It probably goes without saying that Inglourious Basterds was one of my favorite movies this year. I'm not sure that it beats out Kill Bill for my fave Tarantino of the '00s (I was just bowled over by what he accomplished with that film, esp. after revisiting it this summer), but it was unquestionably a highlight in the rather dull year that '09 was, for me, for movies.
It should also go without saying that this isn't QT's WWII movie--it's his WWII-movie movie. Huge difference. For all the intertextual trainspotting that the most obnoxious filmies were falling all over themselves to point out (Aldo Raine is a wink to Aldo Ray! etc.), I don't think this point was given enough attention. Dono very rightly and thoughtfully pointed out over on his blog that, among other things, reimagining Hitler's demise doesn't actually change the historical record, doesn't actually change the fact that all those people died in concentration camps, doesn't actually erase any of the atrocities that occurred and linger in our memories. Of course it doesn't. But after decades' worth of WWII movies that have more subtly attempted to redraw the shape of history in ways that are often way more odious in their piousness and self-righteousness (as Eddie Argos put it, Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now), QT's genius here is to be as fucking in-your-face about his historical revisionism as possible. If we're going to necessarily fictionalize WWII by making a movie about it, why not, at this point, just use every ounce of juice available in the medium and get our rocks off? As Mike Barthel put it, "No one, at this point, needs to be educated about the Nazis or the Holocaust; anyone who wouldn’t have sympathy for the Jews or antipathy for National Socialism is pretty much a lost cause, and it’s hard to imagine any piece of torture-porn or rigorous factual evidence convincing someone who’s not already in that camp. So why not, you know, have some fun with it?" To reiterate: this isn't a movie about WWII--it's a movie about WWII movies. Nobody is desecrating anything here, at least nothing that doesn't deserve to be desecrated a little bit. Don't all the Saving Private Ryans and Life Is Beautifuls need to have the piss taken out of them a little bit with pure punk rock cinema?
Because, as Sean T. Collins so brilliantly pointed out, that's exactly what this is: punk rock cinema. It's snotty and sneering and unapologetically going to leave anyone in the dust who doesn't get the joke. How the fuck else did you think QT would deal with the subject matter? As Archie Hicox, the English film critic-turned-solider-turned-spy, says right before the massacre in the basement tavern, "I hope you don't mind if I go down speaking the King's." In other words: when shit looks grim, you use the language available to you, and then you enjoy your Scotch.
And the language available to QT is movies, the intoxicatingly beautiful and ridiculous grammar of which underpins stuff like the Hugo Stiglitz intertitle and its accompanying power metal guitar riff before Aldo Raine busts into prison to tell him "we're big fans of your work"; Shosanna's face, enjoying the literal last laugh, projected onto the smoke rising from the movie theater-turned-gas-chamber that has been set ablaze using actual film stock; Frederick Zoller turning from a soldier into an actor; Goering fancying himself the Third Reich's David O. Selznick; Bridget von Hammersmark conflating spying with acting; Donny Donowitz and Private Ulmer's breathless action-movie-cliche exchange before busting into Hitler's opera box ("After I kill that guy, you have 30 feet to get to that guy. Can you do it?" "I have to!"); and, of course, the final, cheekily self-referential shot of Aldo Raine drawling "I think this just may be my masterpiece." Even the WWII-movie convention of everyone going around speaking accented English gets a nod during the impeccable opening sequence when Hans Landa shifts from French to English and back again.
Which reminds me--holy shit, this movie was subtitled in at least three different languages and one of the major plot points turns on being able to discern inconsistencies in another character's accent and use of idiomatic gestures. This, rather than the male-dominated cast of soldiers and its attendant tough-guy posturing, is the true hearkening back to the era of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction: language, my people, language. All the sitting around and talking to kill time, all the ways that secrets are traded as precious commodities. Language divides just as sure as it brings pleasure; it's a weapon every bit as dangerous, in its own way, as Aldo Raine's knife. Nicknames and rumor (the trash genres of verbal communication, as it were) serve, elegantly, a kind of double function here, as destabilizing tactics among the governments and their martial emissaries (eg, Hitler's futile insistence that no one ever refer to Donowitz as "the Bear Jew" again) and as sly commentary on the world of film fandom (eg, the repeated question "have you heard of me?", Landa's pointed insult to Utivich about his height).
All of which, of course, would be bullshit if the movie wasn't so much fun and also so lovely. Much has been made of the final showdown at the premier of Nation's Pride, and for good reason. It has to be one of the most taut, thrilling sequences since...well, maybe since the House of Blue Leaves vignette in Kill Bill. The use of Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" was a brilliant, achronological touch that just catapults you into the excitement and anticipation of the moment. Sublime.
There's much, much more to be said about the film, and I'll probably get around to saying more eventually. I just felt like I needed to get some of my most salient impressions up here (four months after the fact, ahem; thanks for your patience, friends) before the end of the year. Viva QT!
*
The few things I've seen since our last movie update right after Thanksgiving have been mostly lackluster. I fell asleep during the final climactic battle sequence of Avatar, and A Single Man is as dumb, shallow, and pretty a film as you'd expect a douchebag like Tom Ford to make. Up in the Air didn't do much for me other than prove, more than ten years after the release of Out of Sight, that America clings tightly to its favorite enduring fantasy of having nearly anonymous sex with George Clooney after getting picked up by him in a hotel bar. (JR Jones made me cackle when he referred to Clooney in his review in the Reader as "the most adored man in America after Barack Obama.") Also, Vera Farmiga is super pretty (though I still always momentarily think she's Claire Forlani). Sherlock Holmes is fluffy and fun, almost distractingly so--Robert Downey Jr., talented as he demonstrably is, pretty much doesn't even act anymore as much as he personifies a series of exclamation points bouncing around at 24 frames a second. In the plus column, I liked Broken Embraces quite a bit more than any Almodovar film in the past few years, especially when you realize it's not actually about the Penelope Cruz-centered love story, but actually about the improvised family structure created by and around Judit and her son. And though I missed it during the approximately five minutes it was out in theaters this summer, I finally just caught Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience on DVD and really loved it. I love that he's one of the few filmmakers willing to engage in any sort of conversation (reductionist as it necessarily must be) about the ways that people make and use money. The personal trainer character made me want to gag on my own tongue a couple times for the ways that he reminded me exactly of the trainer I was working with for six weeks this fall.
