Nearly every camera shot and line of dialog in this movie is pure Tarantino – and yet, it’s probably one of the most mature and airtight films he’s ever directed, a masterwork (not a masterpiece) that weaves all the juicy dialog, larger-than-life characters, and gleeful violence that we’ve come to expect and love from this movie-loving director with a few subtle moral themes and winks to the audiece about violence at the movies and the nature of our response to it.

Don’t read into his message too much, though – Inglourious Basterds is, first and foremost, a Tarantino-ization of history, so he’s not going to sit down and give you a tidy lesson so much as make you laugh yourself silly and cringe with glee at the expected blood spatters and shoot-outs executed with salivating cinematic style.  QT’s film is set smack dab in the middle of Nazi-era WWII Germany (with, thankfully, delicious attention paid to the accents and languages – most of the movie is in subtitles), as the Nazi party is terrorized by the Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt in a screen-chewin Nazi-hatin’ performance on par with his role in Burn After Reading entertainment-wise) led Inglourious Basterds, a team of American Jews doin’ one thing, and one thing only: killin Nazis.

Actually, the Basterds (a misspelling QT has said he will never explain), occupy about a third of the movie – the rest is devoted to a young Jewish lady named Shoshanna – in hiding as a Frenchwoman who owns a theatre, and a plot to use the premiere of a prestigious film to assassinate most of the Nazi party leaders at once (with the help of the Basterds of course). Tarantino’s plot weaving skills are on full display here, and they’re rather impressive – the movie keeps you on the edge of your seat most of the time and is rooted in unpredictability despite its rather conventional assassination plotline. Simply the dialog between the characters is fabulous, but if the acting hadn’t matched the script pitch-perfect, extended scenes of slow dramatic buildup and searing climaxes would have been boring and slow – thankfully this is not the case.

As Tarantino has matured as a filmmaker he’s become increasingly good at pulling performances from his actors that nearly shimmer with a riveting other-reality, but in this film he’s outdone himself and created some of his most memorable characters and suspenseful scenes yet, with even the smallest roles clicking perfectly into place.  Two lead performances in particular stand out, one of them Christoph Waltz as Colonel Landa – a member of the SS nicknamed “The Jew Hunter.”

He’s an instantly iconic villain, an idiosyncratic, ruthlessly calculating and egotistical maniac with a dangerous amount of patience.  Waltz relishes the role by pulling back and playing him as dangerously friendly (he also speaks four different languages in the movie, all seamlessly – a best supporting actor nomination is a must) with cruel cunning barely visible beneath his calm, affable exterior.  The opening scene alone (wherein he and an unassuming French farmer talk for nigh-on twenty tension-laden minutes) is worth the price of admission alone.

And then, there’s Eli Roth as “The Bear Jew”, a member of the Basterds known for beating his victims to death with a baseball bat.  Tarantino introduced Eli Roth to the world when he produced Roth’s “Hostel,” a film quickly written off as cheap torture porn taken to absurd levels. That Roth plays one of the more sadistic members in an already sadistic group is no coincidence, and it’s key to why Tarantino’s latest can’t just be written off as mindless bloody revisionist history.

Though IB is violent, it’s interesting to note that the violence isn’t half as emphasized as were Kill Bill, Death Proof, or for that matter, Pulp Fiction.  Actual scalping is given one introductory shot and only a few scattered shots here and there, and except for one all-important death shoot-out, many of the spurts of violence take place in enclosed darkened spaces where stuff happens so quick you don’t really see what’s going on.  When a moment of violence is focused on, it’s to signify something else (such as when a flourish of blood erupts from a character’s body to create an almost poetic-like image of a flower’s pollen exploding from its burst petals), something meaningful and lasting.  The climactic scene of the movie finds Nazis clapping away at a movie which depicts endless, awful violence –and at the midnight screening that I attended, scenes with awful violence were met with applause and cheers.  There’s no way Tarantino would be ignorant of this kind of response.

The question still remains what exactly this means, though.  Inglourious Basterds is a terrific film that is among Tarantino’s top 3 and certainly the most entertaining and well-made film to come out this summer.  The plot is seamless, the dialog enthralling, the characters memorable and the heroes endearing.  Is there a “message” hidden in this film at all, though?  I mean, what does it MEAN, right? Should we even bother to look for one in a Tarantino movie?  You can certainly bet that he’s not judging his audience for applauding at violence (that’s Michael Haneke’s job), but it could be that he’s evolving as a filmmaker and IB, among other things, is also an experiment in blurring the line between movies and audience’s response to them.  Similarities between the Basterds and the Nazis are clear throughout the film, and in a couple of instances some innocent men are even shot dead by people who are supposed to be “the good guys.” In all likelihood, Tarantino is just playing around, dancing with movie conventions in one scene and slaughtering them to his own end in the next. Whatever the case, it’s well-made, damn fine entertainment.  And Quentin Tarantino knows it.

