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ST. NICK Review

Karina — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:01:06 GMT

Two kids — a boy of 11, and a girl of 9, brother and sister, apparent runaways — drag a duffel bag into a crumbly, seemingly abandoned house. Now they live there. No one seems to be looking for them, and they offer no explanation as to where they came from or why they ran away. They could as likely be aliens as lost little children. It’s almost as if they’ve drifted off into another realm, some kind of Oz.

The first half of David Lowery’s feature directorial debut St. Nick is devoted to the ways in which this family unit spends their days building a life in their new home. Procuring provisions for cheese sandwiches, salvaging furniture, fixing the toilet. Arguing about the fate of the dog they left behind, and whether or not he misses his under-age owners. Virtually wordless for long stretches of time, St. Nick relies heavily on contemplative imagery to convey meaning –– particularly, the clear-lit landscape or a Texas winter in juxtaposition with the pink-and-white faces of his two young stars, real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears. As both types of images, both equally beautiful and mysterious, become increasingly gray, the film matures from a study of actions infused with a quiet magic, to a study of inaction, of waiting and drifting telegraphing an increasingly palpable sense of fear and dread.

Those who have some film festival familiarity with Lowery’s most recent short film, the largely stop-motion A Catalog of Anticipations, may be surprised by his methods here (including many long, slow, fixed, often wide shots), and how long he takes to establish their patterns. In some ways, the title of the short is applicable to the feature: Lowery literally catalogs his character’s movements, showing in painstaking detail how the kids take on some perversion of traditional male and female roles (without anything doing perverted): the boy playing fix-it, building a home by any means necessary and available to him; the girl playing mother to their new “pet” (the decayed skeleton of what used to be a dog). You wait for something to happen, and then you realize that it’s happening — St. Nick reveals itself as a string of vignettes about two lost souls old enough to get themselves lost and enjoy it, but too young to be able to fully grasp the length and obstacles of the road ahead to the point where they, like we, know to wait for the other shoe to drop. They don’t try to get a TV, or comics, or toys. They seem happy to do nothing but what they need to do to maintain their lives. We become comfortable with being with the brother and sister in each heightened moment, whether she’s crafting the world largest, messiest dessert sandwich, or he’s stumbling on a woman playing guitar on her porch and subsequently falling into some kind of love. And then suddenly Lowery gives his characters steeper stakes.

St. Nick would make for an intriguing triple feature with two other recent lyrical kids-on-their-own indies, Children of Invention and Treeless Mountain. In those films, the circumstances that lead to the siblings’ separation from parents leaves an imprint — a resentment, a frustration, a determination to get along with or without adults. In St. Nick, our unnamed brother and sister share only that determination, and increasingly, the sister seems like she’d be just as happy at home playing with the dog, with dinner guaranteed. In Children and Treeless, we meet sibling pairs in which the eldest takes on the de facto role of the little adult out of particularly dire necessity. In St. Nick, we meet a sibling pair where the eldest has created a condition of dire necessity in order to prove himself as an adult. The tragic irony is that, as a self-destructive hero in a Western of his own making, he’s mired in necessarily childish make-believe.

This review originally appeared during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. St. Nick screens tonight in New York at Rooftop Films. See also David Lowery’s recent blog post about sitting in a waiting room with Steven Soderbergh.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE Review

Karina — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:01:01 GMT

The September Issue is an irresistible pop culture mashup: imagine the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.

As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.

The themes of the film emerge most clearly via the relationship between Wintour and VOGUE’s creative director, Grace Coddington. A former model a handful of years older than Wintour, Grace started working at American VOGUE on the same day as her now-superior. Both women worked their way up over the course of decades, only to land in a position where Grace is generally agreed to be the best fashion stylist in the world … and yet every move she makes is subject to Wintour’s approval.

