RAISING KANE

"Stick Treason Up Your Poop Hole": A Script Review and Fantasy Cast of Inglorious Bastards

I spent most of today holed up in my apartment reading Tarantino's script for Inglorious Bastards, and I'm now ready to give my impressions. First the macro: Does it advance Tarantinoism? No, I can't say that it does, but it's a fun read for lovers of WWII movies and it's consistently, weirdly entertaining for a) its refusal to bend to the reality of history and b) its pockets of full-throttle Tarantino bravura, such as giving Hitler and Churchill speaking roles and a few other things I won't spoil. I'd say the best way to describe it is Kill Bill meets The Dirty Dozen. (I don't really see any Western influence in the thing, except one brief Leone cue.) There are no battle set-pieces here, no outdoor fighting at all, actually. It's a sprawling story of intrigue and insurgency that's broken up into chapters exactly like Kill Bill and it requires various title cards to tell us when and where we are at any given time. It jumps backward and forward in time, contains a few over-the-top interludes and has moments of mega-violence sprinkled throughout. The dialogue is fairly creative, although it rarely wows the way you hope it will. Some of the scenes go on a little long, some are a bit unfocused and wind-baggy, and I'd bet money that the script will be tweaked substantially over the next year. Tarantino has talked about not writing the roles with any particular actors in mind and how that's his primary 'stretch' this time around, so I bet he'll be re-writing like mad on the set.

Cinematic influences and shout-outs: Tarantino is apparently going through a Pabst phase -- Pabst is referenced so many times in this thing I lost count. Riefenstahl comes in a close second in the reference department, so I guess maybe it's a whole mountain movie phase. (There's even a sequence of a character climbing that's compared explicitly to a Riefenstahlian mountain climb.) One of Aldo's "bastards" was a film critic back in his civilian life, and speaks of the book he's written on Pabst. Also, there's an entire chapter that's to be filmed in "French New Wave black and white" which I guess could simply mean "black and white" or could entail a whole shooting style and look that's indebted to Godard, etc. Who knows -- the story is pretty fast-moving and straight-forward, so there's not a lot of room for experimental flights of fancy in that regard. There's also an overarching theme about the Germans trying to counteract, through their own cinema, what they perceive as Jewish-tainted Hollywood cinema. This is talked about several times, and adds coloring to the whole Jewsploitation element of the film, which is laid on pretty thick in some scenes.

Biggest surprise: How much of the film is subtitled. 40-50 percent, at least. And that's both French and German, and the film makes plot points out of the accuracy of certain characters' accents, so Tarantino better know what he's doing on that front. I really can't see him hiring Americans and having them put on screwy accents, even though this script is pretty goofy at times. The whole house of cards might collapse if he goes there.

My favorite element: There's a long, somewhat self-contained scene where the character called Bridget von Hammersmark really shines while playing a parlor game with some Nazis. This is a great role and she has the most lively chapter of the movie to play around with. More on her character below. Also, Tarantino sets himself some real visual challenges towards the very end of the film that I can't wait to see brought to life.

My least-favorite element: There's a third-act development that I found rather silly and unnecessary -- you can tell it's unwieldy because of the time it takes to explain what the fuck is going on. Also, some of the lesser bastards aren't really fleshed out at all, at least as I read it. They seem to stand around doing nothing for long stretches of time and then they have little comedy pieces toward the end. I need to read it again, but it seems like there's not a lot of meat on the bone for some of those bastards.

Originality factor: There's not a hell of a lot that I would call blindingly original here, in terms of story or character motivation. What's original is the way the entire movie seems to exist completely on its own terms in a kind of heightened-reality, irrespective of historical accuracy or, at times, common sense. That's not a put-down -- the movie just has its own logic and rhythm. Like all Tarantino movies, it seems very much like it was written by a man whose sole education derives from going to the movies. I doubt that much traditional research went into the creation of the script.