My newest Screen Junkies is article is up, just in time for the new Harry Potter coming out this Wednesday. A tribute to famous magical cinematic and televised babes from years past all the way up through to Hermione. Enjoy and please digg!

“My name is John Dillinger, and I rob banks.” One thing that’s very important to understand about this character is that this isn’t just a statement of what he does. It’s his belief in who he is – Michael Mann’s latest pic focuses mostly on how much Dillinger wasn’t thinking about what he would down the line. He just did it, and did it like nobody else could, at the same time managing to break out of a couple of prisons and gain national acclaim and the public’s respect and sympathy. So if this is the case, why is so little of Mann’s epic devoted to prison breaks, bank robberies, or coverage of how much the public loved him? He was like a gangster Jesse James – a celebrity criminal who was also a good man, yet there’s four, maybe five scenes in the whole flick where we witness this, and the bank robberies and prison breaks play on automatic with zero tension at all. With any movie about the life of a historical figure, you have to make them a real person, not some ghost of history wandering through pre-set events, and except for Johnny Depp’s magnetic performance, this is exactly what Public Enemies feels like.

Part of the problem is the structure – the movie opens with Dillinger breaking out of prison, soon after which he finds shelter at the house of a friend. Not long after that, Dillinger and his men rob a bank, and during all this we learn how Dillinger already has a national reputation and notoriety. He’s already a superman, breaking out of prisons and robbing banks in a minute forty flat. Where’s the build-up? There is none, and Dillinger’s personal history is recounted in about three sentences to Billie Frechette. It’s also disappointing because if Mann’s gonna deprive us of this, you would at least think he’d give us some inside info on how the numerous robberies and prison breaks were planned and executed. Nope. Dillinger and his men zoom into the banks, snatch the money, drive away with hostages, and are scot-free. The two prison breaks we see in the movie are laughable, as is the general incompetence of any police that Dillinger comes into contact with, except for one: Christian Bale.

Which brings us to yet another flaw in the movie. Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard (as Dillinger’s love Billie Frechette), and Christian Bale (as Melvin Purvis) feel like the only three actors in this film. When one of Purvis or Dillinger’s men dies there’s a brief grieving period, maybe, or a shocked silence, but none of the true impact of actual people dying – merely puppets who need to die before the film finishes its running time. You never really care that these people are dying – and it’s only thanks to the charisma and strength of these three actors that you end up caring about their characters at all. Dillinger’s “courtship” of Frechette, despite feeling artificial (like most historical romances the guy and the girl hit it off virtually right away, there’s a small, token “will-they-won’t they” moment, and then the guy wins over the girl and that’s that), actually works because of the sizzling chemistry Cotillard and Depp share. It’s subtle and the actors bring a reality that the script is completely lacking. Bale does his best with the role of Purvis, a man who is part of the Bureau of Investigation (before it was the FBI – a plotline the film comes and goes with), and must deal with some of the moral implications of torture methods employed by the Bureau to get information. Yet once again, the drama is cartoonish – you never get the sense this torturing stuff really bothers anyone but Purvis, and it’s not a complete story – more like a frayed thread stumbling through about 50% of the movie. Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover makes what’s essentially a cameo and is the one to let Purvis know that they will do ANYTHING to catch Dillinger, even if it means torture and violence. It may have actually happened, but the way it’s said and with the script that’s used it’s obviously a clumsy attempt to comment on Bush’s administration’s torture methods.

It’s a shame that this movie is so unfocused, because there’s a lot of material to mine here. You’ve got Dillinger and Frechette’s romance, Frechette abandoning her previously simple life to follow Dillinger wherever he may take her, Dillinger’s love affair with the press and his incredible ability to break out of prisons and rob banks, Dillinger always looking to the very next thing, but nowhere beyond that, and how Frechette challenges this notion within him and how it hurts those around him, Purvis’s inner struggle about what he must do and how he must find and destroy this man for the greater good, despite seeing how much the public loves him. There’s endless possibilities, but Mann just seems focused on one: Dillinger’s living-in-the-moment, but even THAT’S not too well developed and doesn’t quite come together at the end. One thing that’s always consistent is Dillinger’s cockiness – near the end of the movie he walks straight into the office of the FBI task force that has been searching for him for weeks, in the “disguise” of wearing a mustache and sunglasses. He asks a bunch of agents, who are standing around a radio, what the score to the game is. They answer him nonchalantly, not even noticing that the man they’re hunting for is standing right there, really not all that well disguised. It is at this point that the movie cements its status as merely being about a ghost walking through history, untouchable even when he does something as stupid as walk straight into the lion’s den. It’s a shame, because looking at Dillinger as a real human being who did all these things would have been much more interesting than what we received: a story about a guy who robbed banks, escaped prison, fell in love, and died, without ever once really looking to the future.