Otherwise...yeah. It's been a pretty boring year for movies. Whither the explosion of creativity and innovation we saw ten years ago in '99? Was it just a fin de siecle thing? Not much has really stuck with me this year. It's all the single word movies: Up, Moon, Taken, Humpday, Adventureland. More importantly, there was also Bright Star, Bad Lieutenant, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and, as elaborated upon above, Inglourious Basterds. And, in their own weird ways, also The Soloist and Two Lovers. That's not even a movie per month! Hopefully you've had a luckier year than me, my darlings. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the new year and the new decade, shall we?
Bonus track: in chronological order, here are my top 20 favorite films of the '00s.
Almost Famous--2000 (I'm pretty sure I saw this movie the same day I had Ethiopean food for the first time--CTLA, be a good Boswell and correct my memory if I'm wrong about this)
The Anniversary Party--2001 (this is really of a piece with Rachel Getting Married, as far as their being real-time depictions of talented friends gifting each other with the extravagance of their talent; I have a real soft spot for that sort of thing)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch--2001
Moulin Rouge!--2001
The Royal Tenenbaums--2001 (although I seriously did debate citing The Life Aquatic; I've really come around on that film since I originally saw it in the theater, now that I think I better understand what it's doing)
Insomnia--2002 (Christopher Nolan's most underrated film)
The Pianist--2002 (Polanski, you fucker, I wish I knew how to quit you)
Signs--2002 (shut up, I don't even care--this is my favorite film about the experience of the day of 9/11)
All the Real Girls--2003
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead--2003 (it's Clive Owen in a neo-noir; why didn't more people see this?)
Lost in Translation--2003
Kill Bill, Vol. 1--2003--and Vol. 2--2004 (it's really unfair to think of them as separate movies)
Before Sunset--2004
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--2004
Cache--2005 (along with seeing Eyes Wide Shut for the first time, this is one of my favorite filmgoing experiences ever)
A History of Violence--2005
There Will Be Blood--2007
Man on Wire--2008
Rachel Getting Married--2008
Bright Star--2009
Showing posts with label "tarantino revisited". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "tarantino revisited". Show all posts
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Death Proof
Even though, intellectually, I see and to some extent understand that QT's films aren't for everyone, that they're problematic for some thematically and in their treatment of violence, etc., emotionally it's unfathomable to me. I get such a jolt of pure joy out of these movies--both in the sense that they bring me joy personally and in the sense I get that they bring him joy as well--that when people talk about disliking his oeuvre, it's like when I hear someone say they don't like chocolate. It's just like, what? How can you not love this?
It makes sense that Death Proof would be one of QT's most meta/intertextual films, as it's his installment of a "double feature" made in homage to both a style of cinema as well as the whole experience of consuming these kinds of films, made in concert with his best filmmaking buddy. But revisiting it this past week, I found myself more deeply delighted than I'd remembered by the formal elegance on display here--probably because I was initially distracted by all the trash trappings he was playing with (intentional scratches on the print, sleazy mise-en-scene, sudden shifts from black and white to color, the vintage "feature presentation" and "restricted" animations before the movie actually begins). Not only, obviously, is Grindhouse bifurcated, so is Death Proof, and, it's clear to me now, so too is the second half of Death Proof. The movie seems to be constantly splitting itself in half as it moves farther and farther away from any sort of gesture toward "realism" as it becomes more and more purely about cinematic conventions, so that by the time the girls kill Stuntman Mike, it's not really about whether or not these characters would "actually" behave this way--it's more about the symbolic death of the exploitative male gaze. I mean, obviously, right?
The two casts of women in this film are fairly obvious doubles/recursions of themselves, down to their character "types"/looks, haircuts, hierarchies, conversations, etc. I read this as not just indicative of Stuntman Mike's pathology as a stalker looking to endlessly recreate a pattern in his victims but as a comment on Hollywood's deeply boring tendency to do the same. There's always going to be the naive sweetheart, the sassy New Yorker, the kick-ass black "bitch," and the tough girl somewhere in the movies, right? In a way, it reminded me of those scenes in Inland Empire where all those pretty girls were hanging out in a small room, like veal in a pen, seemingly just waiting to be "killed" by the camera for their youth and beauty. The crucial difference between the two sets of women in Death Proof, though--the difference that the power of the story basically hinges on--is that the second group, the group uniquely capable of defending themselves and exacting revenge, is the group of movie people. I think this is QT's rebuke on the prevailing notion that movie nerdery is strictly a boys' club. It's like he's saying, "women are just as familiar with these tropes as dudes are--and not just familiar with them, but when given the space to do so, uniquely capable of using that familiarity to transform and subvert them."
That's why Rosario Dawson's coup de grace drop kick to the head is absolutely crucial, no matter how uncomfortable it's made some (ahem, male) critics. QT sets it up with the kind of subtlety that his detractors seem pathologically incapable of seeing in his work: in the earlier surveillance scene when Stuntman Mike is taking pictures of the second group of women at the airport, we see Abernathy and Lee vamping around for their own amusement, doing cheerleader-esque high kicks. Filmed through Stuntman Mike's spy-cam, their behavior becomes fetishized, and we're meant to get a voyeuristic thrill out of it--their legs are long and tan, their physical familiarity and affection with each other becoming subtly homoerotic (the key reasons that cheerleader movies ever get made in the first place, right?). But then the same action, the high kick in the air, is transformed into one of power, and, yes, table-turning violence. The message here is that the strength and beauty of her body cuts both ways, and she knows it, and all women should know it.
