Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (5/5 Stars)

Whenever some crazy person does some horrible thing in the world, deranged manifestos from the extremes of society are festooned upon us by a media exploiting our collective morbid curiosity. The dead are victimized twice. First they are robbed of their live, then their lives are forever connected and largely overshadowed by the attention spent on the perpetrators. Sharon Tate is a perfect example. This utterly blameless young woman was horrifically murdered by the Manson cult. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood uses this real event from 1969 Hollywood as its reason for being. However, upon exiting the theater, you may notice that during the course of the movie, you have learned far more about Sharon Tate then Charles Manson. Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino to his great credit has flipped the murders on their head. He showers attention on the victims and treats the perpetrator dismissively. This is too my great relief. I was very worried coming into this movie about what Tarantino would do with the material given that Roman Polanski was still alive. Coming out of the movie theater, I can marvel at the deft way Tarantino handled it all.

Reappearing in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained are Leonardo Dicaprio and Brad Pitt respectively. Tarantino writes them some tailor-made roles. Leonardo Dicarprio plays Rick Dalton, former star of Bounty Law, on the downward trajectory of his show business career (in an early scene, he gets presented the ‘opportunity’ to move to Italy and star in westerns over there). Brad Pitt plays Rick Dalton’s former stunt double, Cliff Booth. Cliff may or may not have been involved in the tragic death of his wife in the style of Natalie Wood’s mysterious fate. Nobody can prove whether or not Cliff did what and Tarantino makes it purposefully ambiguous. Enough people think Cliff might have to the point where he no longer is a working man (he also got into a fist fight with Bruce Lee). He spends his days doing odd jobs for Rick and feeding his bulldog.

Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are completely fictional. It is a testament to the movie that we become highly invested in them while waiting for the real occurrences to occur in the last half hour of an almost three hour movie. It must be noted that Brad Pitt at 55 years old still has a six-pack of abs. It’s absurd. While Leo plays worn and tragic, a type of role he has become very good at.

As a very present character is Hollywood itself. The 1969 production value, the neon details, the cars, the Playboy mansion, the year round sun. Most of all, that feel of innocence before those dirty hippies ruined the party and gave the sixties their hangover.

I very much don’t want to ruin this movie for you. If you don’t know anything about it, I think you should do some historical homework and then listen to nothing else. You should know something about the Manson murdes. Read the Wikipedia article. Then watch this movie. You will not be disappointed.

Would you believe me if I told you that this is Tarantino least vulgar and arguably least violent movie. It is on the same violence level of pre-Kill Bill. As far as cursing is concerning, not that much at all really. It’s kind of refreshing. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is top-tier Tarantino. Put it up there with Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. Highly recommended.

The Hateful Eight (3/5 Stars)

Given the huge deal Quentin Tarantino, the writer/director of The Hateful Eight, made about his once-in-a-lifetime roadshow, particular aspects are decidedly underwhelming. Take for instance the promise of the movie being shot in Panavision Super 70 mm filmstock. Tarantino gushed about how it was the largest widescreen format that ever existed and that it had not been in use since the 1950’s and 1960’s for such epics like “Ben Hur” and “Cleopatra.” Well, that is wonderful if the vast majority of The Hateful Eight’s three hour run time had not taken place within a single room. This movie is no epic. So I guess its cool that he used that obsolete film stock but he sure did not need to. Or take for instance the presence of additional footage in the movie. Given that the movie is almost entirely composed of people talking in rooms, I’m not sure this movie needed more of that. In fact it probably would have been better with less. It had a new Ennio Morricone score and that’s cool because Morricone made the best Western scores of the 1960s, but this score is not as good as those old scores. The program was pretty cool except that the movie was not a timeless masterpiece so I doubt it will be a piece of memorabilia in great demand.