Wintour is credited with transforming VOGUE by putting actresses on the cover, thus greasing the wheels for high fashion and its associated esoterica to enter the entertainment media. Grace is more of a purist; she puts her shoots together with the artistry of the image as the first and only concern, only to continually suffer the humiliation of having her work end up on the cutting room floor by the market-minded Wintour. Coddington is the only person around the office who doesn’t seem to buy into the Fear of Wintour, which is palpable on film not because her near-peers and underlings speak to it, but in the way they speak to her. When Anna asks a question, the answer offered is almost always inflected like another question; the people around her are terminally non-committal, as if the worst crime one could commit in Wintour’s presence is to have an opinion.

If the dominant media image of Anna Wintour, from The Devil Wears Prada and beyond, is that she’s a villain, she doesn’t do much here to disabuse us of that notion, and certainly Cutler does her no favors in the way they present her moments of tyranny. The director begins the film with an clip from a sit-down interview with Wintour, in which the VOGUE editor attempts to defend high fashion from unnamed critics. “Just because someone wants to wear Carolina Herrera instead of” — here she reaches for an example, as if she couldn’t possibly think of anything anyone would “want” to wear more than Carolina Herrera –– “something from Kmart, doesn’t make them a dumb person.”

Of course, only a “dumb person” would accuse someone of being “a dumb person” based solely on what they “choose” to wear. The issue is that for most of us the choice between Carolina Herrera and Kmart isn’t actually a “choice”, but a financial imperative. You could chalk this flub up to linguistic imprecision, but Cutler chooses to include right it at the beginning of the film for a reason: it sets the tone for a character whose extreme focus on the bottom line of her magazine causes her to tune out countless realities, up to and including that most of the critics of the fantasy she sells wouldn’t be able to afford that fantasy for themselves.

Cutler may not offer much evidence that Wintour is deeper than our pre-conceived image of her, but he does offer revelations in terms of her actual image. Wintour is often shot from below, the classic angle given to a person in a position of power, but in this instance, it reveals the imperfections of the facade. We see that her neck and the area under her chin are severely bagged, and up against her comparatively smooth face, one gets the sense that this is less from age or surgical restraint than from her habit of lowering her chin in pursed-lip frown. And yet, she’s so concerned with her own image that Grace is able to use Cutler’s camera crew against Wintour to get what she wants.

Grace and Anna embody the age old conflict between art and commerce, given new spin for an age of luxury obsession with the trap door dropped out. A VOGUE couture spread (Grace’s specialty) was the old, safe way for the masses to indulge in luxuries they couldn’t actually have. But when this kind of photo journalism-as-entertainment is pushed out in favor of cover stories revolving around not just non-models, but “it” girl actresses promoting films via carefully calibrated stories of “relatable” personal heartbreak, the fantasy sold within the pages of VOGUE becomes several degrees less blatant in its fantasy, and moves several steps toward actual accessibility. In a climate in which both the pursuit of art and beauty for the sake of it, and of journalism as mass-culture record of the present and contextualization for the future, have been swiftly pushed to the margins, the pretense of escape via advertisement still soldiers on. Though Cutler’s footage was shot over nine months in 2007, September seems to anticipate our current withdrawl from the addiction of spectacular accumulation. More than just aping the escapism of VOGUE itself, it may be the ideal film for those bitter and bedraggled by our current economic fix.

A slightly different verson of this review appeared during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

LACMA Film Program Saved! For Now!

Karina — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:00:47 GMT

The LA Times’ Culture Monster blog is reporting that, thanks to donations totaling $150,000 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Time Warner Cable/Ovation TV, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has reversed their decision to end their film program in October, and will now keep the program alive “at least through the end of the fiscal year in June 2010.” The Culture Monster post doesn’t indicate whether or not the LACMA’s Michael Govan and the film fan activist group Save Film at LACMA will go through with the much-hyped “popcorn summit”, scheduled to take place on September 1, to discuss LACMA’s film future, but apparently the Museum is newly committed to “thinking about the history and future of film as art as well as film’s increasing importance in the larger narrative of art history.”

Interesting side fact/road to conspiracy theory: David Segal’s recent NY Times profile of The Weinstein Company blamed Harvey’s acquisition of Ovation as one of TWC’s biggest missteps. Is Saving LACMA Film the Brothers’ way of backing up Inglourious Basterds’ big opening weekend with a big “we’re back” gesture? Maybe!

