About That Film INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS...

So with Quentin Tarantino's new movie premiering right now, as I type, to the piranhas out at Cannes, I feel it's time for  a bit of a public announcement regarding this hotly anticipated film...

ABOUT THAT FILM "INGLORIOUS BASTERDS" (NOT A TYPOS)

We need to be expecting a lot from Inglourious Basterds.  

And no, I'm not saying we should expect a lot because we are going to get a lot. I'm saying we need to expect something in this film because "it" is a something we very well might not get, and we must acknowledge the step back - if it ultimately is a step back - for Tarantino. Because of my high esteem for Tarantino's last picture, Death Proof, I feel we need to raise our expectations higher than ever before for Inglourious Basterds, in terms of the level of thematic and subtextual elements it has to offer us... and thus be ready to call the film out if it falls short of achieving genuine relevancy, and creating truly meaningful statements about the real world - something that Tarantino has often been criticized for not doing, opting instead for the hermetically sealed artifice of his alleged "pop art" or "pulp cinema" inclination.

There is truth to this criticism.  I believe Death Proof, though, was a considerable step in the right direction, especially after the geeksploitation piffles that were the Kill Bill films, as good as they could often be.  Death Proof is his most rhetorically insinuating, hawk-eyed, and socially critical genre homage yet. This is because it breaches the parameters of mere homage and riffing, and finally makes the leap into more closely discriminating genre deconstruction, as he was more wont to do in the 1990s. 

Even Tarantino's iconic 1990s output somewhat pale in comparison to the edge he reveals in Death Proof.  Those early films indulged his tendency for sparkling homage to genre and incessant hagiography of his characters and their respective, idealized archetype. This less evaluative approach tended to defang his pictures of any trace of critical faculty. Attempted genre deconstruction strikes a viewer merely as flattering imitation.  While Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown have the credit of their revisionism and some choice subtext, we also get the sense Tarantino is too in love with the sensibilities, narrative elements, and aesthetic styles he draws from for these films.  This lack of a distanced eye really prevents him from zeroing in on the functionalism in genre representations, as is so inherently the subject under scrutiny in his films, which are, without exception, reflexive works revealing realities and nuances in film worlds.  Tarantino certainly shows true invention within his virtuoso filmmaking, but he is consistently criticized for his proclivity to "borrow" styles and aesthetics.  This is a tricky and often reactionary criticism, but it underscores the seeming "essential lack" that is consistently perceived by his viewers - a lack of true social and real-world commentary in his films.  There is certainly pathos and gravitas, emotionalism and dramatic parallels, etc. in his films, but while Jackie Brown is an affecting look at the business of living a life, and Pulp Fiction a dismantling look at the absurdities and romances of criminal codes, neither really dig deep or excoriate.  Both are blithe commentaries instead of incisive ones.  They brush upon things only to sink back into the amiability of the story and the story's sentimental value to Tarantino.

In Death Proof, I believe he finally goes the step further and chooses to reveal dysfunction and ugliness in the representations he appropriates, doing this by making us thrill at what are actually truly off-putting illustrations of brutal murder and remorseless victimization. The text seems to revel in the typical formula of the slasher film, the revenge film, the badass babe flick, but instead he imposes on this spare formula the spare structure of an Apichatpong Weerasathakul film and dares us to seek entertainment in what is essentially a thoughtless skeletal formula (slasher films and revenge films = exploitation at their purest), constructed only to make us cheer on violent death and, in the end, ugly retaliation on a helplessly injured and out-numbered old man.  The film's rich and painterly compositions, the story's allegorical simplicity, and the aforementioned structural build give this film the self-containment of a poem, and sets itself apart from Tarantino's other films in its lack of oh-so-clever plot machinations that often come as requisites to the cinema of escapism and pulp diversion.

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino is simply asking for this heightened critical eye. We're getting subject matter from him different from anything we have ever gotten before: a historical piece and a war piece dealing with the most harmfully systematic Fascist rule recorded in history.

Tarantino, in the past, has mined depth in the purely personal and emotional, but rarely-to-never has he ventured into the territory of the political or the grand social arena.  But now - with such subject matter as we have in this particular Quentin Tarantino movie - then incisive social and historical commentary is, pretty necessarily, what we need to be looking for, if we want this to be anything worthwhile in light of what Tarantino achieved with Death Proof.  He needs to prove he can illuminate critically on history as resonantly and astutely as he did on the correlative between vulnerability, power, and genre thrills in the work prior.  