Michael Bay doesn’t so much make movies as try to figure out how to fit a plot in between his ridiculously bombastic action scenes. Some people love him for it, some people hate him, but, he really technically doesn’t make truly good movies. (The Rock and The Island are the closest he’s come). With ROTF, he seems to have outdone himself, both in the amount of action that overwhelms the screen and the head-scratchingly complex story crammed into the lulls between the booms.Bay’s first Transformers outing was a carbon-copy of “Independence Day,” – long stretches of zero robot action, a story built around some mind-numbingly boring characters, and a disservice to the characters of the Autobots and the Decepticons themselves. Basically, whenever there wasn’t a robot on screen, yawns were sure to be heard. This second chapter aims to correct every single one of these things – by virtually eliminating all the boring build-up and backstory, concentrating the character focus on the Transformers and their mythos, plus the Witwicky family, and daring you to find a spot where you can yawn without missing the overload of image and sound blasting at you from the screen.

Don’t be fooled by the accusations against ROTF that claim both the story and action are incomprehensible – there’s just a whole damn butt-load of both. So let’s start off with the story. Shia LeBoeuf reprises his role as Sam Witwicky, who’s about to head off to college and must leave his beloved car Bumblebee behind. Unfortunately, a scrap of the Allspark (the powerful cube from the first movie) still remains in his beat up old jacket from his battle two years ago. Unbeknownst to him, it imprints a code in his head that causes him to see symbols and images that will lead to a secret that the Autobots have been hiding from him. Meanwhile, the Deceptions are on Sam’s tail in pursuit of the scrap of the Allspark so they can, you guessed it, take over the world. The US Army is now working with the Autobots on stopping Decepticon mayhem, but their alliance is threatened by a nosy government official who blames the Decepticon activity on the Autobots’ continued presence. Oh yeah, and Jon Turturro is back, too, helping Sam figure out what exactly the symbols mean. Megan Fox shows up, too, getting a few Decepticon ass-kicking scenes in, but just like the first one, she’s mostly a pretty a face, even though her relationship with Sam is deepened.

So, I usually try not to do this in reviews, but seeing as how the hate for Transformers 2 and its “incomprehensible plot” is so relevant and rampant around the net, I have to say it: does any part of the above paragraph seem incomprehensible to you? Because it certainly didn’t to me. Once I saw Transformers, I started reading the reviews – at 20% some odd percent on Rotten Tomatoes, pretty much everyone who didn’t like it criticized its lack of/incomprehensible plot, which baffled me. I had to actually try to think of ways that it was incomprehensible, but I couldn’t. I understood everything, from start to finish, even the somewhat ineptly handled dips into the TF mythos. (And speaking of which, diehard TF fans will be happy that there’s a whole lot more Starcream/Megatron going on here.) Are there some parts that aren’t fully explained, or not well enough developed? Yeah, of course. It’s Michael Bay. One instance is when a satellite Decepticon, Soundwave, intercepts transmissions from the army that let him know the location of Megatron’s body, deep beneath the sea. Obviously, this doesn’t make much sense, considering it’s been two years since the events in the first movie and it’s hard to believe that not once did Megatron’s whereabouts come across Soundwave’s sensors. But these are the kinds of things you shrug off as merely hiccups in the plot and more evidence that Bay still has a lot of maturing to do as a filmmaker. (Another example – why do the robots chamber rounds when firing? They’re robots, for crying out loud!)

Now, the action. And boy golly, there’s a LOT of action. Within the first ten minutes we’re plunged headfirst into a dizzying action scene introducing a couple of new autobot friends, in pursuit of a Decepticon in Shanghai. It blows anything you saw in “Transformers” out of the water. Not long after this, all of Sam Witwicky’s kitchen appliances are turned into murderous little robots who go after him, his parents, his dogs, and his house, before Bumblebee rolls in to save the day. There’s tiger Decepticons, good Decepticons, even one that is made up five or six different vehicles, forming one massive monster that sucks everything into its gaping, whirling, garbage-dispenser of a mouth. And the action is frenetic, manic, and kinetic. If you’re not paying attention for more than two seconds, you’ll probably lose track of what’s going on in a given action scene. It’s been said that it’s impossible to tell the robots apart when they’re in robot form, but from my experience that’s not the case at all. Most of the robots are brightly colored with distinctive shapes, so even when they’re battling it out amidst a couple of dozen camera cuts, it’s pretty easy to tell who’s who, and though yes, there are too many camera cuts, each one makes sense – unlike, say, Brett Ratner’s abysmal X3.