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC Review

Karina — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:01:24 GMT

“I was the smartest kid in town, and the reporters knew it,” brags Josh Harris in We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s documentary on the rise and fall of the Internet’s first (and still its most charismatic) video mogul. It’s a telling statement, in that it points to both Harris’ 1990s raison d’etre, and also his Achilles heel: it’s not what you do that matters, it’s that people are watching you do it. Timoner’s portrait of the prescient (and quite possibly crazy) web pioneer will be a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing, even if her storytelling tactics are surprisingly stale.

A quick-cut pileup of stock footage, video captured by Timoner over a decade on Harris’ trail, and footage recorded during his surveillance projects, Public outlines Harris’ troubled childhood and tricky relationship with his alcoholic mom before clicking into its comfort zone with Harris’ founding of Pseudo.com. Pseudo, launched in 1993, morphed from a Prodigy chat service into an internet TV network, complete with themed channels and on-air personalities. The company –– and Harris –– became best known for throwing wild parties, which by the late 90s had formed the core of the Silicon Alley social scene. For a brief, heady moment in time, celebrities mingled with nerds, and nerds became celebrities — just because, as Silicon Alley Reporter & Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis puts it, “you knew how to set up a modem.”

Riding high on hype (and an $80 million “on paper” net worth), in 1999 Harris launched a massive art project called “Quiet,” where he invited dozens of artists to live with him in a bunker complete with firing range and communal showers, with each bed outfitted with a camera and a TV screen. Life was filmed constantly, residents were subject to the interrogation of a CIA operative, and no one was allowed to leave. When the FBI broke into the bunker and made everyone evacuate (they thought it was a cult, and as one member says on screen, “We were quacking and walking like a duck”), Harris and his girlfriend Tanya moved into a loft outfitted with motion control cameras in every room, broadcasting their relationship 24 hours a day to an audience of eager chatters. This project, called “We Live in Public,” fell apart when the relationship cracked under the pressure of surveillance. By this point, Harris’ sanity was slipping away as fast as his fortune, and in late 2001, the entrepreuer disappeared to an apple farm upstate.

Harris is a great anti-hero, and the film more than convinces that we haven’t even begun to grapple with the ramifications of our “always on” internet personas. But for all of its fascinations, the frantic pace is frustrating. Timoner’s montages move so quickly that you can’t begin to connect to or contemplate the bulk of her images. This technique is effective in conveying what it felt like to be in the middle of the whirlwind, but it blocks any beyond-superficial understanding of what that whirlwind meant. (The exception to this rule is the section of the film using footage from “We Live in Public” to talk about Josh and Tanya’s break-up; Timoner gives this material time and space to breathe, which only draws attention to the airlessness of the rest of the piece.) Timoner also relies a little too heavily on pop music for commentary. It’s one thing to set a montage of “Quiet” footage to Le Tigre, to remind us what 1999 felt like; it’s another to ask LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” to bring the poignancy to a 9/11 montage. The song might have been a fresher choice had it not been used not long ago (and to greater ironic effect) on an episode of Gossip Girl, but it still would have been a lazy, literal way to inject feeling.

But Public ultimately overcomes its grating stylistic flourishes. Most striking is the footage of “Quiet,” which looks like a mash-up of The Real World and Abu Ghraib. In the late 90s, Harris anticipated not just our country’s use of quasi-fascist interrogation, but the fascination with documenting it and sharing that document on social platforms. Every Harris project seen in the film includes a chat room. He figured out the core truth behind social media years before the rest of us: the news, the art, the event itself is nothing unless you enable people to talk about it.

This review first appeared during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We Live In Public opens in New York this week.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Luke and Brie are on Amazon

Karina — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:01:26 GMT

The following review appeared during the 2008 Hamptons Film Festival. Luke and Brie Are On a First Date is now available for rental or purchase via Amazon Video on Demand.