And, considering my lack of enthusiasm for him before the existence of Death Proof, what I personally need from this film is just proof that he can illuminate in profound ways again... that he has continued to grow since Death Proof; that making that film further cemented in him a belief in the value of the most deliberative of allegory and the sharpest of critique.

Check out that colorful and stylish map they've got going on there. Does the Third Reich's have some Art Noveau-adherent cartographers under their commission, or will Tarantino make a point about the garish ideological branding that characterized Hitler's regime?

"Ridiculous" and "cartoonish" are not necessarily bad, and word is the film is both these things, but will it be at the service of nuanced historical considerations or simplistic Nazi-comeuppance fantasy?  I am cautiously optimistic, for while Tarantino's films may not all reach the heights of meaning, none of them can be called outright juvenility.

ANTI-CHRIST AT CANNES

Lars Von Trier's new film Anti-Christ premiered in Cannes this past Sunday, and apparently it's a mood-conceived provocation consisting of elements of explicit sexuality and extreme acts of violence.  One comparison levied at the film is "Bergman meets Saw."  As cautious as I should be towards valuing pithy analogies such as that one, I do find it enticing to see just how much meaning a true aesthete (which may or may not be Lars Von Trier) can shake out of a film whose premise, trailer, and, now, reception makes it look like a work of unadulterated exploitation cinema.

I am confident there will be much to find profound and revealing about this film, in spite of alleged grue and naughtiness.

A Daily Mail reporter in the Cannes Press Conference (pictured above) made a concerted effort to be particularly combative.  Initially in a perfectly acceptable manner, he asked Von Trier to, for "his benefit," explain and "justify" why he made this film.  When Von Trier gave an also perfectly acceptable, very reasonably conveyed answer of "No," due to the use of the word "justify" and likely its inconsistency with a certain regard he has for the meaning this work has to him, the reporter went on to interrupt him with a very stern, "No, you must," insisting he has an obligation to explain himself as a filmmaker at Cannes - because Cannes is such a big deal, ya know?  As big a deal as the Vatican.  Or a 17th century Spanish tribunal, I guess, in terms of having to perform moral auto da fe to the Cinema-Gods.  Well, I guess more like the Vatican, considering all the yacht parties, sun-bathing celebrities, and less immediate life-and-death business dealings.

Then proceeds lots of murmuring and one reporter coming to Lars' defense, proclaiming Lars an "artist" and the reporter-douche "not-an-artist," which is a defense against criticism I find a bit limited, but works in this circumstance.

But wait, how do I know this?  Am I at Cannes right now?  No, I'm not, goddamnit, because if I were, I, my brain, and all my senses (and I mean all my senses) would be right this second taking in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.  

No, there's video coverage available on the official Cannes website.  For the Anti-Christ conference, just click the following and enjoy: http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/mediaPlayer/9902.html.

Some further thoughts about Lars Von Trier's foray into the horror genre: 

Speaking as a fan of the horror genre, I would actually have preferred the film received more traditional, sober praise (or scorn)... but, all evidence considered, this response was much more in-the-cards (the love/hate/rioting/disgust/arousal).  I still lament the fact that we have a filmmaker here who has evoked incredibly precise, incredibly stimulating sociological treatises in his previous films, and when he makes his big, high-profile leap into the horror genre, remarks about the film's philosophical "plumbings" seem relegated to the usual horror tropes of "the depths of depravity and evil," and this idea of taking the genre to the "extremes" of abject violence as if that's the only place for horror films to meaningfully go.  I would've much preferred an alternate universe where Von Trier came up with a film consisting of scares and supernatural elements that tackled his usual lofty, highly discursive subject matter, instead of him exploring what are essentially the excesses of the horror genre - although, again, I look forward to this film greatly and expect a lot from it.  It doesn't seem like Lars did much to "class up" the genre, though... not that I necessarily would have wanted that.  Films like The Orphanage are said to class up the horror genre... and man was that film boring and often the opposite of classy.  What I ideally wanted was a classic philosophically-dense and challenging Von Trier dissertation that happens to be scary.  But I am very cool with what it seems like we've got - a mood piece-turn-shock cinema nightmare painting from a thinking-man provocateur.

THAS: Tobe Hooper's EGGSHELLS screened at the SXSW '09 Film Festival!

It turns out Tobe Hooper's very first film, his 1969 experimental film Eggshells, was specially screened last Tuesday, March 17th, at the SXSW (South-By-Southwest) Film Festival in the town of its very making - Austin, Texas - where, as a film student at the University of Texas, Hooper made this very first venture into feature-length filmmaking! Screened at the Alamo Drafthouse, Hooper himself was in attendance...  Hot damn, to have been there!