“The Hateful Eight” for all its grandiose presentation is decidedly a small movie. A bounty hunter named John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is taking a prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in the near town of Red Rock. His carriage picks up two more passengers, another bounty hunter named the Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the supposed new sheriff of Red Rock, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). There is a blizzard that will intercept them on their journey so they decide to wait it out at Minnie’s Haberdashery. They do not find Minnie at the Haberdashery. Instead they find Senor Bob (Demian Bichir) looking after the place, Oswaldo Mobray the supposed hangman (Tim Roth), General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) an ex-Confederate officer searching for his son, and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) who is in town to visit his mother. John Ruth makes the splendid observation that one of these men is not who they say they are. Minnie’s Haberdashery is composed of a bar, a kitchen, a general store, several beds and a place to sit by the fire, but it is all one room. The blizzard sets in and everybody waits for shit to start happening.

It takes awhile. By my count it takes about an hour and a half, which in my humble opinion is too long. Most of that time is exposition, that is to say it is people talking about what other people have done in the past. Something along the lines of one character saying to another, “Don’t you know who this so-and-so is, they did some crazy shit during the war.” I wrote about this sort of thing earlier in my “Steve Jobs” review. Movies are a show not tell medium. Lots of scenes where people talk about what happened in the past are more appropriate in the play medium where it is necessitated by the lack of ability to go all over the place but rendered harmless by the immediacy of the action. “The Hateful Eight” would probably make a great play. Very little would have to be changed. As a movie it can be, from time to time, <ahem> boring. There I said it. Boring, especially during the first half. It also does not help that Tarantino, though admittedly funny and cool, is not as funny and cool as he thinks he is. Some of the look at me funny and cool lines fell flat because the movie had not yet become cool or funny enough for them.

In the meantime and through to the end there is plenty of use of the word nigger and a lot of punching the woman in the face. We can take these one at a time because Tarantino does interesting things with the first one and not so interesting things with the second.

It is fair to say that the cinematic relationship between Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino is a special one that does something more than simply transcend the race line. For other white writer/directors it is simply enough to make a sympathetic black character that has a rounded personality and isn’t merely an appendage to the white people. Jackson and Tarantino do more than that. They create black characters in the midst of terrible racism that are also complicated to the point of being bad men themselves. It is tough to be a despicable black character when everybody else in the movie is calling nigger. In this movie, we are drawn preternaturally to Major Marquis Warren’s side because he is the ultimate underdog, the one black guy in Wyoming. We judge the goodness and badness of the other characters by how they treat him. If they have respect for him, like John Ruth, he is a good guy. If they do not, like everybody else, they are not good guys. The most interesting thing about this movie is that by the mid way point, the audience may start wondering whether Major Marquis Warren is somebody to cheer for at all. Samuel L. Jackson has I believe only been nominated for one Oscar (Pulp Fiction). I believed he should have won for Django Unchained. If he is nominated for this movie, it can be said it was deserved. He is the reason why the movie should be watched at all.

Now for the gratuitous violence done towards the woman in the story, Daisy Domergue. She is a course rude bitch with a mouth on her. In the past she has murdered people and she deserves to be hanged. For as much insight Tarantino has had about the history of race relations, he shows a general lack of knowledge about the history of women. I have not yet heard of a 19^th century (or before) story about a woman like Daisy Domergue. Nor am I likely too because no such woman or very few of them have ever existed. Tarantino has this false notion that feminism in movies consists of giving a woman a weapon (gun or sword or kung fu) and having them kick ass. It does not work that way. You see women are physically weaker than men. At some point it does not matter how good at kung fu they are. They will generally lose battles to guys who have 50 or 100 pounds on them. The astute feminist screenwriter will then give their female characters what historical women have always had, shrewdness and wiles. They will not simply make them another man. When Tarantino made “Django Unchained” he paid attention to the psychology of a slave. Jamie Foxx did not just start out badass and plucky. He had to be rehabilitated from a society that would inflict physical and psychological harm on him if he did anything out of line. When making a historical period piece about a woman it should be required that their respective psychology is taken into account because women were subject to societal pressures as well. Tarantino ignores this and his reason for doing so is to make it okay for this particular woman to be punched in the face a bunch. That is to say he has made this particular woman more of a rotten bitch than she historically has any sense in being and he did it in order to make it okay for terrible things to be done to her.