Luke and Brie Are On a First Date, which world premiered in the Hamptons last weekend, is the debut feature by Chad Hartigan, a frequent collaborator of Aaron Katz, and there are definitely some superficial similarities between the two filmmakers’ work. Like Katz’s Quiet City, Luke and Brie follows two attractive young people (George Ducker and Meghan Webster) around a city as they break through awkward uncertainty to forge a tentative romantic connection, and with their dreamy, super-intimate videography, both films have a way of enveloping a viewer in the action (or what passes for action), ultimately serving as delivery vehicles for the kind of heightened realism that marks an unexpectedly life-changing night out. But Luke and Brie plays its drama much closer to the surface, and through a little bit of self-reflexivity, a film that’s virtually wall-to-wall conversation manages to avoid feeling too talky.

Hartigan, who is a Los Angeles-based box office analyst by day, said after the Hamptons screening that Luke and Brie, based structurally on his own first date with his current girlfriend, was shot in 5 days on a budget of $3000. The small scale of the project opens it up to an obvious criticism: surely, all of us could come up with a single night in our romantic lives that seems worthy of dramatization, and many of us could round up some friends and scrape together a few dollars and take a week off work to tell it. So what makes Luke and Brie special? Maybe nothing, and maybe that’s it — maybe it’s not interesting because it’s entering into unchartered territory, but because it takes us through universal, well-worn feelings and makes them feel new. With his camera often seeming to float over faces in extreme close-up, Hartigan’s micro-focus on the nerves, uncertainties, and ambiguities, the posturing and reflex self-medication and unexpected moments of honesty that fuel the night so nails the harrowing aspect of navigating modern romance — in which it’s always easier to do nothing than to do what one really wants — that he’s able to turn the film’s ultimate surrender to traditional romantic closure into something of a surprise.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

SpoutBlog: The Book

Karina — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:01:39 GMT

In the 26 months or so since I started editing SpoutBlog full time, we have published thousands of posts, covered dozens of festivals, and reviewed hundreds of films. In that time, blogging has become the default format for online content, while at the same time what it means to be a professional film critic has — to put it kindly — evolved. The meme is that the media is dying, but more precisely, information distribution is in a weird kind of limbo: blogs still seem ephemeral, printed matter legitimate.

So! We are going to publish a book, a compilation of SpoutBlog’s “greatest hits,” with special emphasis on my reports from festivals, writings on below-the-radar films, and posts that reflect the evolution in online film culture. We’re going to publish it through CreateSpace, then sell it on Amazon and at film festivals and like events. The goal is not necessarily to make money (although we do hope to break even on publishing costs), but to create a physical snapshot of this thing that I’ve devoted the last two years of my life to creating, and that many of you have gotten into the habit of reading. Also, I made an empty promise to myself in grad school that if I wasn’t able to publish a book by the time I was 30, it would be a sign that this writing-about-movies racket wasn’t the right vocation for me. I’m no longer such a believer in signs, but I do still like the idea of publishing books.

To do this, we need your help, in three specific areas:

1. Curation: Right now we’re thinking that the book will probably include about 40 posts — about 1-2 per month since I joined the fold. I’m in the process of creating a short list of candidates; I’ve currently whittled the 3,000-something posts down to 53 pieces, although I’m still trying to figure out which posts to include to reflect my coverage of documentary film. If you have favorite SpoutBlog posts that you think absolutely need to be included in this volume — or, if there’s anything specific you think shouldn’t be included — please let me know in the comments.

2. Photography: I’m looking for a New York-based photographer with access to equipment who can shoot the cover image. We have a concept in mind but would love to find someone who could contribute their own ideas. This would need to happen as soon as possible — preferably within the week — and there would be some small compensation — a couple hundred dollars, a couple sample copies of the book. You can email me at karina AT spout DOT come if you’re interested or know someone who is.

3. Promotion: The goal is to have physical copies of the book in hand by the beginning of October. If you are associated with a film festival/event, an independent bookstore, video store, or anywhere else that would be interested in hosting a reading or signing some such endeavor related to the book this fall or winter, please email me.

If you have any additional thoughts or questions, please let me know in the comments. Maybe it’s pollyannaish, but I really do want this to be something that benefits from the input of the audience — you, after all, are the reason why I get out of bed every morning. Or, at least, fire up my laptop from bed.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Is That Really Lauren Bacall on Twitter?