This is not meant to bag on the characters in the first half of the movie, of course. The sequence in Austin is filled with delights of its own, chief among which comes right before the real violence begins, when Kurt Russell extinguishes his cigarette and then looks directly into the camera. For me, for pure meta-thrill in acknowledging and challenging our gaze, it's got to rival the moment in Y Tu Mama Tambien when in the dive bar, right before the infamous threesome scene, Ana Lopez Mercado similarly breaks the fourth wall as she dances toward the camera. Mike's slight smile and glance back at us makes us 100% complicit in everything that's about to happen, and, just like Rose McGowan locked into the passenger seat (where, as he just explained, the camera would be if the car were being used in the filming of a movie), there's nothing we can do to change or stop it. What a thrown gauntlet.
Speaking of Rose McGowan, I also love her delivery of the line "That pituitary case? Mighta kicked my ass a couple of times--sorry, I'm built like a girl, not a black man--but I'd die before I ever gave Julia Lucai my chocolate milk." I'm generally indifferent to her as an actress, but, shit, she nails that interp so well, with so much humor and musicality, that I want to program it as my phone's ring tone.
I also love the fact that Tarantino casts himself as Warren the bartender in the first half of the movie. Momentarily setting aside the endless debate about his skills as an actor (I will remain respectfully neutral on the point for now), it's such a playful way of heightening the metanarrative here, of reminding us that this movie is unapologetically about movies. The linguistic doubling might be superficially facile, but it's clever: "I love that philosophy: 'Warren says it, we do it!'...Shots first, questions later. Here we go. Post time!" I mean, "shots first, questions later"? Come on. It's cheeky and it's silly, but I love it. He's directing the drunken craziness of the night, like...well, like a director. This bar scene is also where we get those endless shots of frames within frames within frames, the camera constantly set up behind random panes of glass, partitions, doorways, windows, and, of course, windshields. Everything here is mediated; we're always being reminded that we're looking through.
So, there you have it, kittens! My trip through Tarantino's old work is complete, and I'm sooo looking forward to finally checking out Inglourious Basterds. It might take me a while to write something up here, though, since I feel it takes at least three viewings of a well-made movie before I'm able to sufficiently wrap my head around it. Catch you back here soon.
It makes sense that Death Proof would be one of QT's most meta/intertextual films, as it's his installment of a "double feature" made in homage to both a style of cinema as well as the whole experience of consuming these kinds of films, made in concert with his best filmmaking buddy. But revisiting it this past week, I found myself more deeply delighted than I'd remembered by the formal elegance on display here--probably because I was initially distracted by all the trash trappings he was playing with (intentional scratches on the print, sleazy mise-en-scene, sudden shifts from black and white to color, the vintage "feature presentation" and "restricted" animations before the movie actually begins). Not only, obviously, is Grindhouse bifurcated, so is Death Proof, and, it's clear to me now, so too is the second half of Death Proof. The movie seems to be constantly splitting itself in half as it moves farther and farther away from any sort of gesture toward "realism" as it becomes more and more purely about cinematic conventions, so that by the time the girls kill Stuntman Mike, it's not really about whether or not these characters would "actually" behave this way--it's more about the symbolic death of the exploitative male gaze. I mean, obviously, right?
The two casts of women in this film are fairly obvious doubles/recursions of themselves, down to their character "types"/looks, haircuts, hierarchies, conversations, etc. I read this as not just indicative of Stuntman Mike's pathology as a stalker looking to endlessly recreate a pattern in his victims but as a comment on Hollywood's deeply boring tendency to do the same. There's always going to be the naive sweetheart, the sassy New Yorker, the kick-ass black "bitch," and the tough girl somewhere in the movies, right? In a way, it reminded me of those scenes in Inland Empire where all those pretty girls were hanging out in a small room, like veal in a pen, seemingly just waiting to be "killed" by the camera for their youth and beauty. The crucial difference between the two sets of women in Death Proof, though--the difference that the power of the story basically hinges on--is that the second group, the group uniquely capable of defending themselves and exacting revenge, is the group of movie people. I think this is QT's rebuke on the prevailing notion that movie nerdery is strictly a boys' club. It's like he's saying, "women are just as familiar with these tropes as dudes are--and not just familiar with them, but when given the space to do so, uniquely capable of using that familiarity to transform and subvert them."
That's why Rosario Dawson's coup de grace drop kick to the head is absolutely crucial, no matter how uncomfortable it's made some (ahem, male) critics. QT sets it up with the kind of subtlety that his detractors seem pathologically incapable of seeing in his work: in the earlier surveillance scene when Stuntman Mike is taking pictures of the second group of women at the airport, we see Abernathy and Lee vamping around for their own amusement, doing cheerleader-esque high kicks. Filmed through Stuntman Mike's spy-cam, their behavior becomes fetishized, and we're meant to get a voyeuristic thrill out of it--their legs are long and tan, their physical familiarity and affection with each other becoming subtly homoerotic (the key reasons that cheerleader movies ever get made in the first place, right?). But then the same action, the high kick in the air, is transformed into one of power, and, yes, table-turning violence. The message here is that the strength and beauty of her body cuts both ways, and she knows it, and all women should know it.