I remember there was a time when Tarantino’s movies were violent but not as violent as people thought they were. When I watched the DVD extras of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, a big deal was made by how the violence merely felt gratuitously violent because of superior moviemaking. Like in Reservoir Dogs you don’t actually see the ear being cut off, or in Pulp Fiction the samurai cut is below the screen. Contrast that with Tarantino’s last several films where the blood being spilt is generally more extreme than what it would be in real life. One could reasonably question whether if say someone blew off someone else’s head three or four feet away from Jennifer Jason Leigh would she really be splattered with that much blood and brains? I doubt it and I’m pretty sure it is in there less for realism and more because Tarantino wanted to see a woman’s face splattered with blood and brains. It sure makes one question about early Tarantino’s professions of not being as violent as people said he was. As soon as he got a decent budget to splatter blood all over the screen he went whole hog.

Django Unchained (5/5 Stars)

Adult Supervision is Required

Somewhere in Texas. 1958. A Craggly Ridge of Large Bare Rocks. And then a women’s chorus of tenor voices: DJANGO! and then the low baritone of some old crooner DJANGO! And then up on the screen in bold red print, the words DJANGO UNCHAINED. The camera pans down to find a row of slaves in chains shuffling through the wilderness led by two slave traders on horses. The crooner continues his bouyant country ballad, about this man named Django, his lost love, and striving on. And with that first thirty seconds, writer/director Quentin Tarantino announces that you are going to see something you have never seen before.

Well perhaps you have seen parts of it before in different places. Perhaps you have seen solemn dramas about slavery like Roots, or Amistad, or Beloved. Or perhaps you have seen a Spaghetti Western, maybe an unserious action flick starring a stoic man-with-no-name in the company of bad men, fast women, and violent humor.

But I doubt you have seen both, a movie that portrays slavery without being racist or insensitive and at the same time is a helluva lot of fun to watch. Slavery is this nation’s great shame, a national embarrassment of epic proportions. The movies as culture or cultural reflection have had a terrible time talking about it. Early masterpieces of cinema were explicitly racist. The first blockbuster, 1915’s Birth of a Nation, claimed that ex-slaves provoked by northern carpetbaggers bullied and disenfranchised southern whites until the Ku Klux Klan saved the day. Other great American movies that took place during slavery like 1939’s Gone With the Wind white-washed slavery omitting anything but the tamest versions of it. More recent movies about the antebellum South, being race-conscious, sometimes omit black people all together. Think Cold Mountain. When it is talked about, there is a tendency for some pundits to claim the discussion would actually cause racial violence. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing premiered to claims that it would start race riots in 1989. Then, pathetically, you have Fox News and its insistence that a black guy in a black panther cap standing outside a polling booth is somehow intimidating to white people, in 2012 for chrissakes! (By the way that news story eerily parallels a scene in Birth of a Nation). It is my hope that Django Unchained represents a sort of The Producers watershed moment in our culture that allows us to shed our century long cowardly approach to slavery in movies. 

Do you know what I mean by a The Producers moment? I don’t mean the recent movie or the broadway revival. I mean Mel Brook’s original 1967 movie about two Jewish play producers who purposely put on a sure-fire flop, Springtime for Hitler, in order to cheat little old lady investors. Think about that date: 1967. That’s twenty-two years after World War II and a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews. It must have taken a lot of chutzpah to make that movie, which purposely made light of WWII and portrayed Hitler as a kind of gay flower-loving hippy. But it was the correct thing to do both culturally and comedically because it took this huge evil and made it okay to laugh at. That’s important because one of the main tools of assholes in general and these assholes in particular was fear. Good people do not stand up before it is too late because of fear. (Btw I’m not counting Charlie Chaplin’s The Dictator because it was made before the Final Solution was fully known). But when you flood your culture with Hitler jokes the fear dissipates. We aren’t afraid of Nazis anymore. Hell, they make for great entertainment. They are Hollywood’s best villains and most frequent losers. They haven’t won in a movie since Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

