LITTLE ROCK — Sometimes it is a relief for me to go to an "important" movie like Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds knowing I won't be required to write a word about it unless I choose. Going to the movies for me is a busman's holiday, but a holiday nevertheless - it's great to feel released into a film without the expectation of having to develop a theory of it.
And for the record, I loved Inglourious Basterds. It's not a perfect movie, there's a character who suddenly pops up in the third act to whom we haven't been properly introduced, I could live without the scalping and Tarantino almost (but not quite) sabotages a great ending by insisting on a visceral payoff, but it's one of the more enjoyable three hours (with trailers and credits) I've spent in a theater in quite awhile. It's so rich in cinematic value, it's difficult for me to understand how a film critic could fail to be impressed by it.
(That's not the same thing as saying I can't understand why some people don't like it - I understand that very well. You could argue that Tarantino hermetically compartmentalizes large issues in his frames, thus trivializing the great evil of National Socialism. You can abhor his sudden and graphic violence. The director is reproachable - he may be a bad citizen - but you can't say he's a hack.)
But some film critics weren't. And, in my relatively new role as the editor of this section, I have to choose which reviews run. And if I'm choosing reviews rather than writing them, it means I haven't seen the movie in question. So I basically have to guess.
The first two reviews of Inglourious Basterds that I read last week were diametrically opposed. One critic thought the movie signaled the end of Tarantino's career. He gave it one star out of five. The other thought it by far the best movie of the year. He gave it a full five stars.
In the end I selected a piece by Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald that included some analysis of the movie. It was more measured than either of the early reviews at our disposal (for boring deadline reasons, we cannot always avail ourselves of reviews by some of my favorite critics - they simply come in too late in the week), yet it delivered a definite verdict on the movie. Rene liked it, and his piece provided some helpful information about the film beyond his reaction. So what if there were some quotes from the filmmaker and his actors - it worked perfectly well as a review.
It's always my preference to either review a movie myself (or farm it out to a sensibility that I understand and trust), but I recognize that I'm going to have to make choices like this fairly often. No doubt I'll occasionally select reviews that I'll wish I hadn't. The truth is, there will be weeks when I don't have a lot of choice.
But Inglourious Basterds?Yeah, it's all that - a brutal and exuberant piece of filmmaking from a lively mind. It gleefully mixes high art with low humor, seamlessly splices scenes of great beauty (the avenging face projected onto smoke!) into a pulp populist fiction informed by a deep and touching love for movies. God bless Quentin Tarantino. God bless Brad Pitt. And most of all, God bless the amazing Christoph Waltz.
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
Another thing we're trying to do is stay on top of home video - which is probably the way most of us see most of our movies these days. To this end we've expanded the "Home Movies" column, with an eye to identifying smaller, foreign and independent movies you might otherwise miss. (We love Hollywood movies too, but those you usually know about.)
And I'm going to try to use this column to point out interesting home-viewing prospects as well. Such as Absurdistan (2008),a near-silent gem from German writer-director Veit Helmer (Tuvalu), set in the remote mountains of Azerbaijan and Georgia. It's a re-telling of Aristophanes' Lysistrata that evokes the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the French gothic sensibilities of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's mid-1990s dark fantasies.
Absurdistan is distributed by First Run Features and carries a suggested retail price of $24.95.
Then there's Wojciech Has' semi-legendary "head movie" The Saragossa Manuscript, a trippy three-hour tour through the labyrinthine mind of an 18th-century Polish count (Jan Potocki, who was, among other things, the self-proclaimed "novice king of Malta"). Lauded by Luis Bunuel, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese, among others, the beautifully photographed black-and-white film is available from Mr. Bongo Films, with a suggested retail price of $29.99.
Also, Spike Lee's film of the critically lauded Broadway musical Passing Strange - which earned a Tony award for the singer-songwriter Stew - is now available on cable TV via IFC On Demand.
It's a semiautobiographical tale that follows an aspiring songwriter (a stand-in for Stew called only "Youth") on his globe-trotting journey of discovery. If you're a fan of Spike or the intriguing Stew - who made his name with the rock band The Negro Problem - you'll want to catch this.
In the changer: Shane Meadow's Somer's Town (2008, Film Movement, $24.95), Andrzej Wajda's Katyn (2007, Koch Lorber) and Lori Petty's The Poker House (2008, 42 West).
E-mail:
MovieStyle, Pages 35, 40 on 08/28/2009