This is not meant to bag on the characters in the first half of the movie, of course. The sequence in Austin is filled with delights of its own, chief among which comes right before the real violence begins, when Kurt Russell extinguishes his cigarette and then looks directly into the camera. For me, for pure meta-thrill in acknowledging and challenging our gaze, it's got to rival the moment in Y Tu Mama Tambien when in the dive bar, right before the infamous threesome scene, Ana Lopez Mercado similarly breaks the fourth wall as she dances toward the camera. Mike's slight smile and glance back at us makes us 100% complicit in everything that's about to happen, and, just like Rose McGowan locked into the passenger seat (where, as he just explained, the camera would be if the car were being used in the filming of a movie), there's nothing we can do to change or stop it. What a thrown gauntlet.
Speaking of Rose McGowan, I also love her delivery of the line "That pituitary case? Mighta kicked my ass a couple of times--sorry, I'm built like a girl, not a black man--but I'd die before I ever gave Julia Lucai my chocolate milk." I'm generally indifferent to her as an actress, but, shit, she nails that interp so well, with so much humor and musicality, that I want to program it as my phone's ring tone.
I also love the fact that Tarantino casts himself as Warren the bartender in the first half of the movie. Momentarily setting aside the endless debate about his skills as an actor (I will remain respectfully neutral on the point for now), it's such a playful way of heightening the metanarrative here, of reminding us that this movie is unapologetically about movies. The linguistic doubling might be superficially facile, but it's clever: "I love that philosophy: 'Warren says it, we do it!'...Shots first, questions later. Here we go. Post time!" I mean, "shots first, questions later"? Come on. It's cheeky and it's silly, but I love it. He's directing the drunken craziness of the night, like...well, like a director. This bar scene is also where we get those endless shots of frames within frames within frames, the camera constantly set up behind random panes of glass, partitions, doorways, windows, and, of course, windshields. Everything here is mediated; we're always being reminded that we're looking through.
So, there you have it, kittens! My trip through Tarantino's old work is complete, and I'm sooo looking forward to finally checking out Inglourious Basterds. It might take me a while to write something up here, though, since I feel it takes at least three viewings of a well-made movie before I'm able to sufficiently wrap my head around it. Catch you back here soon.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Kill Bill, Vols. I and II
This film is way too big to be dealt with in a mere blog post. It deserves comprehensive, book-length analysis of the kind that I'm in no way equal to. So, at the risk of tragically oversimplifying its brilliance, I'll just say that it strikes me that Kill Bill is pure opera: it's too big, too much, too wide-ranging, and all intentionally so, to make the point that this is what relationships feel like. Those who dismiss or belittle Tarantino as doing nothing more than playing stylistically clever headgames aren't watching with their hearts open. If there's anything "clever" about the moment when Beatrix rounds the corner and lays eyes on her four-year-old daughter for the first time, I'll eat my shoe. Likewise, have these critics who deride him for formal trickery never been in a situation when a conversation with a former lover takes on the emotional tenor of being armed to the teeth in a zero-sum contest that absolutely has to end in bloodshed? The stakes are almost comically high, sure, but dude--the stakes of life are comically high, no?
Anyway, I'm getting grandiose and defensive and testy, mostly on account of the fact that I just read the first few paragraphs of Entertainment Weekly's review of Inglourious Basterds, where Lisa Schwartzbaum writes, "But Tarantino's gleefully assembled spectacles are inextricable from his frustrating emotional limitations: Everything is a game." Bluh. I mean, I guess if you've only paid attention to his films long enough to parse their intertextual references, maybe they'll read as games. But, one of the biggest sources of pleasure for me in rewatching his films these past few weeks has been feeling the warmth of his heart. Dude loves movies and he loves language and he loves his actors and he loves this act of cinematic creation. It's kind of unfathomable to me that anyone could miss that, if they're truly paying attention.
Which sort of leads me back into the primary question that I have about Kill Bill: I'm having a hard time remembering how it was received upon its initial theatrical release. I have a vague feeling that it's considered one of his lesser efforts, which seems absurd given both its cinematic and emotional scope. I think it's going to be a while before we see its like again, and that's emphatically including Uma Thurman's performance. If the film as a whole reads like a shuffle-version of trash genres, her performance likewise is downright encyclopedic in terms of the range and depth of feeling she conveys about the Experience of Being a Woman. She has certainly never looked better onscreen; as blogger Kasia Xavier so accurately observed [link NSFW], "I think Tarantino knew exactly what he was doing. You take a born-pretty girl and you dress her up in pretty things, curl her pretty hair and she becomes empty. Vacuous. The only thing she can claim as a self identity is her one dimensional beauty. But take a pretty girl and throw some shit on her, and make her fight her way out of it and she'll grow to be other-worldly radiant and a force to be reckoned with."
It also made more sense to me upon this re-viewing than it ever has before why, duh, of course, O-Ren Ishii's childhood backstory had to be told in animation. Sure, it's homage to yet another beloved Asian cinematic genre, and sure, the subject matter was way too disturbing to film with an actual child actor, but it was also a tonal doorway through which we have to pass to transition into the "cartoony" violence of the big House of Blue Leaves fight sequence. It seems so obvious to me now, but realizing this was kind of profound in its formal, functional elegance.
I sat down to watch this the other night, telling myself I only needed to watch Volume I, but as soon as it ended, I thought, "there's no fucking way I'm not going to finish the whole thing tonight." It's just that absorbing and engaging, despite the length (which really isn't that bad, all things considered). I mean, even when you get into those loooong monologues at the end delivered by David Carradine (God rest his soul), they're every bit as thrilling as that first, manic showdown between Thurman and Vivica A. Fox. Not to mention that I was fresh off a two-day silent meditation retreat at the Zen Buddhist Temple I attend here in Chicago, so those scenes of Beatrix using the power of her brain to reanimate her own limbs or persevere through that intense martial arts training or focus intensely enough to dig herself out of her own grave all hit me with a unique resonance.
I mean, I know I'm a crazy, unapologetic Tarantino fangirl and all, but this film is so much more rewarding than I think most people give it credit for being. It honestly contains multitudes. I'm not even scratching the surface.
