The DVDetective

I’ve wanted to write this post as soon as I walked out of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Hell, I wanted to start this blog as soon as I walked out of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. And what I want to say is this:

That’s it?!

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie. But there’s something you should know:

PULP FICTION is in my top 3 favorite movies of all time. Some days it’s even number 1.

In my opinion, it’s one of the greatest movies of all time. AND…one of the subtlest.

Yeah, I bet you didn’t see that one coming. I’ll be blogging about THAT in the days to come.

Sooooo…I’m perhaps not the most impartial judge of Tarantino’s recent work.

But really, give me a break. Who is.

So here’s my take: RESERVOIR DOGS. Fantastic movie. Personal Top 20. Used to be a Top 10, but Roth’s American accent starts to grate on me. Most Brits waaaaay overdo an American accent…although I’ll bet they say the same about us Yanks. I wish he’d just stuck to his British accent. He’s amazing in LIE TO ME.

Anyway, you know my opinion about PULP FICTION.

TRUE ROMANCE – yes, I know, only written by Tarantino – is, again, fantastic. I know it was rewritten partially by Roger Avary, but it’s easily Tony Scott’s best movie. Personal Top 30.

NATURAL BORN KILLERS – hated it. Not Tarantino’s fault, but Ollie’s. JACKIE BROWN – hated it. Need to revisit it again, probably better than I remember. KILL BILL I: liked it at the time. Think it’s impressive. KILL BILL II: disliked (but not hated) it at the time. Gradually grew on me with repeated viewings. DEATHPROOF: half of it is very good – the half with Stuntman Mike, the initial stalking of the Austin girls, and the car chase at the end. But several of the conversations (specifically the one where Zoe Bell and the stunt driver argue about taking the Dodge Challenger out for a spin) are just an overwritten mess.

It started showing up in KBII, but Tarantino has lost his ability to write great dialogue scenes. Don’t get me wrong, he can still write very GOOD dialogue scenes, but great? Here’s the test: how many great speeches can you remember offhand from RESERVOIR DOGS? (Madonna speech, “Why do I have to be Mr. Pink”…) How about TRUE ROMANCE? (That insane Walken/Hopper speech about lying…Brad Pitt on the couch…Gandolfini talking about killing people just watch them die…Alabama’s amazing speech about love on the rooftop…Gary Oldman’s “I know I’m pretty but…”) PULP FICTION was the granddaddy of them all. I can’t even name them all. Scenes that people quote for the pure joy of quoting them.

How many can you quote from the rest of his movies? And I’m not talking about “Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey.” Seriously. I can think of a few, but nobody quotes them. Not like his old ones. And I was furious when he ripped off a sociology article on Superman for Bill’s big speech in KBII.

But we’ll get to that some other day. Back to BASTERDS.

What probably doomed me the minute I walked in the theater was that people had been saying it was a really good movie. I had friends who said they were put off by PULP FICTION’s violence, say that “Damn, this was a movie!” A friend of mine actually said that. And hey, Christolph Waltz won the Cannes Best Actor Award for playing Hans Landa, “The Jew Hunter.” That’s pretty impressive – and the closest Tarantino’s gotten back to big awards since PULP won the Palm d’Or and the Oscar for Screenplay.

So…had to be good, right?

Well, part of the fault lies with me. I know I shouldn’t do it, but I read about stuff obsessively before I go into movies. I try to stay away, but it’s like an alcoholic with a bottle of Johnny Walker in the house. You know he’s goin’ after it. I can’t help myself.

So…HEY! SPOILERS HERE! GO AWAY IF YOU DON’T LIKE SPOIILERS!

So I knew about what happens to the Third Reich at the end of the movie. (It wasn’t my fault on that one – I was reading an interview with Tarantino, and the fucking interviewer just springs it out in the second question. Nice way to warn me about spoilers, asshole.) I knew about Shosanna, “cinema as a weapon,” blah blah blah…I knew Landa was a political opportunist more than he was an anti-Semite…I knew it was less about the Basterds and more about the other people…

It didn’t ruin it for me. But I’ve been in movies where I knew quite a bit, and I still got blown away. DARK KNIGHT, for instance (Top 20, I think). I knew a lot…I knew about the Joker pencil trick, I knew who Harvey Dent became…and yet there were at least three or five “WHAT THE FUCK!!” moments watching that movie. Seriously. I was blown away at several points.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS? Not so much.

