No Time to Die (5/5 Stars)

 

James Bond was never intended to be the adult in the room. The early films are exercises in juvenile wish fulfillment, specifically those of white boys. Imagine being a very important person (agent of a world superpower government) possessed with extraordinary skills and intelligence in exceedingly dangerous (see exciting) situations that will never have to actually deal with any of the repercussions. The cleanup is another department. As a bonus to all of this, as a very important person dealing with the less civilized parts of the world, you are offered exotic women by the local power brokers, and if other situations, the women just naturally flock to you because you are more handsome, wealthier, the plot calls for it, etc. I like the old James Bond movies, in particular I recommend “You Only Live Twice” but I will admit they are a guilty pleasure, you know like pornography.

I bring this up in this review for “No Time to Die” because it is quite extraordinary how grown up the franchise has become. With massive popularity comes responsibility (via criticism) and the James Bond of 2021 is more an elder statesman than a juvenile delinquent. What is even more amazing is that the quality of the movies have not diminished. “No Time to Die” is just as entertaining as “You Only Live Twice.” Indeed, “No Time to Die” retains many of the old James Bond tropes: exotic locales, gorgeous women, a disfigured villain in an island fortress, but the mood and tone are of an entirely different genre. “No Time to Die” is like a great cover version song of an old classic. You know the song, but you had no idea it could work so well in such a completely different way.

This is Daniel Craig’s fifth outing as James Bond. The story picks up right where “Spectre” of several years ago left with the hopeful retirement of James Bond with Lea Seydoux, that gorgeous French woman. This one is directed by Cary Fukunaga (True Detective Season 1, Sin Nombre) who also shares a writing credit with the duo of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. (Purvis and Wade, IMDB relates, have written the last seven James Bond movies dating back to 1999’s “The World is Not Enough.” They are getting very good at it.) The retirement does not last very long though as Lea Seydoux’s past comes back to haunt her with James as the collateral damage. This movie is two and a half hours long, its locales span continents from Italy, to Cuba, to Sweden, to Japan, the main villain’s plot, and even his identity, comes quite late, yet it never moved slow and I never felt restless. I was in good super competent hands.

In particular, this movie is a course in actions sequences that work. Unlike the digital acrobatics of Marvel blockbusters, the stunts in “No Time to Die” have a down-to-earth visceral feel to them. It looks like that car really crashed and rolled, that the telephone pole fell down on a live set, that the stunt man really did drive that motorcycle up the side of that Italian building (wow!). At one point, in an extended one shot sequence, Daniel Craig shoots and fist-fights his way up a crowded stairwell. Whatever they are doing, it is just so much better than “Shang-Chi”.

A good James Bond movie is a series of fun set pieces, strong men, and beautiful women. The opening car/motorcycle chase with Lea Seydoux through the Italian village is great. So is the spy mission in Havana, Cuba with Ana de Armas as sidekick. Finally the infiltration of a villain’s island fortress with Lashana Lynch. In between there is humor deftly brought to the fore by wisecracking Ben Whishaw as Q and Naomie Harris as Moneypenney and the classic James Bond score providing the punctuation. In the villain department, Christoph Waltz reprises his Spectre mastermind Blofeld now locked away in a maximum security prison while outside a new threat in the form of Rami Malek.

It is the villain subplot that is finally where this movie comes up short. The danger is real enough. The British government was secretly developing a type of airborne weapon that attacks certain genomic sequences. In this way, the government could conceivably release the virus in a room and it would only kill one person, the intended target. Of course, this weapon is stolen and repurposed so that it may attack whole groups of people with similar genomic sequences, maybe an entire race of people. Evil enough, but the movie does not actually go so far as to suggest what group of people the bad guy is interested in killing. The bad guy’s island fortress is located between Russia and Japan and a simulation of the weapon seems to mainly central Europe. Noone in the movie is from Central Europe. Perhaps the franchise felt that to actually pinpoint a target was not necessary given that the members of the audience could all agree that the idea is nefarious supervillain territory regardless of what group is being targeted. Still, the lack of this detail, harms the viewer’s ability to understand the motivation of the villain, which in turn harms the drama. A minor quibble. Otherwise Rami Malek with his creepy delivery and bug eyes are classic Bond villain.

At the end of this movie, you may come to the realization that this really will be Daniel Craig’s last dance and that the franchise will have to turn to a different actor in any new installment. So who should it be? Well, I think whoever it is, they should redo the entire feel of the franchise, taking it perhaps down a few notches from the stripped down, brutish, and semi-seriousness of Daniel Craig. How about Dev Patel and, please, more irresponsible sex. Being responsible is great for a few movies, as a change of pace, but overall, James Bond should be having more fun.