It is to Tarantino’s great credit that he has pulled a Mel Brooks’ and exploited a long dormant treasure trove of national psychosis and fear that is just screaming to be tamed and used for entertainment purposes. So what are we afraid of that this movie is making us confront and not just confront but also enjoy confronting. Well, counter-intuitively, it is most likely our fear of black people. America, unlike say Nazi Germany, is a winner of history (at least so far). Now it is much easier to make fun of a power structure like the Nazis when they are already defeated, but there has not been a race revolution in this country in which white people were deposed. White guys are actually still in charge around here (for the most part). And because we are still in charge, we tend to be rather defensive (or at least as silent as possible) about whom we inherited the power, even if some were downright evil, lest….well, what? Just what do you think is going to happen if we stop being defensive about our past?

What this movie can hopefully do is show just how absurd those fears are by taking them head on. Django, played by Jamie Foxx, is bought by a German immigrant/dentist/bounty hunter named Dr. King Schulz, played by Christoph Waltz. Dr. Schulz does not believe in slavery but needs Django because he is trailing some wanted fugitives named the Brittle Brothers. Dr. Schulz does not know what they look like but Django does because he was a field slave at the latest plantation the Brittle Brothers ran. Django tried to run away with his wife, Broomhilda, but was unsuccessful. Both were whipped and sold separately. Schulz makes a deal with Django. If Django helps him find the Brittle Brothers, Schulz will set Django free. After showing his worth as a fellow bounty hunter, Schulz has another proposition for Django. Continue on with him, as his partner for a year and Schulz will then help Django find and free his wife. This takes them to the Plantation of one Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, who is a repulsive indulgent Francophile that does not speak French and is a connoisseur of Mandingo fighting. Mandingo fighting consists of making black slaves fight against each other to the death and punishing them with death if they refuse to do so, both of which we see in this movie. Things come to head at the Candieland plantation after unsuccessful negotiations of buying Broomhilda fall through. Django kills a lot of white slaveowners.

Tarantino has unsuccessfully mixed the right amount of dialogue and action in his movies before (Kill Bill too little substantive talk, Inglourious Basterd way too much talk) but he hits exactly the right notes here. Django Unchained is an almost three hour movie, feels like an hour and a half, could have gone longer and I would not have cared. The dialogue is deliciously revolting and actually reminded me of some great Shakespeare villains like Richard II or Iago. Rarely is evil so articulate. Take one scene with Calvin Candie: After he learns from his house slave Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson, that he is being tricked by Schulz and Django, he decides to turn the tables with a basic class in racist phrenology. The psychology of why he chooses to do this is pretty perverted. His black house slave has just educated him that Django, another black man, has tricked him. So Candie produces a skull of a former house slave named Ben, saws a portion of it off, and points out the subservient dimples. Basically he is using pseudoscience to explain why he is in charge even though it has just been objectively proven he is the stupidest person in the room. But the psychological twistedness of Candie pales in comparison to that of the house slave, Stephen, and this is where Django Unchained starts to enter into the realm of masterpiece. The character that Samuel L. Jackson plays is a literate educated wise old man who raised Candie and probably runs the plantation whenever Candie is gone. An obviously capable person, he instead spends all his time hobbling, shuffling, shucking, and jiving. And you won’t find any other person on the plantation willing to treat the other slaves worse than Stephen. He is so totally aware that his power derives solely from his ability to stroke egos, stamp out dissent, and pretend he is not smart enough to know what he’s doing. I believe the term is HNIC. There can only be one, Django be warned. When I think of the regular Samuel L Jackson character type I think of a strong, authoritative, wise person. I can’t think of another role that could be so against this type and at the same time be so right. If you wanted a great example of how slavery strips away all the nobility in a person, think of how you have seen Sam Jackson in any other movie and then watch him in this one. I can imagine him heading off stage and washing his mouth out with soap after every take. The ridiculous thing though is that even while you are watching the performance of subservient stupidity in Jackson’s performance you still get a sense of how subversively smart Stephen really is. To pull that off, I believe is top-notch acting and I think if anyone we’re nominated for an Oscar from this movie, it should be Sam Jackson.

