whole, don’t always work, I doubt very highly that I will see another film in which two champion eaters are enlisted to eat caviar on a boat to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Communist liberation. The film can be cartoonish at times. (Gergely Trócsányi’s shouting as the champion eater grows a bit tedious, but he is replaced by another actor in the next installment. I should probably point out that this film is also a three-part multi-generational epic.) But it’s easily one of the more alive films I’ve seen in a while.

by Edward Champion

Review: Wolke Neun (2008)

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My first instinct was to dismiss the silly second half of Andreas Dresen’s Wolke Neun (Cloud 9 for Yanks), which wallows in childish dialogue (“That’s just so mean!”) and betrays its wonderful first half. But after chewing on this film over the last few days, I’ve found, much to my surprise, that it has stuck with me. I’ve come around to the possibility that these melodramatic developments are, in fact, essential to the film’s broader point. I don’t believe (and my apologies to Jane Juska) this film is really about older people having sex or even elderly characters schtupping about and having a bit of fun, but about the many ways in which civilization has made sex the province of the young, the healthy, and the bendable. We all know that plenty of other people have sex too, but we settle for these smooth and unwrinkled depictions. Aside from the surefire crowd-pleasers of lesbians or ménages à trois, that’s the only sex these days that really sells. But have we lost sight of the awkward gaffes, the intercourse we have when we’re languid or not so virile, or, found sometimes in the troubled suburbs, those clumsy attempts at spontaneity?

Cloud 9 wants us to consider these questions. By casting exceptional actors in the parts (Ursula Werner and Horst Westphal, who resembles, at times, the German answer to Jack Lemmon) and by focusing on a sexual affair not often portrayed in cinema — one between Inge, a 67-year-old married woman, and Karl, a smiling 76-year-old bachelor — Dresen may be asking us to ponder our relationship with authenticity. (Incidentally, this is a subject that Dresen is quite punchy about in interviews: “There is no authenticity in the cinema! If you want authenticity, you should look out the window. You can see truth in the cinema, but you don’t see anything that’s authentic.”) But because Cloud 9 is committed to an inauthentic truth, I’m inclined to accept the inauthentic telephone call that comes near the end of the film and some of the closing corny sentiments (“Perhaps everything has its time.”). For why should we expect constant authenticity from cinema? Maybe we don’t really want to know the authentic truth and maybe we should be spending more of our time looking out windows. (Certainly this film’s failure to depict Viagra caused me to question the dutiful thrusts of our charming septuagenarian bronco.)

Here is a film that initially sets most of its action indoors, suggesting a sedentary life of decay. What do Inge and her husband Werner do for fun? They spend their time listening to records containing train sounds. When they do leave the house, they take a random train and take in the window’s view. “He loves train rides,” explains Inge. Karl, by contrast, offers buff and tangible ambles. “I prefer bike rides through nature,” says Karl. These distinctions may seem clear-cut to us, but Inge actually finds Werner’s locomotive fixations to be not loco, but touching. This is, after all, the man she’s been with for thirty years. Why should she expect otherwise? But then Inge’s lifestyle isn’t so much about expanding her self-discovery, as it is about approaching existence much as she takes on her part-time job: sewing alterations for handsome strangers. No surprise then that our smiling friend Karl meets Inge through her work. But this isn’t exactly Last Tango in the Nursing Home, because these characters thankfully remain independent. But that impending possibility is suggested with Werner’s father, who is infirm and in a rest home. “If I ever end up like my father,” says Werner, “you can shoot me in the woods.” It’s safe to say that Werner lacks Karl’s smooth touch. But then this is Germany.

During the scenes in which Inge rubs lotion on Werner, I was reminded of the creepy scene in Mike Leigh’s Hard Labour, in which Liz Smith rubs her husband’s hairy back. But Inge and Werner seem to get along better than Leigh’s happy couple. Does it all come down to physicality in the end? If so, that’s one hell of a cinematic conceit. But it would be foolish to suggest that this intriguing film is just a dialectic. (Perhaps this is simply what I wanted it to be.)

I should probably point out that during one of the film’s many long takes, I became strangely fixated on the two breast-like bowls hanging on the dining room wall. I doubt that many critics will confess this. And I need not go into the redblooded male’s unwavering interest in mammary glands. But I found this visual to confirm my strange hypothesis. Why on earth would I concentrate on this? Because Dresen may understand that my cinematic mind, like many, is programmed to accept inauthentic truth. And even when there’s a living, breathing character before us, art forces us to fixate on the potential symbols. “That’s just so mean!” says Inge over and over again when Werner eventually levels with her. Childish? Oh yes. But if we were more honest about cinematic authenticity, we wouldn’t have to be reminded. And if we were more truthful about such matters, we wouldn’t have to go to the cinema.

But Cloud 9 is an interesting film.