Karina — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:01:21 GMT

Twitter hasn’t “verified” her account so it could be a fraud, but here’s hoping that this really is Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall mixing it up on the Twitters. It’s plausible — if you condensed the bitchy, dishy voice of her autobiography into 140 character missives, this Twitterstream is what it would look like. My ten favorite moments of her Twitter stream thus far:

10. When she posted the Twitpic of her walking out of Max’s Kansas City en route to Studio 54 to meet “Mr.Warhol and Mr.Nureyev”.

9. Her response to people complaining about her lit cigarette in said picture, spread out over five tweets, including this commentary on the perks of old age: “The good thing about being 84 is that I can smoke as much as I want, If I was smoking 2 packs a day on the set of To Have and Have Not…..when I was 19 and I am still around 65 years later I can continue smoking as much as i want.”

8. “in LA to discuss with Mr. Scorsese his Sinatra biopic in the works, I wonder who he is going to cast to play me.Who would you guys cast?”

7. Bacall says she’s been offered a role in Quentin Tarantino’s new film opposite Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper, in which she would play “the villainess.” “I have never been offered to play a schitzophrenic Russian heroin addicted Kidnapper’s mother before. haha.” Haha indeed.

6. Her first tweet: “I can’t get this God dam thing to work!”

5. Her bio, in which she plugs her autobiography and astutely namechecks her three best films: “Read my book By Myself and Then Some and watch my movies The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not and Written on the Wind”

4. When she admits that her granddaughter made her watch Twilight. “she said it was the greatest vampire film ever.After the “film” was over I wanted to..smack her accros her head with my shoe, but I do not want a book called Grannie Dearest written on me when I die…”

3. …”So instead I gave her a DVD of Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu and told her, now thats a vampire film! and that goes for all of you! watch Nosferatu instead!”

2. When she calls out her 19 year old, scotch-addled grandson for hitting on a cater waitresses “with Jayne Mansfield size breast and Liz Taylor eyes, men do scumble into the female flesh temptation so fast.”

1. When she then posts a twitpic of said grandson, looking like a complete tool.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Aaron Katz, Lena Dunham shorts at Zero Film Fest in DUMBO

Karina — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:00:44 GMT

Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (2006) by Michael Bell-Smith. Courtesy EAI. from Why + Wherefore on Vimeo.

The Zero Film Festival, dedicated to serving “a niche in the independent film community, which has been under appreciated and ignored” by “screening self-financed and zero budget films from filmmakers all over the world”, kicks off tonight with a party in DUMBO, Brooklyn. They’ll be screening short films by some familiar names, including Lena Dunham, Mary Bronstein, Zach Clark and Aaron Katz. According to the fest, Katz’s SXSW 2008 selection Let’s Get Down to Brass Tacks will screen, and Dunham will premiere a new short called Misfire, “about two friends discussing the semantics of a reply to an IM, but it ‘misfires’ when they accidentally hit send.” The lineup also includes Mike Smith’s Chapters 13-22 of R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (see chapters 1-12 above). There’s more info on the event and the fest here.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Rethinking INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Karina — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:01:23 GMT

When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.

And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version said to be different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.

This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too.

The plot is the same. The titular elite squad of Jewish-American soldiers assigned to hunt and scalp Nazis, led by Brad Pitt’s noose-scarred hillbilly Aldo Raine, is only on screen for about half the film. We spend much more time in the company of Colonel Hans Landa, otherwise known as The Jew Hunter, played as a cartoon of logical evil by Christoph Waltz, and Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a beautiful young French Jew whose family’s murder at Landa’s hands caps off the first iteration of Tarantino’s talk-talk, bang-bang structure. Later, Shoshana emerges in Paris as the owner of a small cinema. There she becomes the object of infatuation of a German war hero-turned-star of his own Goebbels-produced biopic, and the next thing she knows, she’s agreed to host a gala, no-Nazi-detractors-allowed premiere for the film at her theater. Knowing that Hitler and Goebbels will be in the audience, Shoshana and her projectionist boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) plot to lock the theater during the film and set it on fire. Meanwhile, the Basterds, in cahoots with a German film star (Diane Kruger) and British film critic-turned-military officer (Michael Fassbender), separately plot to do essentially the exact same thing.

