season of the bitch

possible spoilers

These are the last words in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and they’re so gloriously cocky spilling from the lips of Brad Pitt as Tarantino’s doppelganger, Lt. Aldo Raine: brash, foul-mouthed, scarred and uglied up and from an unsexy part of the USA and constantly smirking, unruffled by anything that happens to or around him, that I think he might be right. Tarantino, that is, speaking through Aldo Raine.

Despite the early trailers that made much of cartoonish violence and Pitt’s cartoonish accent, it’s certainly Tarantino’s most mature movie–despite those easy gags, it’s a mile away from the diatribes that revelled in tossing around taboos and dropping n-bombs in his earlier movies.

Pitt,  though he gets the last word, isn’t even the star of the movie–that would be Melanie Laurent as Shoshana, a Jewish cinema owner who saw her family killed at the orders of Oscar-nominated Christoph Waltz’s Col. Hans Landa, after betrayal by the man who hid them. The garish revenge of Raine and the Basterds is nothing compared to her steely resolve, and she gives the movie emotional heft that sneaks up on you and only hits you when you realize how far she’s willing to go.

Really at its heart this isn’t a movie about revenge–Tarantino already did that, glorifying and personifying revenge in The Bride in Kill Bill–but about movies, about the power and the joy of movies, but mostly the power. The way cinema can destroy, can inspire, can write and rewrite history. It’s not enough to kill Nazis–Shoshana must make a movie and splice it into one of Goebbels’ propaganda pieces, asserting her self, her freedom through cinema.

Tarantino’s greatest strength as a filmmaker has always been that he’s a film junkie: he can reference layer upon layer of high and low art. But the strongest references here are to his own movies–a closeup on Shoshana’s lips nearly identical to one from Pulp Fiction but with stakes much higher, and a drop-in grindhouse title on top of a German Basterd (who despite his cartoonish intro also lends weight–Til Schweiger is dangerously, broodingly dominant onscreen, emanating as palpable hatred as Shoshana’s every time he’s onscreen with the Nazis).

Even the Basterds, who start off as Jewish revenge porn (a crew of Jewish soldiers from the USA dropped in behind enemy lines to destroy as many Nazis as possible?), remind you where the film is really going. Eli Roth, nicknamed “The Bear Jew” and lovingly shot (never thought I’d find the man responsible for Hostel sexy) evokes a remark from Raine that watching him beat Nazis to death “is the closest we get to going to the movies.”

They strike back through spectacle, if not explicitly through cinema. They don’t just kill Nazis; they scalp them (how American-cinematic!) and leave mutilated bodies to be found, and carve swastikas onto the foreheads of those they let live–in a way, a nod toward what he owes to real victims of the Holocaust–a reminder that all this happened and no one should forget, and a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words gesture both of mercy (and the word “merci” is never translated in the subtitles, a move that I can’t help but think was intentional, particularly in the intro scene between Landa and LaPadite) and of continuing revenge. The story of the Basterds is their real strength, making them outsize cinema-villains. Storytelling is power.

The film cartoonizes Hitler, defanging him not just through violence but by making you laugh at him. It humanizes other Nazis, though, while not forgiving them–Daniel Bruhl as the young soldier who crosses over into cinema and stars in his own life story is almost likable in his flirtation with Shoshana and his need to flee the larger-than-life sight of himself on the movie screen, the dramatized version of his real-life exploits.

Bruhl’s character isn’t the only one that crosses the borders there–Diane Kruger also does as an actress turned double agent: film into politics into film again. The lines of reality and cinema, for Tarantino, are suddenly more porous, while the rest of his work has always been hyperconscious that it is film.  Basterds rockets from the improbable–Mike Myers in heavy makeup recruiting a plummy-accented film critic to go behind enemy lines to meet the Basterds–to the poignantly real, but here it’s not just celebrating the fun that movies are, it’s making a stronger point about them.

Tarantino’s political statement here is that cinema is political. Indeed, the movie wouldn’t have to be about Nazis at all but for the fact that no other regime in history so successfully embraced and used film to create and tell its own story.

