..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Inglourious Basterds, The Marc Pease Experience, Post Grad and more ... _________________________________

Inglourious Basterds (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Quentin Tarantino
     
Quentin Tarantino shoots the works in Inglorious Basterds, a wild movie-movie-lover’s blend of WW2 action movie pyrotechnics, subtitled art cinema romance, inside-movie allusions of every type and description, grand spaghetti-operatic Sergio Leone stylistics, and a brash “Let’s-rewrite-World War 2-and make-it-a-De Palma flick” ending so crazy it keeps blowing emotional and technical gaskets as you watch it.
   
That last demonically loony Tarantino set-piece is about a star-Nazi-studded movie premiere of a German patriotic blockbuster called “Nation’s Pride” held at the last minute in a Paris theater run by vengeful Jewish femme fatale, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), with Hitler and Goebbels in the audience and two assassination/massacre schemes in operation inside. (One plot involves Shosanna and the other. the bloody and misspelled “Basterds” of the title: a “Dirty Dozenish“ wild bunch of Jewish Nazi-scalpers ramrodded by the cheerfully sadistic Lt. Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt with Southern-fried tongue deeply in cheek.)
     
The show is certainly a lot of fun to watch, especially if you share many or some of Tarantino‘s madly eclectic movie tastes (I do, mostly), and it contains sequences of real brilliance and high cinematic gusto, and a crackerjack (mostly) cast. Everybody on the tech side, is in high gear here, especially Natural Born Killers cinematographer Robert Richardson, and the score is assembled lovingly from Ennio Morricone music, a dash of Mike “The Wild Angels” Curb, and the somewhat mushy Brothers Four-cut theme song from John Wayne’s The Alamo, Dimitri Tiomkin’s The Green Leaves of Summer.
      
Inglourious Basterds, which takes its title from Enzo Castellari's much different piece of WW2 kitsch, the 1978 Inglorious Basterds. It’s obviously a labor of both mad love and commerce for Tarantino, who has Pitt sign off the movie by saying “I think this just might be my masterpiece,“ and seems to have been in a position to realize every “Guns of Navaronish” fantasy he‘s had for the last few decades. The cast seems to be having a ball, one and all, especially Pitt, Christoph Waltz as the viciously ingenious Jew-hunting Nazi Col. Hans Landa, Laurent as the Jewish vendetta bombshell, and Til Schweiger as macho-man Sgt. Stiglitz.
    
It may seem simply perverse when I say I didn’t enjoy the picture as much as Reservoir Dogs -- which, like Basterds, is based on a mangling of a foreign film title (in that case, Louis Malle’s WW2 era drama “Au Revoir les Enfants,” as mispronounced by a Tarantino date). But I did. Reservoir Dogs is simpler, shorter, cheaper, much less seemingly ambitious. But it has more pleasurable shocks, more relentless narrative inevitability and more sense of its own wacked anti-reality than Basterds, which tends to be a grandly nutty genre-bender without enough prep and context for its nuttiness. Sergio Leone himself of course certainly put real life, history and credibility through the wringer in his great Eastwood and Bronson horse operas -- remember the Civil War in Tarantino’s favorite movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? But the diversions from reality weren’t so bizarre, so exaggerated, so entertainingly but flabbergasting inexplicable.
      
Is Inglorious Basterds taking place perhaps, in the dream-laden mind of an L.A. movie and war buff and WW2 obsessive who gets hit in the head Red Skeltonishly and ”Dubarry was a Lady”-icily, with a sandbag while watching a double feature of  Where Eagles Dare and Dario Argento‘s Blood Red? That might explain why Rod Taylor pops up as Winston Churchill  and why Mike Myers is General Ed. But it still leaves us reeling at the attendance of Hitler and Goebbels, in wartime, at a Parisian theater, run by the vendetta bound Shosanna, attended by the movie’s star and actual hero:the Third Reich’s supposed answer to Sgt. York. On a day’s notice yet.
       
You either go with all this or you don’t. I could most of the time. But you may want to get a reality recharge afterwards, perhaps by watching The Sorrow and the Pity.
    
Tarantino‘s movie begins with one of its best scenes, the Leone-saturated suspense sequence about hidden Jews in a French farmhouse, which introduces Shosanna as well as the perfidious and multilingual Col. Landa, and which establishes the whole reigning mood of movie allusions and rampaging violence. Allusions? Pitt’s Aldo Raine, of course, recalls the quintessential WW2 sadist Aldo Ray and there’s an Omar Ulmer (for Edgar Ulmer) and  a Major Hellstrom (“The Hellstrom Chronicles?”) The other terrific show-scenes are another of Tarantino‘s Mexican standoffs (Who shot Nice Guy Eddie?), this time involving a turncoat German film star (Diane Kruger), and of course, the movie premiere bloodbath.
    
If Inglourious Basterds has a notable lack, it’s that its own Dirty Dozen -- the head-ripping band run by Pitt‘s Aldo -- are not particularly distinctive or interesting characters. Or even very scary. Why do the Nazis here have all the good lines?
    
But at least there are good lines. Tarantino here displays his genius for spiky, punchy, clever genre dialogue, as we haven’t heard it for a while, since the great gab of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. It’s obvious he’d like be Leone, but its nice and nasty to hear his Elmore Leonard side again. And, crazy as Inglourious Basterds may seem, at least it’s alive.       

The Marc Pease Experience (Two Stars)
   
Can we have a moratorium on movies about ambitious middle class kids, their job problems, their nasty nemeses, their wacky families, and their last minute triumphs over everything? Give me a break. There are two of them out this week -- Marc Pease and Post Grad below -- and they’re almost equally unrewarding and annoying.
    
Todd (“Love Liza”) Louiso’s Pease, is the more obnoxious of the two, thanks to its self-obsessed and terminally irritating hero, a twenty something guy who cracked up playing in a high school production of Wiz” and is now trying to get a contract for his a cappella singing group Millennium 9 (which has only four members) and is still chasing his old teacher/director: the almost as obnoxious Jon Gribble (Ben Stiller, showing his dark side), a conniver who not only trashes Pease but steals his girl, Meg (Anna Kendrick).
     
Kendrick‘s Meg is cute and somewhat more sympathetic, and the a cappella singing was okay. But I didn’t want to watch any of these people. Or experience anything with Marc. Lots of people have it tougher than you, dude. Get a life. Get a movie.   
 
Post Grad (One-and-a-Half Stars)
    
Here, the triumphant grad is Alexis Bedel as the aspiring L. A. publishing exec Ryden Malby, the nemesis is Catherine Reitman as nasty valedictorian Jessica, the wacky family includes get-rich-quick schemer Walter (Michael Keaton), good-gal mom Carmela (Jane Lynch) and goofy grandma Maureen (Carol Burnett -- and a real waste of her time). There are two boyfriends -- true-blue Adam Davies (Zach Gilford) and exotic David Santiago (Rodrigo Santiago). The ending is happy. And sappy. Moratorium, please? Contrary to anyone’s theories, this is not the way to make an American art movie.  

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs


- Michael Wilmington
August 20, 2009

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