The film’s guiding spirit is encapsulated in an exclamation by Landa in the first scene: “I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading.” Tarantino has made a movie about World War II filtered through rumor — verbally-transmitted urban legends, to be precise. There is no casual conversation in Inglourious Basterds; virtually every scene involves an interrogation and a chance for someone to brag about and/or live up to their reputation. Concsious of the world they live in — ie, not Hitlers, not ours, but Tarantino’s — characters on both sides of the divide take an active role in their own myth-making, to make sure that word gets out as to who they are and why they are to be feared, and everyone takes great pride in knowing that word is getting around. The film’s most oft repeated phrase is “What have you heard?”

This myth-making provides both Basterds’ most fascinating subtext, and its most bloated primary text. Take for instance, our substantive introduction to the Basterds themselves, in which multiple reputations are discussed before three acts of Basterd-on-Nazi violence occur. One Basterd gets his own awkward origin story flashback, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, before we get to the point of the scene, which is defining which rumor will carry the day. The story of what happened that day will be told in three different forms. There’s what the Basterds tell the sole Nazi survivor of their massacre to tell Hitler; there’s what Hitler tells the sole survivor to tell everyone else, and then there’s what really happened.

Stories are propaganda, and propaganda is a weapon. This is not a film about how the war was fought on the ground (or in concentration/death camps, which are never mentioned), but a film about how both sides fought the battle on screen. In the single Basterds scene that I think is nowhere near long enough, Fassbender’s film critic-turned-British spy describes Goebbels as a warrior in the guise of a studio mogul, fighting for the dominance of the German film industry as a strike against both Weimar silent film and the Hollywood, both the provinces of successful Jews. Shoshanna uses celluloid as a weapon in a more literal sense. Her two-part revenge gambit involves film as an expolosive, and an explosive film in which she proclaims to be “the face of Jewish vengeance” (“in English,” Marcel insists when directing the scene — the language of the passive Jewish vengeance coming from Hollywood). Marcel’s goodbye to Shoshanna, delivered to her face on a movie screen after her actual body has already expired, is the closest thing to moment of genuine romance that Tarantino has ever filmed.

Ironically, though the film relies on the audience’s knowledge Nazi atrocities for its effects, it has little interest in actually depicting them. Tarantino reduces the Nazi high command to Hitler, chief propagandist Goebbels, and Martin Bormann (essentially Hitler’s press secretary). The public face and architect of Nazi supremacy and his right-hand men in its promotion are represented, but not Mengele or Höss, none of the real-life figures involved in the nitty gritty of designing and implementing genocide. Inglouirous Basterds not only avoids the depiction of the real figures responsible for the Final Solution, but it only presents the Nazi mass killing techniques as they’re appropriated as punishment onto Nazis by the Basterds. If you don’t walk in knowing that Nazis branded Jews, shot them en masse, locked them in buildings which they then burnt to the ground, Tarantino isn’t going to tell you, but the Basterds would lose all justification for their brutality if such events hadn’t happened.

What does this all mean? It depends, I think, on how much credit you’re willing to give Quentin Tarantino as a political provocateur. Is he really talking about the world we live in today? If so, what are we to make of a film that plays like apolitical fantasy, but nevertheless devotes its final images to broadcasting the idea that even when we win, Jews will remain an angry people who will neither forgive nor forget the wrongs done to us? If you want to see Inglorious Basterds as a contemporary allegory, you don’t have to strain — in fact, Tarantino makes it easy by presenting American soldiers who treat torture as entertainment (“watching Germans getting beat to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies,” says Pitt), in a setting 60 years removed from Abu Ghraib, within a fight that, like our current excursions in the Middle East, is in part about the right of Jews to simply exist. And then, by giving us multiple (if ambiguously intentional) Jewish suicide bombers, Tarantino makes sure that the heroes of Basterds not only do onto their 20th century oppressors what has been done to them, but they also give their key 21st century foes a taste of their own medicine. You could make the argument that Inglourious Basterds is a palpably anti-Semitic film as easily as you could argue that it’s a rah-rah work of pro-Imperialism, propaganda for US/Israeli collaborative war against those who threaten either’s global interests.

