Tag: Inglourious Basterds

The Top (Two Thousand and) Ten Films

Dear reader,

I give you these 10 suggestions (from the 35 films I saw this year) to consider as eminently watchable and deeply worthwhile cultural experiences…

10.  The Road:  It was bleak and heart-wrenching and so difficult to watch…but it was unflinchingly truthful and often had a kind of tarnished beauty.  An amazing film that I never want to see again.

9.  (500) Days of Summer:  I think I was dead center in the sights of this film’s demographic appeal.  Indie soundtrack (& Smiths shout out to boot!), check.  Ernestly romantic guy, check.  Lack of ambition as virtue, check.  Creative, non-linear, brain-teasing narrative structure, check.  By all accounts, a non-conformist, iconoclastic, incredulous contrarian such as myself should have seen right through this.  But I ate it up.

8.  District 9:  The Office with aliens.  Original and touching beyond all expectation.

7.  Avatar:  Utterly predictable storytelling, but I was almost literally transported into the world of Pandora (course, I DID see it in IMAX 3-D, which made this almost a given).  The mythic instinct come to life…

6.  Adventureland:  This film tapped into something pretty nostalgic for me, but it also is an amazingly honest portrait of summertime post-teenage angst in low-pay limbo.  Performances from main & minor actors hit me in the melancholy bone…and the songs made me shudder with recollection of an adolescence lived to that soundtrack (ROCK ME, AMADEUS!).

5.  Up in the Air:  My only criticism of this very fine and relevant dramatic comedy is in the casting of non-leads:  actual unemployed people as the victims of redundancy came off as schlocky & the hip actors (Zach Galifianakis, Danny McBride, Jason Bateman) in minor roles felt distracting (see The Invention of Lying for the most egregious use of this type of “pack casting”—i.e. “if I show up in your movie, that lets everyone know I’m in your crew”)

4.  Up:  I did not want to like this in order to resist the Pixarification of my soul, but alas my brain is fully washed and my heart is clay in the hands of these masters.  I saw it once with my wife & once with my kids.  So great & unforeseeably ingenious.

3.  Inglourious Basterds:   I really did love this movie, though my reservations of whether I SHOULD have loved it still haunt me.

2.  Where the Wild Things Are:   Never was a fan of the book…creeped me out.  Didn’t particularly want to like the movie, though I am a fan of Jonze & Eggars.  But after viewing, I could not get it out of my thoughts for days.  I feel like I lived that film somehow.  Moved me in profound ways on many different levels.  It will gain the recognition it deserved someday…

And in FIRST PLACE:

The furthest thing from the cluster cuss this could have been.

1.  Fantastic Mr. Fox:  The dialogue, the look, the details, the heart, the growling, the outfits, the voices, the humor, the pacing, the panache, the feel, the stillness, the child-likeness, the tears, the speeches, the GENIUS.  I will see this film many times more before I die…

Note: It’s fascinating to me to see THREE (ostensibly) children’s films at the top of this list.  Regression?  Longing for a care free world?  Return to innocence?  My only response is to ask what the cross is between an elephant and a rhino.

Honorable mentions:  I Love You Man, Watchmen (the credit sequence alone was among the best looking cinema this year), Star Trek.  ADDITION:  Zombieland !

Wish I could have seen:  The Hurt Locker, Bright Star, Moon, A Serious Man, In the Loop, It Might Get Loud, The Informant!, The White Ribbon, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Thirst.

Biggest disappointments (and my respective “microview”—aka review with minimal words involving some sort of pun on the title):

  • The Brothers Bloom – The Brothers Wilt
  • Away We Go – Eww, Go Away
  • The Invention of Lying – The Venting of Denying
  • Ponyo – Panyo

Not as bad as everyone said it was: The Box (from Richard Kelly, writer/director of Donnie Darko):  which had some genuinely creepy, intriguing and touching moments, solid performances, lovely sense of time/place, before it crapped out.  And a score from (pretty much) The Arcade Fire!