Allegedly the Texas counter-culture flick to end all Texas counter-culture flicks, the film is undergoing restoration now by Watchmaker Films and is apparently looking forward to a home video release by next year!  Color me psyched.  Color me psychedelic, in fact!

"Time and Spaced Film Fantasy"?  "An American Freak Illumination"?  We shall see someday, hopefully, if the film can live up to its absolutely golden [baked] taglines.

Some links:

Cinematical's report from the screening

Admiring review by Austin Chronicle's Louis Black

Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2009)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest film Tokyo Sonata is an unabashed message film, clearly making concerted effort to get across on-the-nose observations about the modern world and contemporary society to the viewer. This includes issues such as the family unit, militarism, the financial bedrock of common living, and, in classic Kiyoshi Kurosawa fashion, generation gaps and the plight of the underestimated female. Yes, the K-man has never been coy with his hyper-vivid worldviews, but never has he been particularly plain-spoken, or tied to the literal. Here he is not setting his sights on the art-house audience. Instead of his usual MO, which is to work so heavily in allegory and microcosm, here he is willfully working towards heightening social perception by taking on simplicity and straight-forwardness.

This is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Milk. As Gus Van Sant does in his new film, Kurosawa seems to have also resolved not to stew any longer in the dark, mysterious recesses hid deep within inaccessible, repressed society -- a log line which very much describes both Kurosawa and Van Sant's output prior to 2008. There's nothing mysterious about an ordinary family, nor about their being brought to a breaking point by ordinary pressures of common life, nor about its all being result of the ordinariness of nations and their ideals of social order.

Cast off is the cryptic, for the most part, for both Van Sant and Kurosawa. Both resolve to engage with the prosaic, hectic, and rather dreary public world (be that politics or white-collar bubbles) by taking on society and hegemony, by loudly calling out the failings of the masses that think they do not have anything to hide, and by being so clearly proactive against common regimes of thought and "Elephant-in-the-Room" mores, that their bright, shining, near embarrassingly boisterous films will reach, inspire, and alight even a cinema philistine.

 Both filmmakers pull back on the art-house reins considerably, but manage to mix their art-house habits quite successfully with stories that often seem intentionally barbed and armor-fitted with story material and emotional hooks that verge on after-school special territory.

This time around, there is no need to brace yourself against numbing existential conclusions convinced of life's ephemera. This is a socially minded picture, and what is social-mindedness if not an effort to instill hope for continuance, progress, and change? It is this explicit campaign for change, through a plot engaged to the literal world, that rails this latest picture on a different track from Kurosawa's previous films. Even the film's nearest conduit to existential stupor - the mother character's escapade of longing - takes on the larger (or is it smaller?) significance by representing forwardly the Japanese Housewife, plagued by her social insignificance, as opposed to just a woman, plagued by her very existential being, as is depicted in Kurosawa's harrowing Seance (about a depressive female psychic who goes to terrible extremes to alleviate deadening, deeply-rooted feelings of existential worthlessness).

Tokyo Sonata is said to be Kiyoshi Kurosawa absorbing and filtering Ozu, but then again, it is also the turn-of-phrase in conversation about this film that Tokyo Sonata is still an odd and offbeat Kiyoshi Kurosawa concoction. Some are loving Kurosawa's fusing of his tried-and-true hyper-allegorical renderings with his more novel stab at social realism. Others think his penchant for the odd and off-kilter undermines the worldly wisdom.

In the end, the film is an uneven mix of moments of inspiration and moments of banality; moments of true power and moments of incredulity; scenes of incredible beauty and scenes of social laffs so telegraphed and run-of-the-mill you wonder when's the Kurosawa ghost gonna finally pop out. The cons listed are ultimately attributable to both the overstated social drama originally aimed for as well as the mild Kurosawa mindfuck that eventually has emerged, as the fusion is a bit awkward. When the film is working as a social drama, it spins its wheels for the most part with the broadest social observations and situations. I don't really warm to Kurosawa's sense of humor (Kurosawa's License to Live is a great dark allegory marred by his unfortunate inclination for quirk), and here it's used to drag out unfunny caricatures, most dealing with making the father as pampered as possible (e.g. his worshiping his friend's mock cell phone conversations and his prissiness as a janitor). When turned around as a super-expressionistic Kurosawa film, his oddball flourishes come off a bit hoary and reveal his writing is often dependent on the use of proliferate metaphors, not reality-based observation. When the story is as literal-minded as it is here, his love for open metaphors ("Someone please help me up," or "I've come this far" - both quotes from the mother, unsurprisingly) just seems overly vague, thrown in there without the meat of reality to support it -- which is a problem when your film has such an agenda to be more meat and less philosophy. When the surreal, expressionistic plot developments, character interactions, and abstract flourishes rear their head in the latter half of the picture, their abruptness made them a cliche of the Kurosawa kind. Of course, the "Kiyoshi Kurosawa cliche" is a very special type of cliche, but, even if it were not for the contrast between hyper-realism and hyper-allegory found here, the absurdist gestures of Tokyo Sonata are a bit hackneyed.