Accessibility: This will not be an explicit crowd-pleaser, a la Kill Bill, which is ironic because in many ways it feels like a stylistic sequel to that film. It's more dense and more preoccupied with foreign classic cinema and more structurally complicated than the fanboys will be into, I imagine. And as I said before, it doesn't really represent a new high for Tarantino. I do think he will direct the hell out of it, and much like Kill Bill, it will be evaluated as much for its visual execution and its structure as its dialogue and characters.

Is Hancock About Interracial Relationships?

About a year ago, I remember casually checking the IMDB page for Hancock to read up on it, since a lot of details were unknown at the time. I noticed that the first 'plot keyword' they had up for the film was 'interracial relationship,' which squared with what was common knowledge at the time -- that the movie was about superhero Hancock falling for the wife of PR man Bateman, played by Threon, and so forth. At the time I remember thinking 'That's rather pioneering of Sony, to put out a major summer tentpole with a black man/white woman romantic relationship at the center.' So many previous high-profile movies with a white female/black male central romantic relationship have been explicitly *about* that, i.e. Jungle Fever. It's rarely been able to go unaddressed, as you'd expect it to be in a superhero movie.

Spoilers follow. Obviously Hancock turns out to be much weirder than that, with the Theron-Smith relationship literally being knocked off its trajectory at the last possible second before a black male A-lister and white female A-lister are about to kiss in front of all of America. (Should Sony be quizzed over why they didn't allow that kiss to happen? Notice later that Hancock says it did, but we don't see it.) But that's hardly the end of the film's interracial relationship thread, at least as I see it. I've consulted Denby and a few other reviewers and they don't seem to address the third-act dynamic between Theron and Smith, and how the story *seems* to reveal itself as being about an aggrieved interracial couple fighting for their relationship throughout history.

Savage Musings

Slow day, Part 2. I went to the IFC to see Savage Grace. I'm not going to write a whole review because who cares, but here are some thoughts. 1) I agree with Ed Gonzalez, that there's a nice performance in there and it's more or less ruined by poor direction. 2) Handjobs never work on film. The people behind me were howling with laughter, and these are middle-of-the-day, hardcore IFC patrons. 3) I realize that aging Julianne Moore appropriately for this film was difficult, since she's supposed to awkwardly go from 25 to 50, but nevertheless ... Moore looks *exactly* the same in every time period. Very distracting. 4) The "walker" threesome scene was very well done. The whole notion of them piggy-backing their own psychosis onto 60s liberal decadence was well played, but the whole movie ... just read Ed.

Exclusive Interview: Rosamund Pike

Having started thinking about Toronto this year, I went back through my old Toronto files from last year and suddenly remembered that I still had an unpublished 1.1 with Rosamund Pike, one of my favorite actresses. This was for the movie Fugitive Pieces, and as I recall I had a hard time selling the piece because everyone lost interest after it had trouble picking up distribution interest. As if that matters. It's actually a pretty good interview, in my opinion, even though I was a little bowled over by her and not on my absolute best game. Here's the entire thing -- judge for yourself.

Go Ahead, Make My Commentary Track Remarkably Uninformative

I've been on a commentary kick lately. Listened to the famous Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back track in which Mewes was (later admittedly) on smack the whole time. He speaks only a few times during the whole thing -- in incoherent, trailing-off sentences -- and excuses himself at one point to go to the bathroom. Also Netflixed some of those new Dirty Harry DVDs with tracks. The one for The Enforcer is a B-, with director James Fargo sounding upbeat and giving a lot of background on exactly how he and future DH series directors were chosen and promoted from within Eastwood's company, etc.

I can't say the same for The Dead Pool, which has one of the lamest tracks I've ever encounted. Producer David Valdes seems almost embarassed to be actually recording a track for that piece of shit movie -- okay, except for the toy car chase --  and he doesn't say a single interesting thing for the entire running time. He's also a repeater -- we have to hear twenty times about how fortuitous it was that they selected "Welcome to the Jungle" for the soundtrack. He has nothing to add about what it was like working with Neeson, Clarkson, Carrey pre-fame or any insights on why they, the producers, never returned to the well again after this one. It's a waste of time.