Much Ado About Quentin

Let me say first that I love movies. I think that next to literature, all things film are glorious, minus the business aspect anyway. Whether it is the acting, screenwriting, cinematography, and/or editing related part of the creation, as much as anything in the arts, moving pictures touch me the most and influence my perceptions of culture. Baseball was my first love as a boy, and the Dodgers remain my passion, but the game has changed with corporate ownership, PEDs, and merchandising that borders on propaganda mind control. Movies changed, too, but for whatever reason, I considered them partially prostituted anyway, so seeing baseball become a low-grade hooker in the last 30 years has been more jarring to my false innocence.

I used to go to films so often I knew the theater workers better than my siblings. In my 20s, I'd go to the Syufy Cinedome Theaters in Orange twice or three times a week for the matinee - $2.50 before 2 PM. I had a night job so it was great for a film lover. I once anticipated film openings as if I were some sort of underground version of Walter Winchell. All the ships at sea would one day know of my feelings about Red Sonja or whether or not I enjoyed Pale Rider more than Silverado. It was pre-internet, and I was a dork just a few years removed from playing D&D.

All of this is preface to my anti-review of the latest film by Quentin Tarantino (writer-director), Inglourious Basterds, because I have no nice way of expressing what I am about to do, so I thought I'd begin wistfully. I wish I could have said this right off because it pains me to say it, but I told you that stuff about myself because typing this actually hurts.

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is not a good film. The plot is too ambitious, the characters varied and overmany. 2/3 of the lines are spoken in a language other than English and 90% of those are subtitled. At film's end I turned to my buddy Dave and his wife Lora and said, "Disappointed . . ." And I still am.

I have read no other reviews of this film, and have no idea what the pros think. Perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way. I can say this much, and that is that I went into that theater to see a Tarantino war movie in the vein of Don Siegel, Samuel Fuller, Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah. I wanted a bloodfest of dead Nazis and I wanted to see Jews get payback on white power bastards. I have no qualms with films that are homages, ripoffs, or borrowed techniques of other directors. I actually like that style of film. I expect Quentin to wax Antonioni as he drag-pans his camera here and there. I expect anachronisms aplenty because Quentin cares nothing for such purist drivel. He makes movies that pop and the devil take the hindmost.

So when I say this movie was not good, I mean it and I say it with head lowered. Professional film critics get free admission, press releases, and access to interviews I do not get. But I spent $10.50 of my own teacher's pay greenbacks to see this, and I wish now that I had waited until my friend could pirate me a decent copy next week. Even then, I would have been disappointed.

In my limited but extremely wisened and layered "watched-400-movies-on-VHS-in-25 years-and-another-200-in-theaters" over the same span experiences, this film is Tarantino's worst effort as a director, and as a writer. I usually like Tarantino films, and three of my all-time top 25 are Quentin's babies, but this was just not a good one. UGH!

Was that clear enough? I hope so.

So here goes a few reasons why. You can stop reading now if you like. I know how it goes. If you like a filmmaker, and if you haven't seen his latest effort, and some dickhead pans it, you start to think, "What does your dumbass know anyway?" Who are you, David freaking Lean? Go back to community theater and try out for 'Pippin' again, reject!" I understand that feeling. And you may be correct, except to say, in my defense, I'm too tall to play a hunchback anyway . . .

So allow me to explain the ways that I see Tarantino's latest mondo-actionfest effort as a poor product. There are no spoilers, as this is less a blow-by-blow than it is a post-mortem. I watched this less than 16 hours ago and I'm still bummed out at how it failed to deliver the goods.

What's Wrong With "Inglourious Basterds"

The Dialogue - Normally sharp and irregular simultaneously, this Tarantino script dragged like a dog with no legs. His script lacked the flow of Pulp Fiction or From Dusk Till Dawn, arguably the writer's two finest hours for melding multiple characters into a nice combo of funny, profane, profound, and uneven humanity. Other than the lead character of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), most of the cast was stuck staring languidly across the lens, speaking lines that had little sizzle whatsoever. Yes, there were good moments, but this film lasted an obtuse two-and-half hours, and I assessed its best lines as totalling perhaps 15 minutes of screen time. Younger viewers will doubtless quote lines like "I want my scalps" or "Business is a-Boomin'!" as if these cleverly black whimsies rained from the film's heavens - but they did not. There were times when I wished the characters would either die off quickly or lose their ability to speak, but please GOD stop blurting out your nonsensical, non-realistic blather. I do not blame the actors, as most did the best they could. I blame Quentin. It was his script, or as he called it recently, "my masterpiece." Sorry, but it is not and you've done far, far better, Mr. T.