Either reading, I think, probably gives Tarantino too much credit — when has he ever been a filmmaker who ached to make a statement about contemporary events? Plus, the film’s best source cue tempers either extreme. A key, glorious sequence is set to David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting out Fire)” — borrowed, fittingly, from the soundtrack of the Paul Schrader remake of a Val Lewton horror number that allegorized the struggle of European immigrants in WWII America. It’s one of those musical-montage-as-mission-statement moments: you can’t put out a fire with gasoline without adding to the flames. Every act of war has fallout, and extreme acts burn for decades. Maybe this, too, is giving Tarantino too much credit, to assume that he’d take an active step to undercut his promotion of revenge, particularly when he’s talked at length about wanting to overturn the typical Holocaust film power dynamics to show “Germans that are scared of Jews.” But let’s just say he has a pretty strong track record of speaking through his soundtracks.

I’m still struggling with Basterds, as a statement of ideology (or lack thereof), and as a work of art. There are still things that bother me in terms of the way it flows, and I still think Tarantino sometimes over-exerts himself with the telling at the expense of the showing. But still — mea culpa. My initial assessment of the film was wrong. Maybe what I saw this week in New York really is a complete revitalization, so completely different from what I saw in Cannes as to excuse me from blame for not fully engaging with it in the couple of hours I had to form a correct opinion before the film was rendered old news by the maw of the festival cycle. But probably not. Probably, it is a couple of things. The film is now unquestionably a little bit tighter than the first version I saw; my complaints about the flow and movement of the action sequences is no longer valid, and as far as my complaint about the lack of “rock n’ roll efficiency”, well, that is idiotic now and probably was then, as well. But I honestly don’t know what has changed more since May: the cut of Inglouirous Basterds, or me.

Maybe this is unfair to you, the reader — maybe film critics shouldn’t change. Maybe we should go out of our way to lead extraordinarily stabile lives, to avoid financial stress and familial trauma, to not get depressed or even date for fear of swinging too far towards any emotional extreme in the hopes of maintaining absolute objectivity. If that’s the case, I didn’t do what I should’ve done — I’ve been sent through the wringer by all the above over the last three months, and come out a different person. But the world changes, whether or not I stay the same, and at the rate this one is changing, it’s unrealistic to expect something as trifling as a movie opinion to stay fixed indefinitely. In May, I was visiting France from a country just barely emerged from the glowing spell of Obama’s first hundred days. Today, I am currently living in an America where — apparently — it’s okay to compare the President to Hitler because he is trying to make it easier for poor people to go to hospitals and for old people to draw up living wills, and the only person doing anything substantial to combat that theory is a gay Jew who uses “dining room table” as an epithet. The question of what it means to act like a Nazi is suddenly relevant to our everyday lives. It’s possible that we need Inglourious Basterds now more than ever.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cinema Eye Honors move to January

Karina — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:01:11 GMT

Lots to of changes to report at the Cinema Eye Honors. Held in the spring for the first two years of its existence, in 2010 the awards dedicated to nonfiction film will take place in January. The calendar move will change the identity of the event from a footnote to the long awards season to a potential pre-Oscar indicator. Also, filmmaker Esther B. Robinson and newly installed San Francisco Film Society programmer Rachel Rosen will join Cinema Eye Founder AJ Schnack as co-chairs of the event, and former co-chair Thom Powers will now chair the Nominations Committee. Finally, the nominees for January’s awards will be announced at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England in November, thus somewhat internationalizing the affair.

Coverage of past Cinema Eyes.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Karina on SpoutBlog

ST. NICK Review

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE Review

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WE LIVE IN PUBLIC Review

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SpoutBlog: The Book

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Aaron Katz, Lena Dunham shorts at Zero Film Fest in DUMBO

Rethinking INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Cinema Eye Honors move to January

Is That Really Lauren Bacall on Twitter?