film, eyeballs, brain

There was a time, back in 1994 when Pulp Fiction came out, when I just couldn’t shut up about Quentin Tarantino. In a fit of movie giddiness, I had seen Pulp Fiction on the big screen maybe three times the month it opened; I owned the Faber & Faber editions of his screenplays; I had the posters on the wall; I had memorized the entire “dick dick dick dick dick dick dick” monologue — easy to do, since I owned the soundtracks both on cassette and CD. I owned Reservoir Dogs (1992) on VHS, DVD, HD-DVD (a Belgian import), and Blu-Ray. Even now, I can still tell you when I saw his films, which theaters I saw them in, and who I saw them with. One year my ex and I even dressed up as Vincent and Mia for Halloween.

You might say, correctly, that I was smitten. I loved his films’ explosive profanity, their bursts of violence, the way the narrative swung back and forth with flashbacks within flashbacks, the way Uma Thurman draws a square in the air, the way Tim Roth picks up his wedding ring and hesitates. But people were celebrating Tarantino for being a bad boy and breaking the rules long before I had any conception of what those rules were. Such Paulettesque movie-love, prior to my picking up all the other cinematic references, real or imagined, in Tarantino’s films. Before I knew better, one might say, but that would be going too far.

All this, as the reader would have figured out by now, is a preamble to a confession of inevitable disappointment. I’ve seen and re-watched all his other films, of course, and all those stylistic flourishes which I once found cool  — thrown in just because, even if they go nowhere — I now found gimmicky and distracting, even irritating. But unlike in a real-life amorous relationship — where you used to love the way she used to tuck her hair behind her ear, before it started unaccountably getting on your nerves — Pulp Fiction didn’t change; I did. “It’s not you; it’s me.”

There’s a lot to be said for Tarantino’s candy-store auteurism, though, and even the other day I found myself defending Kill Bill (2003-2004) from a friend who was calling Tarantino a “poacher”. It’s not unfair, but his movie-making is more accurately fueled by a genuine if somewhat juvenile (this is a good thing) enthusiasm: that was so cool, I gotta put it in my movie. (If Tarantino ever makes a Cirio Santiago / Jack Hill movie, you just know he’ll want to pull Vic Diaz out of retirement and make him do a cameo.) When the titles are superimposed on Vanessa Ferlito’s ass in 2007′s Death Proof, it’s silly, but it’s also in homage to the girls-with-guns exploitation flicks of the ’70s.

As with his screenplay for Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, Inglourious Basterds is essentially two different movies; they’re at least interwoven here, but not particularly satisfyingly. The first, and more interesting of the two, deals with a movie theater in Nazi-occupied Paris that has been selected as the venue for the high-wattage premiere of a German propaganda film. Its owner, played by Mélanie Laurent, is in reality the lone survivor of the massacre of a Jewish family hiding in a basement three years prior. Once she figures out that the premiere will include the cream of the Nazi elite, she hatches a plan for fiery revenge. Tarantino’s clearly smitten with her; as with Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, the camera lingers on Laurent for what feels like minutes at a time. (My friend Jane thought she resembled Sandrine Bonnaire; I still think she looks like Catherine Deneuve circa 1965.)

The “second movie” is about the Basterds themselves: a group of bloodthirsty Jewish American soldiers spreading fear across the landscape, collecting German scalps. They’re led by 1st Lieutenant Aldo Raine, hilariously played by Brad Pitt — who, in the right hands (in chronological order: Redford, Fincher, Ritchie, Dominik) can do wonders, but he usually doesn’t. (Pitt lovingly pronounces “Nazi” with a long “A” — linguistically, but not semantically, similar to the same long “A” in the three-syllabled “Vietnam”, or that long “I” in “Iraq”.) One of the Basterds is played by Eli Roth, who plays the baseball bat-wielding “Bear Jew” (and is rumored by terrified German soldiers to be a golem), and is a better director than he is an actor.

It’s almost easier to describe what Inglourious Basterds isn’t: it’s neither a Marvel What If… comic, nor (alas) a Salon Kitty-style Naziploitation movie, nor a Dirty Dozen war-buddy flick. It’s perhaps this last part that’s most disappointing, for the Basterds are together on screen for only something like three scenes; for something that’s ostensibly a war movie, there isn’t much warring going on. One comes to expect certain things in a Tarantino film — dazzling action choreography, for one, especially in his last two films — but it doesn’t happen here. If you were hoping for a “House of Blue Leaves”-style bloodbath, something does happen, but it doesn’t quite materialize in the way you expect.

Tarantino is a great writer of dialogue, though perhaps its most irritating (and most-imitated) feature are the egregious pop-culture references. (It’s obvious, for instance, that his uncredited contribution to Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide was the Silver Surfer routine, squeezed like everything else into that submarine.) It’s the rhythm of talk of fanboys (and fangirls, in the case of Death Proof) probing the wealth and depth of each other’s cultural capital — part gamesmanship, part delight in its obscurities — but at least Tarantino gets it right.

It reappears in Inglourious Basterds, but far more cleverly, in an extended sequence between Nazi officers (and some Basterds in disguise) in a basement bar; instead of idle chatter about Burger King or “Like a Virgin”, they banter about G.W. Pabst. Oftentimes its banality is used to underscore the tension, as in the conversation between Uma Thurman and David Carradine at the end of Kill Bill. It’s used to great effect here, most notably in an opening interrogation sequence between a dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jewish refugees, and the scene-stealing Christophe Waltz. (Waltz is a “delight”, if it can be put that way, as both ruthless SS officer and unfailingly polite gentleman.)

Inglourious Basterds is a more ambitious and perhaps more disciplined work, but I think it’s this overreaching that exacerbates his flaws, because it gestures at something grander than the trashy pulp it actually is. I tend to compare Tarantino with comic-book writer Garth Ennis: an eloquent and moving profession of brotherly camaraderie on one page, then, a few panels later, something completely unfilmable. It’s a similar shift in mood that characterizes Tarantino’s films: a tender love scene one moment, then Ving Rhames being raped in another. At least Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown (1997) seemed like organic wholes; in Inglourious Basterds, this schizophrenic quality is even more pronounced.

When you get to the breathless and cathartic final ten minutes (and the cheerful sadism of the last few seconds), you feel as if you’ve seen two different movies, and neither constitute what Tarantino makes Pitt utter in the final frame: “I think this might just be my masterpiece.” There’s much to admire about Tarantino’s flashy and slick film-making, but the products, like this enjoyable revenge romp, are always suspiciously hollow inside. And I still remain disappointed — at least until he makes that women-in-a-Filipino-prison movie. Preferably with Vic Diaz in it.

[Addendum: just catching up on other blogs -- Richard Bolisay has an excellent review over at Lilok Pelikula.]

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