Spectre (3/5 Stars)

It would be unfair to comment only on the drawbacks of Spectre without at first highlighting the things it brings to the table that other films simply cannot accomplish. That would be the epic globetrotting landscapes of the James Bond franchise. This movie directed by the returning Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) with a new cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Her, Let the Right One In) is especially impressive in this regard. It was shot on film in the classic style and plays great on a big screen (I saw it at the Ziegfeld). The exotic locales include Mexico City during the Dia de los Muertos festival, Rome bathed in a nighttime orange-green glow of conspiracy, London in a chilly bureaucratic blue, a supervillain headquarters in the middle of the desert, and at least one beautifully soft lit train interior great for white tuxedos and fistfights. It really looks good but enough about that.

Spectre seems to be the culmination of the last three Daniel Craig Bond films. At various times in the movie the images of past characters find themselves on screen. Included are Eva Green from Casino Royale and Judi Dench from Skyfall. Conspicuously absent are any characters from Quantum of Solace; a movie that I really liked for reasons everybody else hated i.e. a realistic supervillain scheme. All of the shadowy bad guys in the previous movies are connected to a secret organization called Spectre that has an octopus as a mascot. It’s really big and does a lot of things. And here is where the last series of movies finally experiences a thematic disconnect between the reactionary pedigree of the franchise and the radical version of the Daniel Craig James Bond.

The James Bond supervillains have historically been colorful silly things. They generally have some outlandish goal like wanting to take over the world (or blowing it up). They have exhorbitantly expensive secret lairs. They have exotic henchmen with quirky ways of killing people. None of these things are all that believable. The Daniel Craig series of movies took the silliness out of the franchise. They took away almost all of the gadgets. They took away the scene stealing physical deformities of the villains. They involved evil schemes that were more or less real (in fact the scheme in Quantum of Solace actually happened which is the main reason I thought the movie had some serious chutzpah.) Heck even the blatant promiscuity is gone. I believe Daniel Craig refuses sex at least once in each of his movies. In this one, the refusal takes place within the first ten minutes during an impressively long tracking. It feels like a nice inside joke. The effect of all this seriousness combined with the retention of superior action sequences and decent character development has produced, I would argue, the best Bond movies in the franchise. Spectre has the look of the last three art house Bond movies but the plot of one of the old sillies. The whole thing feels like a setup to the production of more of the forgettable kind of Bond movies. It seems counterintuitive to me that the last three great James Bond movies would culminate into a standard James Bond movie. But that is me. James Bond movies do have a structure and the franchise has been around for a very long because that structure works for the most part.

If you have many Bond movies there are plenty of tropes here that you will recognize. The running joke of Bond’s propensity to destroy all of the equipment built by the continually annoyed Q (Ben Whishaw) is on full display here. Bond flirts with Moneypenney (Naomi Campbell). Bond rebels against M (Ralph Fiennes now). Bond gets captured by the bad guy, tied to a gurney, and uses a trick watch to escape. There is even a scene involving the love interest (Lea Seydoux) tied to a chair with a ticking time bomb and Bond has to decide whether to save her and probably die or just save himself. You have seen all of this before, but rarely in the Daniel Craig series, (or shot so beautifully by a great director and cinematographer team), which always took itself more seriously than the previous installments.

Nowhere does the disconnect present itself so glaringly then when the evil scheme presents itself. Spoiler alert I guess although I don’t think you will care so much by this reveal. The scheme is a world dragnet of surveillance, the sort Edward Snowden told us about and is in vogue currently as a supervillain plot. James Bond’s part of the British Secret Service MI:6 is portrayed as the responsible old fashioned way of doing spy stuff. Of course it isn’t. I mean the first scene of this movie has James Bond going AWOL in Mexico City having a fistfight in a helicoptor over a parade of several thousand innocent bystanders. It is a seriously dangerous irresponsible stunt by a agent going rogue agaist all orders. I know this is a James Bond movie but I wouldn’t judge the scene on its safety to the public if the movie itself did not intend to grandstand against the surveillance issues of our times and take the position that those are worse. There are too many dramatic conversations where characters inveigh vaguely against the danger of a police state in between set pieces of extraordinary violence that only with movie magic would not kill scores of innocent bystanders.