I had sworn off Nazi movies before this one hit, but I am also a sworn Tarantino fan. So I may say instead that I hope this is the Nazi movie to end all Nazi movies. After all, it’s so conclusively rewritten history–something perhaps only safe to do with history both as well-known and as disputed as that of Hitler’s Germany.  Just the fact that he can make this movie leaves you wondering what kind of movies we’d have had the Nazis won. You get the feeling that for Tarantino, one of the most poignant scenes in the film is Shoshana’s statement that she has no choice but to play German films.

There are a million tiny perfect moments here–a montage set to David Bowie’s “Cat People/Putting Out Fire” with Shoshana putting on her makeup-as-war-paint, a cigarette flying in slow motion through the air to set a pile of film on fire, a request by Landa for a house on Nantucket that I can’t help but interpret as a dig at the Bush family’s own connections to the Reich, Roth’s exuberant outburst after bashing in a Nazi skull complete with Ted Williams references.

I did long for a comeback moment, a la Kill Bill or True Romance, a gesture of personal physical violence from one of the film’s female characters. But perhaps the lack of it is an odd gesture for some sort of peace, at least for Shoshana.

Peace. It’s not really a theme here, but neither is war. Violence certainly is, but for all the vicarious thrills (and heck, I’m Jewish, I enjoy them as much as anyone) the feeling given is less that violence is good and more that those thrills SHOULD be vicarious. Bashing people’s heads in with a baseball bat isn’t actually a solution to a problem, and if you want to burn down the theater to take your enemies out, you may well go out with it.

Still, I haven’t left a movie theater with a wicked grin like I did tonight in a while, and that’s the pleasure Tarantino has always given–lines to quote, laughs to remember later, visuals that stick with you, and stories, always stories.

It’s just that here, his story actually says something.

The Summer Of Death continues. Patrick Swayze has apparently died. In his honor, I’m reposting my somewhat famous feminist defense of Dirty Dancing, complete with video. You know you love this, so don’t even pretend.

1. Dirty Dancing.

I submit that not only is Dirty Dancing a classic, but that it is in fact a feminist movie. The entire relationship between Baby and Johnny is about HER desires, what she wants and when. She has the power to break his heart. Her sexuality is not punished in the film (though admittedly Penny and her sister do suffer for their desires). But Baby knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it, class differences be damned. Plus, she’s studying economics of underdeveloped countries, and wants to join the Peace Corps–in the 60s. I love it. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

I bring you Sarah’s Favorite Female Desire Movies!

1. Dirty Dancing.

I submit that not only is Dirty Dancing a classic, but that it is in fact a feminist movie. The entire relationship between Baby and Johnny is about HER desires, what she wants and when. She has the power to break his heart. Her sexuality is not punished in the film (though admittedly Penny and her sister do suffer for their desires). But Baby knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it, class differences be damned. Plus, she’s studying economics of underdeveloped countries, and wants to join the Peace Corps–in the 60s. I love it. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

(more below!)

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So on a snap decision tonight, Karthika and I went to see Milk. Because it’s catch-up time on movies (and I appear to have missed Synecdoche, New York, which makes me sad).

The problem with Sean Penn is that he’s so consistently head and shoulders above the rest of the actors out there that it’s hard for him to stand out anymore. He’s competing with his own stellar performances–I thought a few times of his Willie Stark from All The King’s Men during this movie even though the two roles are of course almost nothing alike.

Milk is a very well done biopic–there’s almost nothing wrong with it, and it’s filled with quietly excellent performances. James Franco is heart-melting as Milk’s longtime partner and support system, and even the more flamboyant roles seem very comfortable, unforced. The lone exception is Diego Luna as Milk’s neurotic, needy lover, who hits all the wrong notes and seems so clearly to be designed to make you wish Milk and Scott were still together. If he was supposed to show a flaw in Milk by highlighting his devotion to work above his own life, it failed–anyone would want to avoid that hot mess.

