Beverly Hills 213

Like all Quentin Tarantino movies, Inglourious Basterds is exasperating, absurd, cruel, cynical, sneeringly arrogant, racist, elitist, naïvely derivative, and viciously funny. It is also one whale of a rigorous entertainment. The wild plot: In World War II occupied France, a band of bloodthirsty American Jews form a battalion of renegade guerrilla soldiers without approval or military supervision, dedicated to the merciless torture and death of all Nazis. They don’t take prisoners. They butcher their captives, performing shocking acts of execution, mutilating their corpses, and bashing the skulls of their victims with baseball bats like eggshells. Their leader is Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), an Indian from the Smoky Mountains with a rope burn around his neck from a narrow encounter with a hangman’s noose whose specialty is scalping Nazis while they’re still alive—a talent that earns him the nickname “Apache”. Under Apache’s command, their war crimes accelerate, littering the 1941 landscape with more corpses than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and Saving Private Ryan combined. With little attention to narrative detail, it is suddenly 1944 and Apache leads the “basterds” to Berlin to blow up a movie house where Hitler, Goebbels, Goehring and the entire Third Reich are attending the movie premiere of a Nazi war propaganda film during a Leni Riefenstahl Film Festival. Preposterous, of course, but according to Mr. Tarantino, what more logical way to end the Holocaust than to go up in flames from flammable nitrate film stock in three-strip Technicolor with the cameras rolling? Would you believe the basterds’ chief allies in this big, noisy finale are a revered Marlene Dietrich style film star and a covert double agent who is really a British film critic with an expertise in German cinema? You gotta love it. Facetious, and sprawling for 2 and ½ hours, the film is often unintentionally hilarious but, I hastily add, never tedious. Both the German barbarism and the testosterone-infused American brutality are exploitative in styles that borrow freely from every war movie Mr. Tarantino has ever discovered in the video rental shops he calls home. In all of his films, he specializes in exposing, with imagery and well-crafted vignettes, humanity’s capacity for violence and stupidity. But when he’s accused of film school smugness and fractured plagiarism I can’t entirely disagree. Inspired by everything from the German cinema of Murnau, Pabst, and Josef von Sternberg (Emil Jannings even shows up for the premiere!) to Hogan’s Heroes and (most glaringly) Paul Verhoeven’s fabulous Nazi saga, The Black Book, Mr. Tarantino borrows and steals so many clichés from other people’s movies that I’m surprised he didn’t throw in the little girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List. A monstre sacre for Generation X’ers who like their movies loud, outrageous and obnoxious, Mr. Tarantino is so immune to opinion that he can’t even spell the title right, and nobody challenges him. By the time he gets around to rewriting the end of World War II, his arrogance is positively de rigeur. He’s like an idiot savant. If you crave Holocaust accuracy, see Heimat or all nine hours of Shoah. If you want the most disgusting, patronizing and manipulatively sentimental crap movie ever made about the subject, revisit Life is Beautiful. Mr. Tarantino aims for neither end of the scale; as war movies go, this one never rises to the level of Elem Klimov’s 1985 epic tragedy Come and See or sinks to the depths of The Dirty Dozen Hollywood heroics. The important thing to remember is that Inglorious Basterds is in no way intended to be taken seriously—and as pure hokum, it delivers. Mr. Tarantino is pretty generally considered, in serious circles, as a wickedly overrated amateur, but in hijsj defense I admire the way he makes no claim to “art”, so you can’t say he’s pretentious. He’s as self-conscious and referential a movie “fan” as mainstream entertainment can be, which makes him a welcome adversary of the kind of creeping art house paralysis I generally hate—phony, self-conscious, and booooring! (Lars von Trier, anyone?) His limitations are obvious. He sees everything from the viewpoint of a teenage faux-cool dude, which means his films rarely delve any deeper than juvenile posturing. So, like Pulp Fiction, he turns Inglorious Basterds into stylish and riveting without any remotely profound insight. It totally reflects not the age of its setting, but the age that has informed its director—a time of pop videos, Playstations, the internet, CGI and 24-hour digital TV with ads inserted every eight minutes for bathroom breaks. So expect World War II as seen through an issue of DC Comics. The gung-ho “basterds” are louts who storm the barriers like Hogan’s heroes, the comic-book Nazis are Katzenjammer Kids, and nobody displays much icy wit except for one Nazi colonel who steals the picture. (More about him in the next paragraph.) Among the casting errors, comedian Mike Myers plays a British officer with makeup and prosthetics that render him unrecognizable, the terrific Irish actor Michael Fassbender (devastating in Hunger as Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner who starved himself to death in prison) plays the undercover movie critic who parachutes behind enemy lines kill off Der Fuhrer, and a bulbous Rod Taylor makes a guest appearance as Winston Churchhill. The dismally miscast Brad Pitt, upstaged by an exaggerated Southern accent that imitates choking on grits and grillades, acts with a grim intensity like he’s the only one who’s not in on the joke. The film turns ludicrous when he crashes the premiere, festooned with swastikas, pretending to be an Italian extra, and sounding like Gomer Pyle. On the plus side, I was bowled over by Christoph Waltz, a juicy, flamboyant Austrian actor who speaks perfect English, in the unforgettable role of the finger-licking Gestapo Lt. Hans Landa, a combination of every handsome, blue-eyed movie Nazi from Otto Preminger and Helmut Dantine to Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Passionate about gourmet food and fresh milk, oozing a lethal charm than thinly veils a capacity for murderous outrage, the energy and discipline coming out of Mr.Waltz make him one 35-millimeter Nazi who deserves an Academy Award. With the war coming to a disastrous end, the funniest thing in the movie is his final offer to help kill the leaders of the German high command, in exchange for the Congressional