The film is best when, of course, it finds the happy medium between accessible and weird. As it turns out, apparently the film's development was not entirely a harmonic one: Aussie co-writer Max Mannix had originally written the film to be a very Ozu-like, "neo-realist" look at a contemporary Japanese family, without whimsical interruptions (indeed Kurosawa had significantly re-worked it to his own vision, with such interruptions). But despite my misgivings, I am glad Kurosawa ran off with it: the feverish and dreamy climactic act is a fine reminder just how good Kurosawa is at the abstract and the ethereal.

A few more nagging flaws: a subplot with a fellow down-and-out businessman is a distraction, laying at the center of the film's "prosaic" middle-section, and its awfully premature discarding deems it ultimately useless. I had an issue with the casting as well, this character being casted in a way that I thought him much younger than our protagonist, when they were supposed to have gone to school together. This would not be so much of a problem if it didn't just serve to highlight that this depicted 2nd family (the family of the friend) functions solely as a redundant mirror of the main family, when something possibly more interesting could have been done if they mixed it up a bit, for instance if the friend actually was of a younger generation.

Second, you know that scene when the mother goes all Bonnie Parker and returns to the thief all rawr and "You know you're glad to see me, let's drive!"? Then she retracts the convertible roof and says "I've come this far"? Well, we all saw that bit coming, as crowd-pleasing as it is.  In general, the mother's third act development is perhaps too incredulous and the thief seems inessential and incongruous to the rest of the film.  His being a portrait of failure is an effective point, potently filmed, but he is a sole cartoon character in midst of steady husbands and fathers that fill the rest of the picture.

Lastly, there is another subplot involving the US military and Japan that seems more suited for the more farcical satire of something like The Host than this film. It is a bit thuddingly presented, but I appreciated the plain-spoken hypothetical nature of it. It also leads to a very clear-headed and moving final word for a pivotal character. The excellence of this particular plot thread's closure is an evaluation that probably applies to the film as a whole: despite the rough and uneven ride we are given throughout the film, the resolutions and finishing touches the film finally offers us are all of stunning clarity -- for instance, the climax being the literal dissemination of the family, and the resolution being their ironic, simultaneous coalescence to a stunned breakfast table (with a repeating angle that is reprised for each character's entrance). And then there's the final scene, which is truly resplendent in its simplicity.

Tokyo Sonata - 7/10

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009)

This must be one of the most non-message-laden children's film I've seen; perhaps one of the most non-message-laden films, period, I've seen. Coraline is practically anomalous in the annals of above-ground cinema in its quizzical non-preachiness. The imaginative anarchy that is supposedly liberated in the animated film and alleged to be achieved in the likes of the South Park and Aqua Teen Hunger Force movies have always never been able to shake off a certain transparency in their existence as responses to the current fixtures of mainstream culture, whether doing this with explicit satire (as in South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut) or utterly vulgarized inanity (Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon The Movie). Coraline, on the other hand, reaches back to those strange fascinations humans had in their childhood, when things could be utterly meaningless and not be an acquisition from the grab bag that is popular culture's sense of irony (or from, of course, the opposite: the grab bag - or fish-in-a-barrel - of culture's stead beliefs, like moral values, religion, psychoanalysis, etc.). Coraline, with Dada-like imperceptibility, succeeds in being the first film about nothing, without a socialized, righteous bone in its body. No morals, no Christian values, no Freudian shockers, no politics, and no cultural subversion like South Park or Un Chien Andalou (although I'm told I must see Freddie Got Fingered). It's not about any traditionally boasted life values - heck, it's not even about imagination! The closest one could get is saying the film's actually not a film... it's a "moving picture." Because yessiree, that is right, these pictures move nowadays! So if you want to see bustier-clad tightroping dames, all's ya gotta do is just look through this 'ere peep'ole and turn the crank. Why are they tightroping in lingerie? Because you like it, that's why! Why else?