Now going back: To be afraid of this movie, you would have to hold onto two absurd notions. One: you would have to believe that slavery was somehow justifiable. Perhaps if you just saw Gone with the Wind you wouldn’t understand the big deal. But here we have most of it: You have the absolute poverty of slaves (Django starts the movie shuffling through a wilderness with no shoes, shackles scraping up his ankles, no shirt or coat); you have the cruel and unusual violence inflicted upon slaves without due process (whippings, mandingo fighting, hotboxes, being torn apart by dogs, etc.), and you have the utterly disrespectful attitude of slave-owners that treats slaves as disposable property at worst and children at best. Are we not at a point in this country where all the above is universally rejected? Surely it is enjoyable to everyone, regardless of race, when the hero of the story (Django obviously) rescues his lost love and the villains (the slave-owners obviously) get their comeuppance.

Two: you would have to believe that black people today might resort to racial violence against white people. This is probably the bigger problem. The reason why it is offensive for Fox News to show that one black panther guy at the polling booth is that it infers black people cannot tell the difference between antebellum slave-owners and modern day white Americans, a lack of trust between fellow citizens that can be nothing but insulting. I believe you could show Django Unchained in most anywhere in America and audiences everywhere would have basically the same reactions. They would laugh at the same spots, they would cringe at the same spots, and they would applause at the same spots. Our attitudes toward this subject matter are the same and I’m glad this movie can come along to prove it.

I just want to mention one more thing and that is Tarantino’s cameo and the epilogue to this movie. Tarantino is no fool I’m sure. He knows that audiences will be able to recognize him when he gets on the screen. For this very reason Hitchcock put his cameo towards the front of his movies in his later career. He noticed that when everyone saw him they were distracted from the story. But Tarantino is incredibly noticeable in his cameo so I have to suspect he knows he is noticeable, in a say deux ex machina sort of way. The epilogue of Django Unchained is the most unbelievable part of the movie and Tarantino’s appearance and the way his character (An Australian?) enables the epilogue to happen is an admission that the movie’s end is less about practical realism and more about fantastical indulgence. As a critic, I have a pretty simple rule about this sort of thing. If I liked the movie, go ahead. If I didn’t like the movie, you are an egotistical indulgent sonofabitch who is insulting my intelligence. That at least is how I felt about the last line of Inglourious Basterds. I, however, loved this movie. So this ending is just fine with me. The movie earned it and I would not have it any other way.

I’m sure there will be many movies imitating Django Unchained pretty soon. I suggest you see it while it is still original. 

Inglourious Basterds (3/5 Stars) August 29, 2009

Shutup Nerd! 


Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino returns to the silver screen this time with a World War II film. It’s only been two years since his last film ‘Death Proof.’ That’s a record for shortest hiatus for this notoriously unprolific director. He has only directed six films in a span of eighteen years. Headlining the advertising campaign of this film is Brad Pitt as a the non-Jewish leader of a band of renegade Jewish American soldiers called the ‘Inglourious Basterds’ who specialize in killing Nazis behind enemy lines. The ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is the German high command gave them. Apparently the correct spelling was lost in translation. In truth though the Basterds only comprise a third of the movie’s screen time. The other storylines feature an evil Nazi (redundant isn’t it?) officer known as the ‘Jew Hunter,’ played deliciously by Christopher Waltz, a Jewish girl named Shosanna who has escaped the ‘Jew Hunter’ and is now the owner of a cinema in Paris, and a British spy that goes on a mission to blow up the movie premiere of Goebbels newest cinematic propaganda masterpiece ‘A Nation’s Pride” at the same movie theater. These storylines are each successfully started off in their own separate chapters in the first half of the movie. Then they hang about too long, go off in weird directions, and ultimately fail to intertwine themselves into one effective overall story. Does this movie deserve three stars? Technically no, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it, more than some four star movies. But I feel inclined to give it such a bad rating because I feel it could have been a masterpiece had the Director not been arrogant enough to think that he could break basic rules of pace, suspense, and logic without suspecting that it would hurt the overall picture and confuse and bore the audience. (In other words, it annoyed me on a gut level). Why didn’t he think that? Well I bet it’s because Tarantino thinks that every line of dialogue he writes (typos included) is gold and that people will have an infinite tolerance for self-referential ‘aint I cool’ speech. They don’t. That’s why nobody went to see ‘Death Proof.’ You think the guy would have gotten an ounce of humility from that colossal failure. Now there is nothing wrong with long extended scenes of dialogue itself, Tarantino himself proved that in previous movies and in this one. But they are delicate things and must be cared for in a certain way or else they belong in the deleted scenes menu of a Special Edition DVD set. To fully explain what I mean, I will compare and contrast Tarantino, the masterful movie writer/director, and Tarantino, the stubborn, indulgent prick that has sabotaged every good idea he has had since he made ‘Pulp Fiction.’ Conveniently I can use examples of both of these Tarantinos in this movie alone, although I will also use some examples from what unfortunately looks like will be his one and only masterpiece, ‘Pulp Fiction.’ 

