I had to see Inglourious Basterds twice to properly appreciate it. The first time was one beset with hang ups: expectations of a film, expectations of history; I came away from it thinking that it had great moments but was uncertain as to its quality as a whole movie. It turned out that the film has great moments, yes, sequences of incandescence that outshine its remainder; thing is, the remainder is still almost as great. It’s now safe for me to say that Inglourious Basterds is an unqualified success: a blissful piece of film making and a great film on top of that. If it took me a week to realise that, it’s my own fault.
Earlier on Twitter I lamented the cult that has risen around Joss Whedon. Two people tried to slap me down for it. Then I remembered tonight that “The Trio” existed, and that this is a bad thing indeed and I was entirely right to be critical.
Twitter’s down, so I’m sharing it with you here.
Coming soon: Coraline (written but not edited; a good film!); the awful state of children’s film based on trailers (“Say Hello to my Little Friend!”); Funny People (when I find out when the damn thing is out here) and finally, GI Joe, which I’ve already lined up tickets for.
Public Enemies is not, as I was informed the day that I saw it, "the worst movie everâ€. It's not a particularly good movie, but it's not a bad movie. The most accurate word for Public Enemies is "flatâ€. In a few more words, I would go on to describe the cinematography as "extreme close up HD shaky camâ€. One of the best things that Spielberg, for example, does in his treatment of period film is to make them feel as if they were made in the time they're set; Munich, despite whatever else you might say about it, felt like a seventies film.
While there are obvious aesthetic and practical considerations to take into account in the making of a period piece set in the twenties (Clint Eastwood did a pretty good job in Changeling), Michael Mann's choice to shoot Public Enemies in HD and with such proximity to the actors divorces the film from the audience. Alienating the audience with cinematography is not a good idea when you've chosen to tell an interesting story in an unengaging fashion, eking flat characterisation out of normally talented actors.
Public Enemies had the chance to have it all: bank robberies! Johnny Depp! Style! Panache! It's not dull and it's not a bad movie, but it simply doesn't work. It's a movie that asks its audience to sit there and watch for two and a half hours. Their eyes won't slide off the screen, but will they give a damn about what they're seeing? It would be a tough gambit for the studios, but this is a movie where the poster is better than the finished product; good promotion and a good cast will carry it so far, but how will it fare on word of mouth here in Australia?
The idea that Han Solo didn't shoot first is poorly implemented in the Star War Special Edition. It seems that, in 1997, George Lucas got Han Solo confused with Indiana Jones: Han is a man primarily interested in personal gain who eventually gets his heart softened by the triplet allures of love, justice and deus ex machina; Indy is an adventurer who firmly believes that things belong in museums. Surely Han couldn't do something so dirty as to shoot a dude unprovoked, Lucas must have thought. No, that's not Han at all; the Han I know chills with moon teddy bears and claps around campfires with Billy Dee Williams[1].
This theory doesn't entirely stand up in light of Indy simply shooting the guy who came at him with a scimitar in Raiders, but Lucas has never been known for his consistency, not even in the days when he had credibility as a film maker and story teller.
In light of Lucas' waning, never before have the words "Greedo shot first†been so true, so weird, or so paradoxical: this insane piece from Charlie Jane Anders examines what would have happened in a bizarro world where movies are rendered pointless but also somehow …gooder? (That word is as real as this theory!)
This hypothetical draws so heavily on knowledge of the Star Wars universe and its characters that one wonders how it would have made any sense if it were the original version of events. The best part is that it heavily references the prequel trilogy, which is great for two reasons: it assumes that Lucas had actually thought of any of this stuff at the time he made A New Hope; and, having prepared three movies before A New Hope, Lucas decided to neglect all of that in favour of Greedo killing everyone who got in his way, thereby conquering the galaxy.
Actually, that does kind of make sense. Also worthy of note is the fact that Greedo somehow manages to get directly from being pulled aboard the Death Star to rescuing Leia, which I recall having been at least slightly difficult for a team of two seat-of-the-pants professionals, a farm boy and a pair of droids. But hey, he's Greedo. He makes the trains run on time, he managed to wear a suit that was probably actually integrated into Vader's biometric systems, and he restores peace to a galaxy which apparently has a murderous law of succession.
The real question is "why not?†I have no satisfactory answer. Greedo shot first.
[1] I am forever going to be inexplicably angry that the final shot of the Star Wars saga features Billy Dee Williams clapping with ewoks.