Liked the beginning with the Morricone music…liked the scene, although I’d already heard it compared to the opening scenes of THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, so…eh. Really liked Pitt in this one. Thought I might be put off by his accent, but it was one of my favorite parts of the movie. Thought I would hate Eli Roth, but he actually did a good job, especially the “Can you make it?” “I’ll have to” scene he has at the end with another, minor character. Great scene.

Loved the scene in the German beer hall between the Brit, Diane Kruger, and the asshole SS character.

And – if taken by themselves – I really liked the Shosanna scenes. Her scene with Landa after talking to Goebbels…great.

Landa…hmmm. On one hand, if I hadn’t heard about how he won the Cannes award, I think I would have loved Waltz in the part. The problem was, I never really felt threatened. Except in the scene with Shosanna after Goebbels – that was good. But the opening – eh. I like him as a wacky weirdo, but I never bought him as a terribly fear-inspiring character. And not particularly sinister (unless you count the defacto rounding up Jews for execution part). The asshole SS officer in the beer hall – the one who doesn’t buy the Brit’s accent – was way more unnerving to me, even in the few short scenes he had.

And I hate, FUCKING HATE, that Tarantino used a non-period song as Shosanna glams up for her final performance.

A David Bowie song, no less.

Yeah, I get that it’s thematically relevant. I get that the whole scene looks like some nightmarish, German Expressionism countdown to death. I get it. (I think.)

But…come on, man. That song took me straight out of the movie. All I could think was, “What the fuck is that David Bowie song doing in a World War II movie?”

If you’re gonna pull shit like that, better make it a recurring theme – or maybe even a linchpin of the movie, like in MARIE ANTOINETTE. (Haven’t seen it, but I know it uses 80’s pop music for the entire soundtrack.) But one out-of-time anachronism for a scene that is really nothing more than a depiction of the character’s state of mind and setting a mood? MAN that was like a pencil jabbed in my ear. (The eraser, not the sharp point.)

I guess you could say he was setting us up for the ultimate whimsy with the way he rewrites the end of WWII.

I pondered it, and I came up with an interesting thought: every World War II movie rewrites history to some degree. Whether it be big, like THE BIG RED ONE (one of my favorite war movies of all time – I’ll write about it some day), or relatively close to reality (like A BRIDGE TOO FAR was, supposedly, according to William Goldman’s ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE), every movie rewrites reality, even though it purports not to. And we accept it, because it’s close enough. And the movie is trying for the illusion of reality, or at least enough to sucker us in to believing what we’re seeing.

I think Tarantino on some level was like, “Well, if everybody rewrites history in making these movies, I’M GONNA DO THE BIGGEST REWRITE OF THEM ALL.”

And he’s right, it is.

It’s audacious.

But I don’t know if it’s particularly good.

Oh, it’s fun in a bloodletting kind of way, and I likes me some bloodletting every now and then. The ultimate Jewish revenge on Hitler is pretty cool in theory.

But it…eh…I don’t know. It seems to be a scene that dances around screaming, “Look at me! Look at what I’m doing! Ha ha! Aren’t you shocked? Isn’t this kuh-raaaaaaaazy? Hahahahahahahahaha!”

And it IS shocking, at first. (By the way, the reviewer who objected to the rewrite of WWII on the grounds that it lowered Jews to the Germans’ level is an idiot.)

But is it much more than that? Mm. We’ll see on repeated viewings…if I ever get around to one. It’s not a movie that particularly inspires me to do a second viewing.

And the last line of the movie – “This just may be my masterpiece” – followed by Tarantino’s credit? He might as well have put a horn and a drum going “Bah-dah-dah-duh-de-bump. Fweet!” the way the band does after a bad comic’s joke.

This is your masterpiece, huh? I waited 15 years after hearing about this shortly after PULP FICTION…for this?

I think he started off making a men-on-a-mission movie, which is what Tarantino says…but then he got carried away. He has said in interviews that the Shosanna part of the film insistently began growing, and he almost didn’t have control over it. Or something to that effect.

That’s the problem. The Shosanna movie would have been very interesting on its own. The Basterds would have been incredibly fun (I would have liked to have known more about Aldo Raines, Pitt’s character, that’s for sure). Landa would have been interesting to follow around the Nazi corridors of power. The only problem is, mix them all up and…you get a weird mess. It’s not like PULP FICTION, where all the separate parts coalesce into a greater whole that builds and builds. In BASTERDS, the parts seem to give short shrift to each other, robbing each other of screentime until, like any good compromise, EVERYBODY’S unhappy.

At least I was.