Let’s take a look at the first chapter in this movie: Once upon a time in Nazi-Occupied France. It opens on a farmhouse in the French countryside. A man is chopping wood when he sees a Nazi car driving up. The Nazis arrive; the officer played by Christopher Waltz gets out. He asks to talk to the man. They are talking in French. Both are very polite. The man invites the officer into the house. Therein he introduces his daughters and offers the officer a glass of wine. The officer noticing that this is a dairy farm asks for a glass of milk instead. One of the daughters pours him a glass. We watch him drink the whole thing. Then the officer suggests the man ask his daughters to leave for the conversation they will have. The man does so and the daughters leave. After they have left the officer asks the man if he knows who he is. The man tells him. The officer asks the man if he knows his nickname. The man says he does. The officer’s nickname is “Jew Hunter.” The officer inquires as to the whereabouts of one of the Jewish families in the county that is unaccounted for. The man says he has heard a rumor that they are in Spain and that the previous Nazi officer assigned to the county had already searched his house. The officer smiles and is very amiable. Then he asks the man if they can switch the conversation from French to English as he is not so good at the latter. They do so. Then the officer goes into the reason why he is called the “Jew Hunter.” He gives a very Anti-Semitic explanation of the difference between the Germans, who are like Hawks, and the Jews, who are like Rats. The man asks if he can smoke his pipe. It is a small corncob pipe. The officer explains that he got his nickname because he was especially good at thinking like a rat and mentions that he thinks the qualities of a rat are quite admirable in some ways. At this moment, after it seems like they have been talking for quite awhile, the camera moves and it is revealed that the man has been hiding the Jewish family under his floorboards the entire time. The officer than remarks that he finds it amazing what the Jews will do when they have abandoned any sense of decency. The man is starting to look nervous. Then the officer asks if he can smoke and takes out a comically large pipe. Not missing a beat the officer tells the man that a person who tells him what he needs to know will not suffer a whit whereas a man who has to make him search will suffer dire consequences to not only himself but his family. At this point the man seems very perturbed. Then the officer asks the man flatly whether he has Jews underneath his floorboards. The man, with a single tear running down his face, quietly admits it. The officer than remarks that since he has not heard any sounds underneath it is quite evident that the Jews do not understand English and asks the man not to give away the fact that three Nazi soldiers are entering the house instead of his three daughters. As the officer, in very polite and charming French, tells the man that he won’t search the house and says goodbye, he motions to his soldiers to shoot at the floor. They do so. All the Jews are shot and killed except one girl who escapes. We are then treated to a very iconic shot of a beautiful girl running for her life across the fields of the French countryside. We are told her name is Shosanna. The chapter ends.