How great is GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra going to be? With my barely concealed distaste in this "summer†season (bearing in mind that Australians won't see Up until September), I'm going to take GI Joe's tagline to heart: "When all else fails, they don'tâ€.
Look at it this way: it’s bright and crisp. It looks like the special effects had enough of a budget to appear both special and effective. It doesn’t look like it takes itself too seriously, as evidenced by the villain being Christopher Eccleston (the Ninth Doctor!) eating scenery, combined with Joseph Gordon Levitt in fetish gear (although I don’t think that’s shown in this trailer).
I think that one of the many problems with Transformers is that it takes itself so damned seriously, and Michael Bay is convinced that he has made “art”. Shia LeBoeuf sees his character as so identifiable it’s scary.
Megan Fox, on the other hand, has been the only person publicly out of the machine, admitting that it’s not art, and that she needs hard liquor to fill the void in her soul created by watching the movie.
Imagine, if you will, that GI Joe was produced by a team of Megan Foxes. People who knew they weren’t making art, but were instead focused on having as much fun as they possibly could on the ultimate in ridiculously over-budgeted ($170 million!) bubblegum cinema.
It might not be the case here, but come on. We can only take so many terrible self important movies before we want to chew on a movie that is aware of what it is, of its limitations, and has decided to make us laugh, intentionally or not.
To be entirely honest, when I was at the cinema and I saw the submarines approaching the base at the trailer’s beginning, I was intrigued. Then I found out that it was GI Joe and my natural cynicism kicked in, but the trailer editor had done his job. I could no longer totally discount the piece.
GI Joe might not be good by any objective measure except one: it will be better than Revenge of the Fallen. Don’t let me down, Dennis Quaid. When all else fails, you don’t.
Synecdoche, New York is my favourite sort of movie: it exists on the edge of reality, its existence only confirmed by the fact that I saw it with a friend. It's also got another thing going for it that makes it harder to write about: the less that you know of Synecdoche, New York, the more liable you are to be surprised.
Either that or pissed off and feeling like Charlie Kaufman has wasted more than twenty years of your life. That's the beauty of the movies: you can feel strongly one way or the other. Hatred is still a response, and it's far better than apathy.
"Isn't this movie just Leonidas with a shirt on?â€
-Tony Lin, 14/07/2009
Have you got any idea of how sick of seeing trailers for The Ugly Truth I am? They're pairing it with everything, from Revolutionary Road way back in the day to Transformers and Brüno now! It's had a huge lead in promotion, so it's probably going to explode at the Australian box office.
This time I won't go into a lengthy tirade against Katherine Heigl, because she's got some sort of defence machine that will spring into action if a word … and there have been many … is said against her. That doesn't stop the fact that this movie is going to suck (although last time I defamed The Ugly Truth I also defamed The Proposal, and that turned out better than my cynical heart could ever have hoped).
I don't understand why some movies take so long to come out. I've been seeing trailers for this for about five months; it comes out on August 6th here. From the (Australian!) director of Legally Blonde, the Jane Fonda comeback vehicle Monster-in-Law (which I saw the trailer for roughly seventy billion times in 2005), and criminally boring card counting flick 21, The Ugly Truth is another bad romantic comedy about two unlovable creatures finding love in each other.
That's actually pretty surprising: that both of them are as bad as each other, albeit in different ways. How many times am I going to have to see Heigl fellate a hot dog before I die? It's getting so much play that I fear I may have a coronary at the cinema and that will be the last thing that I see.
The Ugly Truth amounts to a frat comedy on Gerard Butler's side combined with a "successful woman want to know what love is, and wants you to show her†romance on the other side. Can misogyny and blatant career sexism meet in the middle and create a successful film? Does Gerard Butler actually work in a "real†movie, or will he forever be kicking people into holes and telling them where they are in the hearts and minds of the people?
It's also R rated in America, so that means you'll get extra raunch! Substitute "raunch†for "boobsâ€, which in Hollywood means the same thing most of the time.
Maybe, if I could drag myself to it, it could surprise me. The Proposal worked because it didn't resort to gender stereotyping, even if the same movie could never have been made had Sandra Bullock's character been a man and Reynolds' a woman. These were just two people who had their own family and intimacy issues and the movie worked based on that.