Medal of Honor, U.S. citizenship, and a house in Nantucket. Mr. Tarantino knows how to frame a scene. The color, movement and sound are as good as Pulp Fiction, the dialogue is a slight improvement over Reservoir Dogs, and the scene where the Gestapo invade a French farmhouse to massacre a Jewish family hiding under the floor is better than anything in Kill Bill. World War II was more serious, complex, and horrifying than all this comic embellishment, but if I sound critical, I apologize in advance. I had a helluva time watching Inglourious Basterds. It’s as frenzied as a dog in heat. Mr. Tarantino lacks nuance, but he’s an erratic, awkward and often brilliant filmmaker. In time, he might even become a mature one. Is anyone as tired of the endless stream of movies about the war in Northern Ireland between the Protestants and the Catholics (still to this day referred to as “the Troubles”) as I am? The conflict between the violent Irish Republican Army’s quest for Catholic independence from British dominance and Margaret Thatcher’s violent Protestant soldiers who fought the insurrection for 38 years goes all the way back to Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Some things, like cricket and table wine, don’t travel. Movies about machine guns, mass murders, and bombs going off in Belfast pubs and hospitals are about as fascinating to American filmgoers as every movie about the Civil War except Gone with the Wind is to audiences across the pond. But directors from the UK never run out of new ways to get “the Troubles” off their chests. Movies continue to proliferate about the IRA (usually by Jim Sheridan and Terry George) no matter how much money they lose. This week, two new ones. Having only recently survived Hunger, the harrowing, detailed depiction of IRA martyr Bobby Sands and his ghastly 1981hunger strike inside the Draconian walls of the infamous Maze Prison, we are now treated to Fifty Dead Men Walking, the true and shocking story of Martin McGartland, a poor Catholic boy from the slums of west Belfast who was recruited by the British police to spy on the IRA and feed information to his British “handler”, a mysterious man with the code name “Fergus”, at the same time he was acting as a trusted volunteer for the IRA. According to his best-selling memoirs, the information Martin passed on to the British saved at least 50 lives before he was exposed, captured and almost tortured to death. (Of course, there is no way to estimate how many lives he burned, blew up and gunned to death in fires, explosions and street massacres.) He miraculously escaped the IRA mercenaries (some were buddies and close family friends, all were fellow Catholics) by leaping through a glass window on the top of an IRA torture hideaway, hitting the pavement below, and breaking almost every bone in his body. Leaving a girlfriend, a grieving family and two children behind, Martin was assigned a new name and sent to a clandestine destination. Eleven years later, the IRA riddled his body with six bullets and labeled him a “dead man walking”. He never saw his family again, he dictated the book on which this movie is based in hiding, and even though times have changed, he is still on the run from the IRA. Canadian director Kari Skogland has made Fifty Dead Men Walking more of a political thriller than a documentary-style history lesson, but she has, I admit, invested the story with a focus on the human element and true grit. The movie is aided immensely by the inspired performance of versatile young actor Jim Sturgess as Martin McGartland. To get under the skin of a hustler turned hero, he worked hard to perfect a Northern Ireland accent that sounds like mud, and succeeded so well that I couldn’t understand half of what he said throughout the entire movie. Authenticity is nice, but not if it costs the film every hope of a profit. Ben Kingsley is also fine as the wily British agent who explains there is no such thing as the “right” side of the war (“The price of a conscience is death”), and Kevin Zegers as Martin’s friend, Nathalie Press as his girl, and Rose McGowan as a hearty broth of an Irish colleen turned lethal IRA intelligence agent are equally splendid. They impart an exact feeling of what it was like to be in the middle of Belfast’s dangerous war zones in the late 1980s. Still, the despair doesn’t really amount to much more than what you might expect from a routine action thriller. Not exactly profound. Five Minutes of Heaven, also based on fact, shows how, among the bombs and riots, a fever developed that sent men, women and children into the streets to test their patriotism. In 1975, a 17-year-old Protestant boy named Alistair Little kills a 19-year-old Catholic named Jim Griffin—a pointless assassination witnessed by the victim’s 11-year-old brother Joe. Alistair serves 12 years in prison for the murder and when he rejoins society, he’s a changed man—guilty and haunted by remorse. He is also Liam Neeson, which somewhat stacks the decks in his favor automatically. This much is true. The movie re-enacts the crime, then takes a fictional turn as it poses the question: what would happen if the two survivors came face to face on a TV talk show? Alistair began a new life, but the family of the boy he killed never recovered. Thirty-three years have passed, but some wounds never heal. The point of the TV show is to capture truth, stage a reconciliation, and build ratings. Noble, a responsible citizen who paid his debt to society, and a symbol of a changing Ireland, Alistair (Mr. Neeson) seeks redemption. Still raging with fury and loss, Joe (James Nesbitt) wants revenge, and he’s even concealed a knife to guarantee it. Will they seize the opportunity to reconcile? Or will their meeting on camera only provoke more violence? Five Minutes of Heaven was directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, the terrific German director who brings to the aftermath of the Irish struggle the same wisdom of nuanced observation that informed his brilliant Oscar-nominated 2004 film Downfall, a catalogue of the last 12 days of the Third Reich in Hitler’s Berlin bunker from the keyhole view of the Fuhrer’s secretary, Traudl Junge. It has less conflagration and combat than Fifty Dead Men Walking, but both films try to be as neutral as Switzerland in showing both sides of the sectarian conflict, but let’s face it. There ain’t nothin’ funny about the IRA. Both films could benefit from a little less of the balanced historical context and a little more of the movie madness of Quentin Tarantino.