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Inglourious Propoganda

I saw the film Inglourious Basterds the other day, upon the recommendation of a number of friends.  I left the theater feeling two simultaneous and somewhat contradictory feelings (in a word: ambivalent).  On the one hand, I “enjoyed” the film:  the tension-building dialogues exploding in a climactic release (apologies for the sexual undertones there), the hip, “anything goes” approach to style (anachronistic soundtrack, insider cameos, visual homage, etc.) and the powerful archetypal film characters (the bad ass soldiers, the avenging victim, the brilliant psychopath, etc.).  It was an incredibly well-made film, but it also gave me exactly what I would want (on one level) from a movie about people taking on the Nazis.  [SPOILER ALERT]  The Nazis get SLAUGHTERED!  The good guys win, and even if some of them died in the process, it was heroically in the act of destroying some of the most evil people in history.

inglourious-basterds-poster

But this is where the contradictory feeling came in.  It felt wrong to enjoy the massacre of Nazis.  (There was some part of me that felt like I was watching Team America: World Police without realizing it was a satire of American military arrogance.)

The scene that came back to me as I was reflecting on the film & realizing my ambivalence was when Hitler, Goebbels & the Nazi elite were watching the film within the film about the young Nazi war hero who killed 300 Allied soldiers from a tower.  Repeatedly, we watch the Nazis applauding scenes of the sniper picking off his attackers (probably Americans) and we scoff at this propagandistic depiction of violence against the enemy, portrayed as inhuman, anonymous targets for the hero to destroy.  Even the young Nazi hero seems to feel disdain for the way this is portrayed…

Though I did not find it ironic at the time, subsequently, we as the audience are treated to the sight of these Nazi filmgoers being burned to death & shot down like fish in a barrel by  Jewish soldiers (along with a highly fetishized moment of actor Eli Roth ripping Hitler’s face apart with a hail (heil?) of bullets).  It seems implicit that we will cheer this on, indeed, the whole film feels like a set-up for a moment that we can hardly believe could end this way (knowing actual history as we do).  Of course, it was an “alternate history” reality we see occurring, but it felt so much more satisfying than what actually happened.  However, I began to wonder how we as the filmgoers were much different from the Nazi movie audience cheering the death of Allied soldiers.

This led me to see the director of IB, Quentin Tarantino, as a sort of Joseph Goebbels figure of American populist cinema (depicting simplistic good/evil characters, giving an audience what it wants, using techniques–such as the score, B-movie conventions, etc.–to tap into the collective audience subconscious and manipulate them to the filmmaker’s ends), which oddly then, would make Harvey Weinstein, a Jew,  the Hitler figure…although I suppose it’s not completely surprising as he has been seen as a bit of a fascist dictator in the filmmaking business.

The film had a number of role reversals of Nazi for Jew (Aldo referring to Nazi’s as “not human”, the brutal beatings/casual executions of German soldiers, all of the Nazi’s being burned to death similar to the crematoriums), which made me feel like I was being set up/propogandized to applaud the same thing for the Nazis which I lamented for the Jews. I may be seeing something that is not there at all, but it seems like to take this film simply as a “revenge fantasy film” for Jews (see reactions from descendants of Holocaust survivors and Rabbis here)  lacks a certain amount of incredulity that a savvy director such as QT would expect.  Am I supposed to resist my enjoyment of this slice of fantasy justice, or give into it and become implicitly akin to the Nazi filmgoers?

Anyhow, regardless of whether I have appropriately interpreted this sequence of scenes, I would recommend anyone else who “enjoyed” watching all of the Nazis get killed as inhuman representations of pure evil to watch a film like Stalingrad where the audience follows young German soldiers, who don’t seem as gung ho about the 3rd Reich as we usually see in films, heading to the Russian front where they are led like sheep to a slaughter.  Anyone associated with the Nazi regime certainly finds themselves on the wrong side of history,  but we may need to be careful to allow ourselves to be duped into seeing ANYONE as less than human…even those who we feel like are the worst people in history.