But let’s be positive about some of those set pieces because they are very good. My favorite parts of the movie have to do with the henchmen, played by a former pro wrestler named Dave Bautista who first came on the movie scene in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy. He is a big brute of a man. After an awkward introduction he becomes the antagonist for a great car chase through Rome. It’s thrilling and very prettily shot and I was impressed that they got access to the Vatican. James Bond gets away but Dave Bautista catches up on a train as James Bond, in a white tuxedo, and Lea Seydoux, in an elegant dress, are sitting down to drinks. He bursts in from another car and havoc ensues. The fight is interesting in that it becomes clear that James cannot win it. Bautista is too big and too strong. It is a very cool thing to watch. I was wondering if they could end it in a way that wasn’t bullshit. They did.

I wish Cristoph Waltz was more entertaining as a Bond villain to me. On paper he would seem to be perfect. But I can’t say it was a particularly memorable performance or character. Oh and the bad guy from BBC's Sherlock Holmes is in this movie as well. He had far more potential on paper too. 

The Zero Theorem (2/5 Stars)

‘The Zero Theorem,’ is a much bigger movie in its advertisements. The production design provided by the endlessly inventive mind of its director, Terry Gilliam, after being crammed into a two minute commercial gives off the impression of a visual epic on the scale of his previous works Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Manchusen, and most recently The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus. In actuality much of the movie takes place within the main room of a decaying cathedral now inhabited by a recluse named Qohen Loeth (Christoph Waltz). There are a few other set pieces like a workplace and a street and a virtual reality beach, but other than that the locations are quite limited. It is a rather dramatic exercise in how to get as many visually inventive designs within the smallest amount of budget possible. Terry Gilliam is at the forefront of stretching the digital buck to its breaking point.

Unfortunately besides the production design, “The Zero Theorem” is not a particularly enjoyable film and given the absurdity of the production design in relation to the main metaphor of the film, it cannot be considered a good film either.

The film is supposedly set in a futuristic dystopia that mixes the cynicism of Blade Runner with the color palette of Speed Racer. It is a weird futuristic dystopia in that the technology is new and unfamiliar but also far worse than what we currently have today. Everything is way more complicated and far more annoying to use than it has to be. Take the computer/video game console that Qohen Loeth works on at his job. Not only does he have to manually pedal the thing with his feet, but the controller he uses looks like the worst idea Nintendo ever had went and ate all their other controllers. The good people at Apple who have dedicated their lives to making technology non–threatening for the general public should look on this movie with a sense of horror.

Gilliam did something similar to this in Brazil when he used warped technology (airducts to be exact) to actively demonstrate the oppression of a totalitarian government. But ‘The Zero Theorem’ is not a totalitarian dystopia but a consumerist dystopia run by a business named ‘Management.’ It is not at all clear why this business would want to actively oppress its customers with a terrible user experience. For all of this movie’s preachiness about the diminishment of the individual in a corporatized landscape, the most culpable villain here is problem Gilliam himself. He is the one that came up with all these profoundly annoying contraptions and he has a long history of treating human beings as cannon fodder for whims and jokes (see Monty Python).

His main character in this movie is especially pathetic. Played hairless and socially castrated by Christoph Waltz. What he wants is to be a recluse sitting next to a phone in his cathedral where someday he may get a call that will explain to him the meaning of his life. (Movies that dwell on the meaning of life generally give unsatisfactory answers and this one does not disappoint in its disappointment. Management has an answer to why they have assigned Qohen to work on the Zero Theorem, a theory that proves that there is no meaning of life, but again the production design of the movie argues against that explanation.) Qohen refers to himself in the royal first person and claims he is dying. It is a metaphor to be sure, but the metaphor is so obvious that it swallows up the viewer’s ability to think it deep. It is just there and might as well not be because the movie is not persuasive in its arguments.

A lot of things are here that might not as well be. Qohen attends a party with a host that is dressed in a fat tiger costume. There is no particular reason for the fat tiger costume. It is just another in a long list of visual gags that make the viewer titter in a ‘hey what is that doing there?’ vibe but in context are meaningless artistic choices. The character might have well been dressed up as a walrus or a unicorn or not dressed up at all. It does not lend anything to the story. Critics complain all the time about the arbitrariness of huge blockbusters but then give leeway to smaller independent films like this. Well, in my opinion the standards should apply to both. What we see on the screen should not merely be whimsical indulgences? They need to add or complement what the story is about. If this were a bigger film it would be bad. Being a small independent film does not make it any less bad.

There also must be noted that there is a female character (played by Melanie Thierry) that has the sad and far too common fate of having to somehow someway fall in love with an utterly unattractive and much older man. I suppose when you are in charge of a movie’s budget, one of the perks is that you can hire women willing to portray this sort of thing. The honest thing to do though is to make the character mainly interested in money too. 

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.