Inglourious Basterds

[petronia]

I really liked it. XD The best Tarentino script so far that's not really in English, and the excellent European actors save it from being too pomo for its own good. It feels streamlined for QT, or maybe just that some obvious gestures are avoided - a backstory montage, say, or another ultra-violent set-piece or three. Structurally the thing is more built around six or seven sit-down conversations than (not infrequent, don't get me wrong) violent confrontations; the second time around you know what happens at the end of the chit-chat, so you can watch for the cinematographic injokes instead. I think that's the idea, anyway. XD If you were a film student you'd probably be able to catch them on the first go, but I need a commentary track. Also THE MORE YOU KNOW about German pre-war auteur cinema and the propaganda industry etcetcetc which tbh I was pretty into given relevant family history.

It's not morally vacuous whatever the reviewers say. It's making the same kind of point about movies and moviegoers as Miike does these days, except a lot of people seem to miss said point - some of them because they're not self-examining, others (many others, I would guess) because they don't have the button in them that Miike or Tarentino wants you to watch them punching to begin with, so they misjudge the intent. (Maybe I'm misjudging directorial intent, except at least I liked the movie.) Nothing in Inglourious Basterds made me as queasy as QT's own cameo in Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, but then I'm 1) Asian and 2) not Jewish, and that may make the difference insofar as the act of bashing on triggers is concerned.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It's making the same kind of point about movies and moviegoers as Miike does these days

Which is what? 'Exploding brains or GTFO?'

[petronia.livejournal.com]

To simplify it down to the basics, Miike and Tarentino are asking what kind of person you are if you enjoy seeing people hurt on-screen, and what - when you get down to it - that "enjoyment" consists of. I consider it moral because it's always seeking to elicit the raw response then asking you to examine it. What filmmaker's trick or story element makes kicking this person's head in register as a cartoonish laugh and that person as sadness and horror? Because person A is a Nazi and person B is a Jew? Because the soundtrack choice is different? Is there a difference between Nazi cadres watching a German sniper shoot Allied soldiers on-screen, and modern audiences watching Jews shoot Nazi cadres on-screen (assuming you have the balls to set up a direct comparison?). What counts as propaganda? What if the Jew were also psychopathic? What if she were the wronged survivor heroine of a revenge thriller? What if she's both? If we need some sign that it's "okay", or that they "deserve it", to "enjoy ourselves", then what is it that we're enjoying and what is it they deserve? A filmic recreation of something that never happened? Should it have happened? Is it sadism, or exorcism of buried fears, or practice for a horrific future that may not come ("I would never be so stupid as to go into the basement")? Is it a real fantasy that people have already, or are you giving them ideas? What does it mean for me as a filmmaker, and as a moral person, that I want to make this movie? If I make a movie about Nazis killing Jews, does it make it more or less voyeuristic if it's played for laughs? Does it make it okay if I'm a Jew? What if it's never okay?

I do think all these questions are there and aren't accidental, and that I'm not making them up. There are enough violent movies that don't ask the questions that I can tell the difference. There are two fronts on which the call to action fails, though: firstly that the nature of the beast is that one can enjoy the movie on simple hedonistic terms without thinking about it (because you're not made complicit in it otherwise), so people don't; and secondly that if you never enjoy screen violence the way filmmakers like Tarentino practice it, then these questions aren't for you to answer.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Another related question - that I happen to be very interested in** - concerns the boundaries of good taste. As in, what does it take to turn an act of screen violence or line of dialogue from something you'd expect in any "normal" summer blockbuster film to something that renders audiences uncomfortable. I like watching Miike films at Fantasia, because he can always get a nervous laugh - or even nervous silence - when he wants, from this fanboi audience whose primary mode of dealing with on-screen horror is to disengage emotions and treat it as kitsch.

** In other ways too; like, what makes certain music "good" and certain manga "trashy", whether trashy manga can be Art, whether schlockiness precludes affect, and so on.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

And to be fair, I don't think early Miikes or Tarentinos are necessarily asking the questions so much as they exhibit virtuosic, even childlike joy in being allowed to create the effects in the first place. (The thing in Tarentino that some critics complain of as coldness - "he never lets you forget it's a movie". Damn straight.) But I don't think it's possible for a thinking person to be extremely good at something without eventually asking what that thing is for, and both these guys are thinking persons.