Anyway, I'm getting grandiose and defensive and testy, mostly on account of the fact that I just read the first few paragraphs of Entertainment Weekly's review of Inglourious Basterds, where Lisa Schwartzbaum writes, "But Tarantino's gleefully assembled spectacles are inextricable from his frustrating emotional limitations: Everything is a game." Bluh. I mean, I guess if you've only paid attention to his films long enough to parse their intertextual references, maybe they'll read as games. But, one of the biggest sources of pleasure for me in rewatching his films these past few weeks has been feeling the warmth of his heart. Dude loves movies and he loves language and he loves his actors and he loves this act of cinematic creation. It's kind of unfathomable to me that anyone could miss that, if they're truly paying attention.
Which sort of leads me back into the primary question that I have about Kill Bill: I'm having a hard time remembering how it was received upon its initial theatrical release. I have a vague feeling that it's considered one of his lesser efforts, which seems absurd given both its cinematic and emotional scope. I think it's going to be a while before we see its like again, and that's emphatically including Uma Thurman's performance. If the film as a whole reads like a shuffle-version of trash genres, her performance likewise is downright encyclopedic in terms of the range and depth of feeling she conveys about the Experience of Being a Woman. She has certainly never looked better onscreen; as blogger Kasia Xavier so accurately observed [link NSFW], "I think Tarantino knew exactly what he was doing. You take a born-pretty girl and you dress her up in pretty things, curl her pretty hair and she becomes empty. Vacuous. The only thing she can claim as a self identity is her one dimensional beauty. But take a pretty girl and throw some shit on her, and make her fight her way out of it and she'll grow to be other-worldly radiant and a force to be reckoned with."
It also made more sense to me upon this re-viewing than it ever has before why, duh, of course, O-Ren Ishii's childhood backstory had to be told in animation. Sure, it's homage to yet another beloved Asian cinematic genre, and sure, the subject matter was way too disturbing to film with an actual child actor, but it was also a tonal doorway through which we have to pass to transition into the "cartoony" violence of the big House of Blue Leaves fight sequence. It seems so obvious to me now, but realizing this was kind of profound in its formal, functional elegance.
I sat down to watch this the other night, telling myself I only needed to watch Volume I, but as soon as it ended, I thought, "there's no fucking way I'm not going to finish the whole thing tonight." It's just that absorbing and engaging, despite the length (which really isn't that bad, all things considered). I mean, even when you get into those loooong monologues at the end delivered by David Carradine (God rest his soul), they're every bit as thrilling as that first, manic showdown between Thurman and Vivica A. Fox. Not to mention that I was fresh off a two-day silent meditation retreat at the Zen Buddhist Temple I attend here in Chicago, so those scenes of Beatrix using the power of her brain to reanimate her own limbs or persevere through that intense martial arts training or focus intensely enough to dig herself out of her own grave all hit me with a unique resonance.
I mean, I know I'm a crazy, unapologetic Tarantino fangirl and all, but this film is so much more rewarding than I think most people give it credit for being. It honestly contains multitudes. I'm not even scratching the surface.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Jackie Brown
OK, I was totally in tears within the first three minutes of rewatching Jackie Brown. That opening sequence at the airport has to be one of my favorite sequences in film ever. It just keeps expanding: it starts off as a clear homage to The Graduate, but then you see that, rather than being super-emo about a twenty-two-year-old white man's sense of spiritual stasis, it's updating the reference to make a comment on an aging black woman's inability to gain much traction against her life. But then the pace evolves, as she starts walking briskly, eventually breaking into a run. At that point I realized that her journey through the airport is also a metaphor for the journey of her life. First it's an unhurried glide when everything seems easy and progress happens without much exertion; then it's a strutting, confident stride on her own steam; then it's a panicked dash to the finish line, trying not to be late for her sense of responsibility to herself, for her outside commitments, and perhaps even for some perceived appointment with her own destiny--that rush to get it all in before it's too late. It's also one of Tarantino's few purely cinematic moments so far in his oeuvre. It's like watching him finally learn to really be a director, to trust his visual instincts without the snappy dialogue to back it up. He's reveling in film history here--again, with the fairly explicit bite from The Graduate, but also with the look and feel of '70s credit sequences via the typography and color palette, but I also even see California-style Altman here in those lengthy tracking shots and the way the sunshine gets all blown out as she runs past the window in silhouette. And, of course he's also reveling in the deliciousness of that fact that he has unfettered access to photograph a woman as stunningly beautiful as Pam Grier for as long as he wants to--a deliciousness that's thoughtfully tempered with clear respect and affection. You can almost hear him thinking, "let me shoot you like this so that I can make everyone feel about you the same way that I feel about you, so that everyone will remember how amazing you can be." As I watched all this unfolding, revisiting this much loved film, I started laughing at its brilliant audacity, its multivalence, its perfection, then crying because it was all kind of too much--then laughing at my crying, then crying some more for good measure. It's beautiful. (Check it out here on YouTube if you haven't seen it for a while yourself.)
Jackie Brown is probably the Tarantino film I've seen the most and am consequently most familiar with (and, depending on the day, it's probably the film I'd call my favorite of his), so there weren't a whole lot of surprises for me on the order of what I experienced in the past few weeks with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Watching it this week brought more a sense of pure joy to be revisiting this old friend. I was struck, though, with how much everyone in this film is aging with varying degrees of discomfort about it. The whole notion of taking these nearly forgotten '70s movie stars like Grier and Robert Forster is right there in front of your face, and it obviously comprised many of the talking points surrounding the movie when it first came out. But I don't think I'd ever really noticed the anguished enormity of the line that Ordell speaks to Louis right before he shoots him: "what the fuck happen to you? You used to be beautiful, man." Wow. It had never occurred to me to read their friendship in light of their past history together, but of course it makes sense. They've seen each other age through time wasted in prison and "career" changes, all leading up to this last proverbial chance to make one big score. Of course, there's also the meta-level commentary on DeNiro's own aging from skinny young punk lighting the world on fire with his Method ferocity into a portly, avuncular character actor taking roles that were more and more beneath him. "You used to be beautiful, man." This is the movie's battle cry. And not in a shitty, judgmental way--just in the way that taking a moment to observe the passage of time can be profoundly philosophically flummoxing.