And that is what Coraline is about. Not all that "appreciating your family" blah blah. It's about spectacle without explanation. I suppose one could elaborate that into practically equaling "psychoanalysis," since that - the labyrinthine mind - is where all sensations are in essence from, and spectacle is by definition whatever the hell makes us sensate. What it implies about the human condition is the field of psychology, but Coraline, strikingly, doesn't seem to give a fuck.

So the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie is out there in the multiplexes waving its arms about telling viewers, "If you don't enjoy this, then you've become a closed-minded busybody!" But it's purposefully crude drawings emphasizes its irony and so betrays its status desires, its counter-cultural pandering, its riffing on video game nostalgia, and its general catering to modern pop culture's post-modernity-developed sense of meaninglessness. Coraline, on the other hand, starts from square zero. It tells the viewer: "If you don't enjoy this... were you ever unsullied by this social world?" Were you ever a child, those little beings who could be dazzled by the purely meaningless without feeling the need to respond to some intellectual registration of the object in question within themselves?

Now, which you find more appealingly "X-treeeme!" I'll gladly leave to each person's personal taste, but while ATHF calls you out for "changing, man!", Coraline is, well, aghast at your very existential being, as someone who was never born an untouched child. You didn't "used to be cool" - you just never were; you must have popped out your mom's womb the prick, moron, knucklehead, hipster, whatever, that you are now.

Okay, so maybe the film does have a story and a message. The whole film is centered around imagery and archetypal renderings of the family unit, mother-daughter dynamics, and gothic imagery, which, one can suppose, gives it message enough. The sequence of Coraline's complete immersion into the Other world, in which she sits in on the grand shows performed by her neighbors, is a visual tour de force and makes me want to give the film a 9 for its unabashed indulgence in the joys and the morbid traps of empty magic and spectacle (equated in the film to the "perfect family" ideal). Watching in such impossible close-up those creepy, beady-eyed mice doing runway acrobatics made me recall other antiquary curiosities as Edison Co.'s 1903 elephant electrocution film and this thing.
This film harkens back to the good ol' days of the Cinema of Attractions, where concerns to be narratively engaging, explicably PC and rational, and logically appeasing were not to be so stringently applied to the magic of the movies.

The 3-D is amazing. I cannot imagine watching the movie without it, although I am not sure if that fact makes me very happy. It just confuses me more about the seeming resistance to "message" behind this picture. Any themes or emotional through-points Selick might be trying to communicate through his screenplay are at least equaled, but likely surpassed, by his motivation to create a 3-D extravaganza. Coraline is an very special film in that, from pretty much every angle - that is, thematically and otherwise - it is pretty much about spectacle and empty spectacle, and the 3-D just plays so nicely into that. I am sure Coraline is almost as fine and evocative in 2-D, but I imagine the film is pretty much built around creating 3-D imagery. It's 2 hours of the Paddle Ball man from House of Wax - only thematically integrated, and dazzling, and not idiotic.

So is it Selick being texturally perceptive in that he has made a 3-D spectacle of a film, about the perils of empty spectacle, communicated in the way of complete spectacle, and with a shocking lack in conventional movie preachiness, which would have undermined the spectacle? That would be some fine subtext, if it be the case. Assuming so, what does it say about a film that makes it its anti-moralistic prerogative not to undermine its devious motives to beguile and seduce its audience with egregious spectacle, without taking the audience to task at the end?

The film's spectacle targets a special, weird place in its susceptible viewers' hearts and minds, which is the same sensibility that in other cases causes us to be so strongly pulled in by the sheer strange, and so bemused by the non-sequitur. The non-sequitur, as in those funny things that have a way of revealing the meaning behind meaninglessness. Is that not what symbology and dream psychology essentially is? The meaning behind the meaningless (or the meaning given to the meaningless...?). Take for example, the Other Father, cultivating a garden in the form of her likeness - is the concept just "cool" or was it culled from some Jungian notion of something-or-other, who knows what, about seeds being sown or the blossoming of fruit? Does the distinction really exist? Most likely it is both, and thus we get to the idea that Coraline is a synthesis of cinema and dreams - dreams being spectacles, but an intrinstic part of the real world, the real world being that place where it is, after all, all 3-D, all the time.

And one's dreams don't exactly assault you with cloyingly pat messages after sitting with them for an hour and a half, do they?

I wonder about Neil Gaiman's book and what "morals" or messages it is most inured to impart to its readers... and how this film adapts and accentuates (or, I suspect, de-accentuates) them.

Coraline - 7/10