Okay, this scene is a bit of a masterpiece. But why? It’s all about momentum and payoff. We start out very small, just two guys talking. One affable and evil, the other is good and unmoving. We don’t entirely know what there are talking about. The audience is confused on several levels. We don’t know why the officer is talking to this particular person, we aren’t used to cheerful Nazis, we don’t get why all the attention is being paid to milk and pipes, we don’t know quite what the officer is getting about when he’s talking about rats and hawks, and we don’t understand why he’s taking his sweet ass time. Every one of these questions is answered in a dramatic and satisfying way. The officer is talking to the man because he is hiding Jews, he’s talking about rats because he knows the Jews are in the floorboards and he’s an anti-semitic basterd, he’s being affable and charming in French and then switches to English because he gets a kick out of not only killing Jews but playing one last psychological trick on them before doing so (my favorite part. I have never seen language used as a dramatic twist in a movie before, caught me completely by surprise), the milk and pipe is meant to intimidate the man, and he’s taking his sweet ass time because he gets a sociopathic kick out of wearing down the man to the point where he betrays himself. Tarantino could have just written that the Nazi goes into the house, searches the floorboards and kills the Jews. He did it this way because 1) It gives the audience an idea of just how smart and cunning the main bad guy in the story is and 2) the purely evil and sociopathic way he goes about doing it reminds us of how much we really really hate Nazis. Plus this gives us great empathy for the girl who escapes. So now the story has set up the really bad guy and the damsel in distress. And now the audience is chomping at the bit to be introduced to the heroes of our story, which is what the next chapter is all about. 

My main point is that extended scenes of dialogue need to add up to something, and that something needs to be a sufficient climax to make the extended dialogue worth listening to. When the scene is exceptionally long, there needs to payoff to the early dialogue and the climax needs to be really big. ‘Pulp Fiction’ is rife with these exceptional scenes. In the first story we treated to carpool talk between two hit men about quarter pounders in Paris. This dialogue pays off in the big climax of that story when one of the hit men brings it back up again before he executes a man in incredibly dramatic fashion as he quotes the bible. In the second story we are treated to extended dialogue about an unseen character, which supposedly gave the boss’s wife a foot massage and was thrown out of a three-story window. The payoff comes after the wife overdoses on one of the hitman’s heroin and the hitman has to somehow save her life or risk being killed by his boss. The story ends with an unforgettable scene in which John Travolta has to pierce her heart with the largest needle you’ve ever seen, which itself is a payoff for a prior discussion about a woman’s fetish with piercing. That woman happens to be in the room and her reaction to it is ‘cool.’ Why? because she and the audience has just witnessed the ultimate piercing. I could go on but suffice to say that every long period of just talking in ‘Pulp Fiction’ is punctuated with an unforgettable scene in which things are revealed, logical choices are made, and incredible shit happens. The two parts are inseparable. They justify each other. You cannot have one without the other, especially if jokes aren’t being told. For example of a movie which is all payoff and no build up I give you Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ which features a lot of shit happening but lacks the sense of realism that gives the characters any logical motivation. In the end you can admire how Bill gets Killed but you don’t really care whether Bill gets Killed or not. For an example of a movie which is all build up and no payoff I give you Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’ which features a group of girls talking for so long about completely irrelevant things that when the climatic car chase finally does happen it is underwhelming and quite forgettable. 