This is also, of course, the film where Tarantino starts to transition more decisively away from men's stories and into women's, becoming, if not a feminist filmmaker per se, then at least one who keeps a deep and abiding love for all manner of female kick-assery close to his heart. And, pound for pound, give me this soundtrack any day of the week over Reservoir Dogs' or Pulp Fiction's!
In other news, I was delighted to have been asked back as a guest blogger over on eat!drink!snack! this week. I contributed to Shawn's newly launched "the musical fruit" column, where he's pairing songs with fresh produce. You can find my post on the Long Winters' "Blue Diamonds" and a lovely pint of blueberries here.
Jackie Brown is probably the Tarantino film I've seen the most and am consequently most familiar with (and, depending on the day, it's probably the film I'd call my favorite of his), so there weren't a whole lot of surprises for me on the order of what I experienced in the past few weeks with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Watching it this week brought more a sense of pure joy to be revisiting this old friend. I was struck, though, with how much everyone in this film is aging with varying degrees of discomfort about it. The whole notion of taking these nearly forgotten '70s movie stars like Grier and Robert Forster is right there in front of your face, and it obviously comprised many of the talking points surrounding the movie when it first came out. But I don't think I'd ever really noticed the anguished enormity of the line that Ordell speaks to Louis right before he shoots him: "what the fuck happen to you? You used to be beautiful, man." Wow. It had never occurred to me to read their friendship in light of their past history together, but of course it makes sense. They've seen each other age through time wasted in prison and "career" changes, all leading up to this last proverbial chance to make one big score. Of course, there's also the meta-level commentary on DeNiro's own aging from skinny young punk lighting the world on fire with his Method ferocity into a portly, avuncular character actor taking roles that were more and more beneath him. "You used to be beautiful, man." This is the movie's battle cry. And not in a shitty, judgmental way--just in the way that taking a moment to observe the passage of time can be profoundly philosophically flummoxing.
This is also, of course, the film where Tarantino starts to transition more decisively away from men's stories and into women's, becoming, if not a feminist filmmaker per se, then at least one who keeps a deep and abiding love for all manner of female kick-assery close to his heart. And, pound for pound, give me this soundtrack any day of the week over Reservoir Dogs' or Pulp Fiction's!
In other news, I was delighted to have been asked back as a guest blogger over on eat!drink!snack! this week. I contributed to Shawn's newly launched "the musical fruit" column, where he's pairing songs with fresh produce. You can find my post on the Long Winters' "Blue Diamonds" and a lovely pint of blueberries here.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Pulp Fiction
Oh man, you guys, this mini-Tarantino film festival I've programmed for myself is turning out to be the best idea I've had in months. Like that horrible old joke about memory loss allowing you to hide your own Easter eggs, it's awesome to rewatch your favorite movies when you've not seen them in so long that you've forgotten most of the major themes and plot points.
Pulp Fiction is so good it's kind of unreal. No, seriously. I know it's common knowledge, the most basic of basic received wisdom, at this point that it's a game-changer, a modern classic, etc., etc. But, straight up--do you actively remember how good this movie is? It's that good. Probably even better. I think I probably feel the same way about Tarantino that certain other people around my age feel about Stephen Malkmus: he was the right guy making the right art in the right medium at the right time in my life, and I'm kind of never going to get over it.
Watching Pulp Fiction again the other night for the first time in about ten years (seriously, I think it's been since Naremore's film noir class my sophomore year at IU), I was struck by how much this movie is really about secrets--about the usually accidental things that happen to people that remain unspeakable to anyone other than the person the experience has been shared with. There's the big ones, of course: Mia's overdose, Marsellus's anal rape, Vincent's shooting that kid in the face. But there's so many other little ones embedded throughout: the story about the foot massage that Tony Rocky Horror may or may not have given Mia, the admission that Butch makes to Esmerelda Villalobos in the cab about what it feels like to kill a man, the confidences shared between Butch's father and Christopher Walken's character in the POW camp; even the "royale with cheese" trivia is a bit of unlocked knowledge decoded by Vincent and shared with Jules. All of which makes Jules's final "I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd" monologue so powerful and so important--in publicly interpreting the verse from Ezekiel for Pumpkin/Ringo, he's made a decision that he can't keep the wisdom he's been granted via the "miracle" he witnessed to himself. He has to share it; he has to talk about it; he can't keep it a secret. Aside from the brain-tickling fun of the achronological narrative, this is the big reason why the story has to be told out of order--so it can culminate with that gesture of openness, with that revelation.
It blows my mind that I saw this in the theater when I was 15. I mean, I'm so, so thankful for being exposed to a movie this awesome at such a formative stage in my intellectual and aesthetic development, but, seriously...how fucking inappropriate! Did I even know what anal rape was at that point? I know for certain that the subtleties of Vincent and Mia's drugs of choice went way over my head. But, the very literal dance between the spaced-out haze of his heroin stupor and her coked-up frenzy as they try to come to some common ground at dinner is now so much more hilarious to me, but also painfully, poetically truthful in the way it shows how hard it can be to connect with another person because of all the bullshit racing around in our systems.