Josh Brolin plays Dan White, the one character not comfortable in his own skin, and his entire life feels like a drag performance or an ill-fitting costume–even his hair looks like a bad toupee. The contrast between the less attractive, older, social-outcast Harvey Milk who is still so at home in himself, and the attractive, married, “respectable” White, who is so at odds with himself that he resigns, then wants his job back, then is willing to kill for it…well, it’s well done.

Gus Van Sant has little use for scenery chewers, and indeed his more recent movies (Elephant, Gerry, Last Days) have been so meditative, eschewing standard narrative in favor of watching people interact in front of the camera, that I was almost shocked at how conventional Milk was. (Then again, I’m also talking about the director of Good Will Hunting-which I love.) But it adheres to all the biopic traditions, and has perhaps an easier time of it with the life of Harvey Milk, which has a nearly perfect dramatic arc over an 8-year period. He falls in love, moves to California, faces discrimination, runs for office, loses, runs for office, loses, runs for office, loses, and then finally wins, only to face a bigger, scarier fight against Proposition 6 (it seems too coincidental how close it is to our own Prop 8), wins that, and then…well, you know how it ends.

The film made me tear up at several points, but like the aforementioned Van Sant movies, felt a bit distant. I would have liked more of Milk’s personal life–more pieces of him to see the human that was lost to an assassin’s bullet, not just the symbol. Aside from a few scenes between Franco and Penn, who make an easy, natural couple, mostly I cried because I knew what was coming, and I knew how little has changed in the thirty years since Milk died.

Just thirty years. And at the same time, thirty years! Longer than my lifetime, yet not long enough. The signs carried in the film were so similar to the ones a few weeks back at the anti-Prop 8 rally, and the arguments given by Milk’s opponents not too different from the ones we still hear. And the scenes with Milk and the  bourgeois gay folk reminded me of recent battles with the HRC and the gloss put on the marriage fight all too often: see, we’re acceptable!

Milk never bought into that. One of my favorite moments in the film is him telling Emile Hirsch’s character to wear his tightest jeans and make a grand entrance every time he showed up in City Hall. Milk both made himself accessible and insisted on openness, and I like the combination.  Don’t I wish he’d been around to help with the fight against Prop 8.

(Side note: I’ve seen the trailer for The Wrestler twice in two days, and both times it’s made me cry.)

If this movie was any indication, it’s going to be a good movie season.

I haven’t seen a movie in a while that sent me this deep into film-geek heaven. The last one might even have been Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. From the opening scenes, with cameras behind the rotating cameras of India’s “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and Dev Patel sweating under the lights, I was sucked into a world that Danny Boyle has no right to have created so perfectly.

Boyle might not have grown up in the slums of India, but he understands the streets and feels for the kids and knows how to make you feel for them too. At heart, Danny Boyle is a romantic, which might sound funny for me to say of a man best known for Trainspotting and 28 Days Later. But it’s true.

All the gritty realism of those films, the swirling action and heady plunge into an alien world, is here, plus a deeper love of humanity that showed up better in A Life Less Ordinary (and possibly Millions, which I haven’t seen but which also revolves around a child). Slumdog Millionaire pulls together all the threads of Boyle’s career into a movie that easily tops them all.

So many horrible things happen to Jamal (Patel) but he still manages to hope and love, and that’s the deepest message of this film and the one that resonated and left me grinning like an idiot as I walked out of the theater. But it’s also a movie about class and capitalism, not so much about the clash of East and West as it is the clash of money with humanity.

Jamal wins 10 million rupees on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” but since he’s a poor kid from the slums, he’s arrested for cheating. The movie flashes back through his life, explaining how he knew the answer to each question, and showing a life that would’ve turned a lesser kid hard and mean. That did turn his brother Salim hard and mean.

Salim as an adult is lanky-sexy and hard as nails, and we see in him all that Jamal could’ve become. But Jamal had Salim as a barrier against the world, and had Latika to love. So he remains wide-eyed and trusting and awkwardly charming, and with each bit of pain he endures we pull for him a bit more, like the Indian audience that tunes in to cheer for him on “Millionaire.” He is, after all, a piece of all of them.