The first three chapters of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ follows the ‘Pulp Fiction’ model in which a great deal of dialogue is capped off with a satisfying ending whether it’s Brad Pitt carving a Nazi insignia into a Nazi’s head or Shosanna encountering the Nazi who killed her family and is now in charge of security for the movie premiere. Then the movie veers off into a scene a la ‘Death Proof’ about a British spies mission. This is the first mistake because we are treated to yet another substantial chunk of time introducing another character when Tarantino had already done this three times before. The hour mark is not the time for another ten-minute introduction. Anyway the spy is briefed by Mike Myers for a long time (they go into some depth about German cinema) and then sent to rendevous with the Basterds and a German Actress who will give him a briefing about his mission to blow up the cinema. The Actress agrees to meet them in a basement bar in some French city. The scene opens with her playing a card game with a bunch of German soldiers where a person writes a famous person on the card, puts it up to their head, and asks questions to figure out who he is. We see them play out a game of this and are given the background of one of the Nazi soldier’s family. Then the basterds walk in and the Actress excuses herself. Before she can brief them though one of the soldiers asks for her autograph. She does so but the guy hangs around longer. The British spy finally tells him to piss off because, you know, he wants the info for the plan and the soldier is stopping the actress (and the movie!) from doing so. You think that would be the end of it, but the soldier is disturbed by the spy’s accent. This is followed by a lengthy discussion about where the spy would get that particular accent. A German officer joins the discussion after a bit and more words about it are batted around. Finally after some discussion the German actress convinces the officer that the spy is from a German town no one has ever heard from. The officer seemingly satisfied, sits down with them and makes them play another round of the previously mentioned game. At this moment I groaned with boredom because the momentum of the story had effectively killed itself. Not only had the movie gone for I don’t know how long with any payoff or climatic scene, but it had completely forgotten about the several interesting characters it had introduced beforehand. The scene ends with a very forgettable shootout in which basically everyone in the room dies, including the British spy, which the movie had just painstakingly introduced for the last half hour. A great deal of time has passed and very little of what we just sat through was paid off. 

The movie ends at the movie premiere with a spectacle al a ‘Kill Bill’ in which we are treated to some very pretty death and destruction that has very little logical buildup to it. What happens is that the ‘Basterds’ go ahead with the British spy’s mission without him even though they speak no German and they’ve apparently lost half of their band (no explanation is given for the absence of about half of the basterds from the second half of the movie). They get into the premiere as the Italian escorts of the German Actress. They’re plan is laughably shallow. None of the basterds know Italian and Brad Pitt doesn’t even bother to change his thick hillbilly accent. Alongside their plot to blow up the theater is Shosanna’s plan to burn the entire place down. Christopher Waltz happens to be the Nazi in charge of security, an especially important job since the German high command is present at the premiere. You would think with a set up like that we would see a great battle of strategy or some suspense as to how the entire thing would play out. Too bad, the Nazis lose so easily it’s like watching a Chuck Norris movie. Now mind you I don’t give a damn about historical accuracy and take a good deal of pleasure out of watching Nazis die horrible deaths. but to me, watching battles in movies is like watching sports on TV. I would rather see my favorite football team win it in overtime than to see them trounce the opposing team by 50-0. It is just far more enjoyable. 

The thing is, Tarantino didn’t have any time to put much thought into the climatic scene because he had already wasted so much time with the previous storyline about the British spy that didn’t go anywhere. What he should have done is cut the British spy out all together and focused in depth on a Dirty Dozen style plan that would have put to use the entire squad of basterds (he only uses four in the movie). He also could have connected the basterds and the Shossana storylines somehow, something that didn’t happen in the movie. Shossana doesn’t even get a revenge scene with Waltz at the end that pays off her two previous very suspenseful encounters with him. And wouldn’t it have been cool if Tarantino had Hitler pick a fight with Brad Pitt and had them duel it out with swords and fists. I’m just saying. 

Another thing I have to mention is that Tarantino’s nerdy love for movies is creeping into his films in disturbing ways. He even stops the plot at one point to have an unseen narrator explain to us how some type of film stock is especially flammable. Also the idea that Jewish Vengeance would take place in a movie theater (Because you know there’s a lot of Jews in Hollywood) only makes sense if you don’t notice the more obvious motivation, namely that Tarantino probably had an orgasm when he found a way to put a movie theater into his film. That way he could have the characters drop names from antiquated and long forgotten movies! The movie ends with a line that would only work if you agreed with it. I don’t and I think it’s perhaps the most arrogant ‘look at me,’ line I’ve ever witnessed in a movie. 

Roger Ebert has declared this the best movie of the year and has said that a person needs to watch it several times to get its greatness. I will see it again because I admire and respect Roger Ebert. But I reserve the right to think of movies that need to be seen twice the same way I think of jokes that need to be explained. Badly told.