And those are just the big things. I was free to notice so many other little things now that I didn't need to worry about parsing the narrative timeline and wasn't overly distracted by the violence and the language. Like, how totally cheeky it was to open the movie with Tim Roth in such a diametrically opposed character to the one he played in Reservoir Dogs. Or how Bruce Willis is perfection in his role (and also way more alarmingly attractive than I ever realized--but that's maybe just because I'm getting older and my tastes are changing). Also, the fact that Butch's choice of weapon in the pawn shop scene is a samurai sword makes way more sense now in the context of Tarantino's oeuvre than it did in '94. Pre-Kill Bill, it just seemed like a super-over-the-top gesture played for laughs, but now it's so clearly a reference to Tarantino's love for chop-socky epics.
Kittens, my brain is still whirring days after watching it. But, mostly, I'm just happy to have reconnected with the film itself, both for what I remember it being to me at 15 and for the realization that it still has new things to offer me as many years later. Take a moment, if you can, to revisit something similarly important from your own past. I hope it likewise brings you no small measure of joy.
Pulp Fiction is so good it's kind of unreal. No, seriously. I know it's common knowledge, the most basic of basic received wisdom, at this point that it's a game-changer, a modern classic, etc., etc. But, straight up--do you actively remember how good this movie is? It's that good. Probably even better. I think I probably feel the same way about Tarantino that certain other people around my age feel about Stephen Malkmus: he was the right guy making the right art in the right medium at the right time in my life, and I'm kind of never going to get over it.
Watching Pulp Fiction again the other night for the first time in about ten years (seriously, I think it's been since Naremore's film noir class my sophomore year at IU), I was struck by how much this movie is really about secrets--about the usually accidental things that happen to people that remain unspeakable to anyone other than the person the experience has been shared with. There's the big ones, of course: Mia's overdose, Marsellus's anal rape, Vincent's shooting that kid in the face. But there's so many other little ones embedded throughout: the story about the foot massage that Tony Rocky Horror may or may not have given Mia, the admission that Butch makes to Esmerelda Villalobos in the cab about what it feels like to kill a man, the confidences shared between Butch's father and Christopher Walken's character in the POW camp; even the "royale with cheese" trivia is a bit of unlocked knowledge decoded by Vincent and shared with Jules. All of which makes Jules's final "I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd" monologue so powerful and so important--in publicly interpreting the verse from Ezekiel for Pumpkin/Ringo, he's made a decision that he can't keep the wisdom he's been granted via the "miracle" he witnessed to himself. He has to share it; he has to talk about it; he can't keep it a secret. Aside from the brain-tickling fun of the achronological narrative, this is the big reason why the story has to be told out of order--so it can culminate with that gesture of openness, with that revelation.
It blows my mind that I saw this in the theater when I was 15. I mean, I'm so, so thankful for being exposed to a movie this awesome at such a formative stage in my intellectual and aesthetic development, but, seriously...how fucking inappropriate! Did I even know what anal rape was at that point? I know for certain that the subtleties of Vincent and Mia's drugs of choice went way over my head. But, the very literal dance between the spaced-out haze of his heroin stupor and her coked-up frenzy as they try to come to some common ground at dinner is now so much more hilarious to me, but also painfully, poetically truthful in the way it shows how hard it can be to connect with another person because of all the bullshit racing around in our systems.
And those are just the big things. I was free to notice so many other little things now that I didn't need to worry about parsing the narrative timeline and wasn't overly distracted by the violence and the language. Like, how totally cheeky it was to open the movie with Tim Roth in such a diametrically opposed character to the one he played in Reservoir Dogs. Or how Bruce Willis is perfection in his role (and also way more alarmingly attractive than I ever realized--but that's maybe just because I'm getting older and my tastes are changing). Also, the fact that Butch's choice of weapon in the pawn shop scene is a samurai sword makes way more sense now in the context of Tarantino's oeuvre than it did in '94. Pre-Kill Bill, it just seemed like a super-over-the-top gesture played for laughs, but now it's so clearly a reference to Tarantino's love for chop-socky epics.
Kittens, my brain is still whirring days after watching it. But, mostly, I'm just happy to have reconnected with the film itself, both for what I remember it being to me at 15 and for the realization that it still has new things to offer me as many years later. Take a moment, if you can, to revisit something similarly important from your own past. I hope it likewise brings you no small measure of joy.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Moon, Tarantino, Micachu, Baby Teeth
Moon--Let me chime in and say that this film is wonderful. It strikes me as somewhat miraculous that it got made at all. It's so quiet and so patient and so taut and so mature. Sam Rockwell is fabulous; when that guy's good, he's superlative. It's also one of the most audaciously anti-capitalist things I've seen in recent memory, literalizing the plight of how a person can be wholly exploited by a system that depends on the service s/he can provide yet doesn't reciprocate in any meaningful way, until the person is spent and discarded. Don't sleep on this one, guys.
Reservoir Dogs--OK, ready to feel old? Do you realize that this film came out in 1992? A full 17 years ago? What the hell! Anyway, when's the last time you've watched this, kittens? It holds up sooo well. I've decided that in anticipation of the release of Inglourious Basterds I'm going to work my way through Tarantino's directorial output in chronological order, so last weekend I settled in for a total dude night of pizza and beer and bloodshed. But for all the violence that often clouds people's impressions and interpretations of this film, I was shocked to realize that this movie is basically a love letter to restraint, to patience. Patience and language. After the jewel heist goes wrong, everything that happens happens while they're waiting for the gang boss to show up and tell them what to do. And, of course, Tim Roth's undercover cop character is secretly waiting for the boss to show up so he can bust him. That's it. That's the whole movie! The sheer perversity of it tickles my brain. And, that's why the ear-slicing scene is actually so crucial. It's upping the stakes beyond the beyond, asking how long do you wait? how long can you stand it while everything is going to hell around you? how much of a professional can you possibly be in the most extreme circumstances? And, of course, other than that grizzliness, what else fills the time while you're waiting? Language. Talking, idle chatter, storytelling, jokes, debates, random bits of remembered pop culture detritus, ribaldry, reminiscences--in other words, all the stuff that Tarantino is (rightly) most remembered and renowned for as a writer/auteur. It's delicious to listen to, but also, at bottom, it's really kind of delightfully old-fashioned. That he was able to fool everybody into thinking he's this rock-'em, sock-'em bad boy when he really just wants to put people in a room and get them talking is the ultimate credit to his talent.