I could talk at length about gorgeous overhead shots–a market, a train, the Taj Mahal–or a scene in which the boys’ clambering up a set of bleachers to steal purses is ten times more beautiful than the opera the rich folks are watching. I could talk about the kids from actual slums in India, who do an amazing job carrying much of the movie. There’s just so much here that begs to be seen again, and again.

The movie takes on lots of weighty subjects and themes through the lives of the boys. Their mother dies in anti-Muslim violence, they have to learn to fend for themselves, and fight off a gangster who is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to turn kids into better beggars (in one of the movie’s most horrific scenes).

And the boys learn to make money. One of the questions that Jamal answers correctly is which U.S. statesman is on the hundred-dollar bill, and Salim crawls into a bathtub filled with money at the film’s end. Money is always there, but ultimately it’s not what Jamal wants. He wants the girl, and when it comes down to the ending we’re all reminded that the money more often than not is what hurt the boys the most (though plenty of other things do as well).

The coolness with which the police officers torture Jamal and then are captivated by his story and become the good guys is chilling, and a commentary on the willingness of good people to do bad things that sets up later events perfectly.

Of course, the obvious theme is that what Jamal learns on the streets sets him up for success more than anything he could’ve learned in school. That knowledge and wisdom are not things that can be bought and sold with a degree or a fancy house or any other trinket of privilege. What it says that his final question on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” is one about a classic of Western literature is something I’ll have to think more about, and I wonder if it was the same in the novel the story came from. But the question also relates to Jamal’s life, his bonds with his brother and the girl he loves, and these are the true meaning of the film.

Because Jamal is willing to throw away the money he’s won at every turn, just to stay on TV a bit longer, just in case the girl he loves is watching.

I’ve never identified with the romantic heroine. None that I can think of, anyway.

My favorite book, Les Miserables, has among other things (revolution! socialist politics! humor! angst!) a sweeping romance, love-at-first-sight style. And I never liked Cosette. I identified with Eponine, rejected, dead on the battlefield.

I never liked Romeo and Juliet, but Mercutio made me laugh. In West Side Story they added another female character, and I liked Anita way better than Maria.  I wanted to be Rizzo in Grease. Liked Rayanne better in My So-Called Life.

My favorite love stories were always full of action or doomed. The happy endings never seemed real. I liked True Romance and Natural Born Killers and The Crow.

I’m starting to wonder if that affected how I feel about romance.

I wonder.

are here. This one’s for matttbastard, violet and pidomon.

I’m too caffeinated yet tired to write a full review, so I’m just going to throw my feminist critique out there. (Is it still a critique if I’m going to say something good?)

Yay for a movie about teenage hookups that focused on the FEMALE orgasm for once. Granted, one girl used it as a weapon to hurt the other, but let’s hear it for some focus on the girl getting off for once.

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else, so I’m not going to say any more than that.

Oh, but Kat Dennings is so damn cute.

Watching this movie on OnDemand while I’m doing my reading–in other words, not paying a whole ton of attention. I’m not sure how historically accurate it’s supposed to be, but the Cuban Missile Crisis is kind of fascinating in any case. (Plus, I can indulge my weird historico-crush on Bobby Kennedy.)

What’s really crazy is to think about, say, the current administration in a situation like that. We’d be screwed–they’d have bombed first, and probably not survived long enough to ask questions later. Even with McCain’s famous temper and willingness to joke about bombing Iran…

I wonder how many people, put in that situation, would’ve managed to extract us from it in one piece? I’m not one for mindless JFK-hero worship, but it is fairly interesting to note that whether or not this movie’s accurate in the degree of resistance received from the military brass, there were definitely people who wanted to bomb, to invade, to do the kind of shit we’ve done in Iraq.

Of course, now we just go after countries without nuclear weapons, and without superpower backing.

Paul Newman is dead.

I cannot think of a celebrity that I would genuinely mourn more than Paul Newman. They don’t make men like him nowadays, and they sure didn’t make them that often to begin with.

The Hustler is one of my favorite movies, and I’m going to watch it tonight and cry.