The Ugly Truth, from the poster on, tells you "this is what a man is. This is what a woman is.†It's lazy writing, in reality, but time and again that seems to be what audiences want. You can't go to such a movie and uncritically accept what it is trying to feed you. I want people to be able to rise up and say: "not everyone is like this! Certainly, Katherine Heigl, men like your breasts, but that is not all there is to you! And Gerard Butler, stop making men seem so shallow! Sure you like Katherine Heigl's breasts, but that's not all you like about her!â€
It's a war I'm never liable to win, but I'll repeat myself until the day I die: stop making crap movies that are little more than thinly veiled sexism. As I intend to die during a preview for The Ugly Truth next week, you won't hear it repeated much longer, but keep it in mind.
Inglourious Basterds, entirely apart from having a title that's painful to type, entirely separate from the not-entirely-favourable reception it had at Cannes, is Quentin Tarantino's latest movie.
I'm too young to really remember him being cinema's enfant terrible, and I recall being sent upstairs by my aunt while she and my brother watched Reservoir Dogs … unfortunately, the TV was at the bottom of the stairs so I could hear every damn word she was protecting me from … but I know his work, if not overly well.
I realise that it's becoming a sort of recurring motif for me, labelling things as "not movies†… but Tarantino doesn't so much make "not movies†as he does "genre movies†… films in bold and italics. They're more movie than movie.
Tarantino is in the business of making replicants, is what I'm saying.
I saw this trailer for it at Bruno, and immediately afterwards my occasional comrade said "that looks shitâ€. But it doesn't to my eyes. It looks somewhat splendid, and I say that as someone who thought that Death Proof was self-indulgent clap trap only partly redeemed by a great ending. As Tony said to Dittman, "it's Tarantino, man!â€
There don't seem to have been a lot of World War II movies out of America lately, particularly not ones that have dealt with Nazi fighting adventures. Spike Lee had his, which never saw release here and, in the interest of academic honesty, I can't be bothered looking up the name of it. The other was Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, which dared to answer the question "how do you make an assassination plot against Hitler boring?â€
Inglourious Basterds, on the other hand, is unambiguous: it's about the olden days when people were allowed to kill Nazis on film and do so in elaborate and bloody ways. What's so bad about that? It looks fun, and it looks like once again Tarantino has indulged his love for film. Some may say that Kill Bill Volume 2 was better than the first, but what I most remember about it was that the credits doubled as the credits for Volume 1, and reminded me of how much fun I had the day I saw it.
Inglourious Basterds features everything that anyone could ever ask of this type of movie: Brad Pitt shooting Nazis, and at least a little bit of participation from Samuel L. Jackson. What could possibly go wrong? This is me setting up a hubristic goal: I am going to see Inglourious Basterds and I am going to enjoy it. 2009 has been so disappointing and underwhelming so far that it has to deliver.
It should also be noted that the trailer I've posted above is slightly different to the one I saw, but largely the same, and totally different to the most widely available trailer which makes the movie look boring as all get out. I know that some … my father, for one - think that one shouldn't treat Nazi Germany as a simple matter of gung ho guns, render it a "boy's own†adventure, but I think that, as long as we don't try to deny it, it's right to try to get as much out of the experience as we can. By rendering Hitler ridiculous … and there's no one better at that than Mel Brooks … we disrespect not the memories of those who died in the war, but those of Hitler himself.
Please don't disappoint me again, Mister Tarantino: I know you have the power, through this movie, to save my American summer.
The Harry Potter movie franchise is an odd duck: it's not so much about movies as it is about the intellectual property. You expect a certain degree of something, and you generally receive it. After Christopher Columbus's twee bogs of the first two, the films have improved in most every way, although of course they've never been an adequate substitute for the books, instead being a series of realisations of key scenes. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is no different, although my choice to view it in a cinema full of teenaged girls was.
This is a bad idea and I would not recommend it to anyone unless, of course, they find themselves somehow knee deep in fandom and anything approaching romance makes them titter. The movie itself is okay, though!
Brüno is a difficult movie, to put it lightly. It is frequently very funny, but overall it's not very good … neither in story nor in message.
Perhaps, given my position as an internationally renowned homosexual fashionista, this movie hits closer to the bone than Borat ever could have hoped, but it simply doesn’t work as well. There are only so many Teutonic variations on “arsehole” you can say before you realise you’ve got to make an actual movie. Brünois not that movie, because it never gets past that point.