Micachu and the Shapes, Live at Schubas--I was really thrilled to see how good Micachu was live. Her songs' charms rely way less on Matthew Herbert's production than, say, Pitchfork would have you believe. The music is a bit cracked, to be sure, but to paraphrase that great Leonard Cohen line, it's only so the light can get through. Mica Levi herself is completely adorable, a born performer and bandleader, a fact made all the more apparent because it doesn't feel like she's trying at all. Her drummer and keyboard player support her ably, taking every left turn in these songs with ultimate grace and ease. Local viola virtuoso Anni Rossi opened. After seeing string players like Owen Pallett and Andrew Bird process their instruments through an arsenal of looping pedals, it's nice to hear someone just play for a change. She's a bit like a less affected Regina Spektor--quirky without wearing the quirk like a badge of honor. Plus, she's got a lovely, lilty voice. Look for more good things to come from her. Pictures from the show here.
Baby Teeth, Hustle Beach--It's the moment we've been waiting for, kittens: Hustle Beach has finally been unleashed on the world. Yay! I couldn't be happier for the guys. I've only had a chance to listen to it once through so far, but most of the songs are familiar from their recent live sets, various Daytrotter sessions, and Abraham's 52 Teeth song blog. It all sounds great. I'm glad to see many of the reviews that have been posted so far are dealing so directly with the humor in their sound and songs, as that's one of the things I cherish most about them and feel truly sets them apart. Although, the somewhat tortured response that "Big Schools" has received as an album opener is a bit curious. I know he's not the coolest reference point these days, but this kind of epic narrative of mute, unacknowledged suburban discontent and myopia seems straight out of Ben Folds's playbook (in a good way--think "Army" or even "You to Thank"). Anyway, check their MySpace page for upcoming tour dates; I would strongly advise you to check out their live show if they're going to be anywhere in your vicinity (New Yorkers especially: August 7 at Cake Shop).
Reservoir Dogs--OK, ready to feel old? Do you realize that this film came out in 1992? A full 17 years ago? What the hell! Anyway, when's the last time you've watched this, kittens? It holds up sooo well. I've decided that in anticipation of the release of Inglourious Basterds I'm going to work my way through Tarantino's directorial output in chronological order, so last weekend I settled in for a total dude night of pizza and beer and bloodshed. But for all the violence that often clouds people's impressions and interpretations of this film, I was shocked to realize that this movie is basically a love letter to restraint, to patience. Patience and language. After the jewel heist goes wrong, everything that happens happens while they're waiting for the gang boss to show up and tell them what to do. And, of course, Tim Roth's undercover cop character is secretly waiting for the boss to show up so he can bust him. That's it. That's the whole movie! The sheer perversity of it tickles my brain. And, that's why the ear-slicing scene is actually so crucial. It's upping the stakes beyond the beyond, asking how long do you wait? how long can you stand it while everything is going to hell around you? how much of a professional can you possibly be in the most extreme circumstances? And, of course, other than that grizzliness, what else fills the time while you're waiting? Language. Talking, idle chatter, storytelling, jokes, debates, random bits of remembered pop culture detritus, ribaldry, reminiscences--in other words, all the stuff that Tarantino is (rightly) most remembered and renowned for as a writer/auteur. It's delicious to listen to, but also, at bottom, it's really kind of delightfully old-fashioned. That he was able to fool everybody into thinking he's this rock-'em, sock-'em bad boy when he really just wants to put people in a room and get them talking is the ultimate credit to his talent.
Micachu and the Shapes, Live at Schubas--I was really thrilled to see how good Micachu was live. Her songs' charms rely way less on Matthew Herbert's production than, say, Pitchfork would have you believe. The music is a bit cracked, to be sure, but to paraphrase that great Leonard Cohen line, it's only so the light can get through. Mica Levi herself is completely adorable, a born performer and bandleader, a fact made all the more apparent because it doesn't feel like she's trying at all. Her drummer and keyboard player support her ably, taking every left turn in these songs with ultimate grace and ease. Local viola virtuoso Anni Rossi opened. After seeing string players like Owen Pallett and Andrew Bird process their instruments through an arsenal of looping pedals, it's nice to hear someone just play for a change. She's a bit like a less affected Regina Spektor--quirky without wearing the quirk like a badge of honor. Plus, she's got a lovely, lilty voice. Look for more good things to come from her. Pictures from the show here.
Baby Teeth, Hustle Beach--It's the moment we've been waiting for, kittens: Hustle Beach has finally been unleashed on the world. Yay! I couldn't be happier for the guys. I've only had a chance to listen to it once through so far, but most of the songs are familiar from their recent live sets, various Daytrotter sessions, and Abraham's 52 Teeth song blog. It all sounds great. I'm glad to see many of the reviews that have been posted so far are dealing so directly with the humor in their sound and songs, as that's one of the things I cherish most about them and feel truly sets them apart. Although, the somewhat tortured response that "Big Schools" has received as an album opener is a bit curious. I know he's not the coolest reference point these days, but this kind of epic narrative of mute, unacknowledged suburban discontent and myopia seems straight out of Ben Folds's playbook (in a good way--think "Army" or even "You to Thank"). Anyway, check their MySpace page for upcoming tour dates; I would strongly advise you to check out their live show if they're going to be anywhere in your vicinity (New Yorkers especially: August 7 at Cake Shop).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