The Gore Factor - When you make stuff go splat like QT does, your fans hope for the usual. Gimme an ear slice, gimme a point-blank execution, gimme vampires and zombies popping like rotten cantaloupes on hot pavement. Yeah, GORE! This film's problem is the predictability of the splatter. At no point was I genuinely surprised, and no situational irony of any kind arose to make me think, "Dear God, he isn't going to show THAT, is he?" Oh sure, there's ample scalp-taking, knife-carving, bat-swinging and gunshot-riddled Nazis, and good guys, bad guys, and even bar girls get dead inventively enough in this flick. But it was too rote, too expected, and too, too "Meh!"

Allow me to return to my earlier baseball framework here, so bear with me, please. QT's movie gore has become what Barry Bond's last 200 home runs were in his steroid phase. Both could do their thing well before they started cheating. Both saw others steal their technique and gain fame as well. Both reacted to that imitation by going for a compromise in their approach to their art. Bonds and Tarantino act as if MORE is better because of excess alone, not because of the quality of the process itself. If I lost some of you non-baseball fans, I apologize. It is just that Tarantino need not show off his flair any more, yet he keeps fetishistically going for some sort of goreapalooza in his movies. I'm over it and this is the worst I've seen from him. Be new and better, not just more graphic for its own sake. In a zombie film like Planet Terror, it makes a certain measure of sense, but I've seen Nazi movies like Peckinpah's Cross of Iron and Siegel's Hell Is for Heroes and those films were just as horrifying in their violence without the cheap jolts that QT uses in this mess. Neither of Don's or Sam's iconic WWII tales required a bat-braining scene like this film employs. Oddly enough, Inglourious Basterds was graphic but ridiculous that way, and I consider Gaspar Noés' ferocious bludgeoning scene (in 2002's Irréversible) the standard of what Tarantino tried to do here but failed to achieve. Gaspar wanted to horrify you in that film - SUCCESS, Gaspar ~ Epic Fail, Quentin! Finally, neither Peckinpah nor Siegel of old needed nor wanted the viewer of their film to laugh at what was not, in truth, evil and disgusting. They let war's horrors be horrifying, not farcical.

The Cutesy Comments - Suffice it to say that Inglourious Basterds has a hatful of these Tarantino quoteables. I'll give him his due. I laughed a few times, but a few means five or six times in this case. In the theater in which I watched the film, the laughs were common early but tapered off to a scattered few by the halfway point and were pretty much nil by the last reel. If you remove the Aldo Raine character from this film, and if Brad Pitt were NOT cast in this key role, I assure you that those same lines that got laughs and snickers would have netted almost no such reaction. Tarantino stunt casted with Pitt, an actor I don't laud often but who is a talented performer regardless of how paparazzi-ed out his persona has become. The guy can act, and he saves this film from being a total loss. Several other actors try hard and do what they can, but because half of this film is subtitled from French and German into English, I must say that I would have preferred they left the titles out. If you are reading them it is tough to appreciate the silent film stylings that most of the unknown actors in this film were usuing to affect their characters. The fact that most of the cast faces a fatal mission to go undercover into Nazi-occupied France and they die trying to fight the evils of fascism makes you WANT to watch their faces, but you cannot, because you are reading subtitles.

Stunt Casting - Putting Mike Myers into a British officer's role for seven minutes, or giving Rod Taylor a few lines to play a muted version of Winston Churchill, or letting us hear Samuel Jackson do mindless voice-overs or a disembodied Harvey Keitel speak over a telephone at film's end does not mean a movie is good. It sure does not make the script better. Wasting fine German actors like Christoph Waltz (as Nazi Hans "The Hawk" Landa), Diane Kruger (as Bridget von Hammersmark, a boiled down hybrid of Marlene Dietrich & Hedy Lamarr, real life European actresses who doubled as spies for the Allies), and Sylvester Groth (a brilliantly creepy Joseph Goebbels) in a film this bad makes me wonder why Tarantino bothers to place his old pals in cameo roles anymore. It is as if he wants us all to know how these stars were in his former films. Well, Quentin, we get it, and these stars you drop into your project like so many rats in a maze, merely to speak a line and leave . . . they detract from where the focus ought have been - on your script and on those actors who tried to form the core of the action. They deserved better, and sadly, they could not save your film.

So, that's a mess more verbiage than I might have opted for here, but if you read my District 9 review a week or so ago, you know I'm a wordy bastard. I swear I meant to keep this shorter, but fear not. You can read this in less than 15 minutes, and know that in that same amount of time, Tarantino managed to write an equal amount of dialogue into a 153-minute massacre of French, German, English, and Brooklynese.

But I guess if you kill Nazis by the bushel and make carnage seem cool, an albatross script and a macro-managed plotline can be forgiven. To me, it cannot be. I'll re-watch Reservoir Dogs this week and try to remember how good QT used to be. I hope he rebounds next time, because I want him to be great again.

Finski