In any case, Bay’s extremely talented at creating very entertaining set pieces that absolutely demand our attention, from start to finish. The action scenes penetrate your brain and giant battling bots duke it out on your retina. In that way, it’s sort of an invasive movie – once you enter the theatre, be prepared for two hours and forty minutes of loud, intense, in-your-face crunching crashing metal (and a plot with maybe a hole here and there) that absolutely REFUSES to let up. It may be the first movie I’ve ever seen where the term “nonstop action” is pretty spot on. And I’d like to give Mr. Bay some credit for this. He knows what people didn’t like about TF1 – they complained about the boring plot and lack of, you know, actual Transformers, so he stuffed this one to the brim with a whole shit-load of plot and an even bigger platter of action and special effects. And theres’ some damn creative work going on here – the design of some of the new Transformers themselves are mind-boggling, intricate, and brain-meltingly insane. You can tell nobody gave Bay a roof on this thing – it’s an all out, balls-to-the-wall smorgasbord of cool robots doing extremely cool things. And even if I couldn’t tell you exactly why that particular bullet didn’t destroy that robot, but THAT one did, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun to watch. The animation itself has been upped considerably – Optimus Prime’s face when he’s talking to the meddler who wants to dissolve his alliance with the army is extremely detailed and expressive, and Bumblebee’s expression when he finds out Sam is going to college (he can’t take his favorite Camaro) is cleverly done and actually made me a little sad for the poor car.

Essentially, Revenge of the Fallen is little more than a special effects extravaganza designed specifically to deliver the goods on some very kickass robot action scenes, and in that sense, it succeeds in spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds. The plot, this time around, is also a lot more interesting and engaging, and’ll keep your brain humming in between the seemingly ubiquitous action. It’s also funnier than the first movie, too, like in a scene where Sam’s mom accidentally buys some “green” brownies at Princeton. Sam’s parents in the first movie were a highlight and had perfect chemistry together, and this movie is no different; though their role is enlarged and they have more of a chance to shine. But in the end, let’s be honest with ourselves – if you’re going to see a Transformers movie, the first question is going to be, “Is the action good?” And the answer is a hearty and bone-crunchingly loud, “YES.” There’s just something about seeing giant alien bots transforming into cars and back again so they can kick each other’s asses that’s appealing to the kid in me, I have to be honest. I really, really, did like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and I do think it’s better than the first one, in many ways. I will agree that it’s not an entirely good movie – it’s made to entertain and blow your fucking brain away, and little else, but sometimes, that’s exactly what you need. I’ll take this supposedly “mindless, incomprehensible” fluff over “Up’s” pre-packaged Pixar cuteness any day. (Side note: don’t get me wrong, I loved Up, but it wasn’t one of my favorite Pixar movies.)

A little belated with this link, but better late than never. From Screen Junkies, my list of 11 Terminally Typecast Actors.

Another list for Screen Junkies! This one details the absolute trash of the live action wisecracking animal world, as well as some of those classic babbling beasts that made us laugh and love. (Shoot me for that schmaltz.)

Enjoy the 5 Best & Worst Talking Animals!

….has now been dugg over 1,000 times over at Digg.com! Pop open the champagne, we gotta celebrate!

Oh yeah, and just in case you were wondering, here’s the article itself, courtesy of Screen Junkies. Enjoy, dear reader.

A long, sad, hilarious history this little boy has had, and in a tribute to all this deaths and near-deaths, all the “oh my gods” and “you bastards,” I give you my article on Screen Junkies: South Park’s 13 Most Twisted Kenny Deaths. Peace.

Originally, I was going to write a review based on Watchmen purely as a movie, unrelated to the graphic novel. That was before I actually read the graphic novel, and having done that, and been more able to appropriately grasp the spirit of the book, it’s impossible to look at Watchmen the movie as entirely separate from its origins. As I read through the graphic novel, I began to comprehend the immense scope of the whole thing – it’s much more than a graphic novel, incorporating elements of poetry, art, novels, newspapers, comics, and more into a seamless whole that traces the development of this superhero world from basically its beginnings to its present. It’s engrossing and impossibly well executed, and the very thought of trying to write a script for this beast almost makes the brain explode. The fact that someone *did* do it, or even tried, is daunting at best and horrifying at worst. So does the movie succeed, as I always say, on a movie’s own terms, while keeping the spirit of the book? The answer is a sigh-of-relief yes, although it is not an across-the-board one, for in several areas Watchmen falters, missing the point on some of the book’s themes and trying to jam too much “cool” into the mix.

For the un-geekified, Watchmen takes place in 1985, with the US and Russia on the brink of nuclear war. In this atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, Edward Blake, having led a double life as the costumed vigilante The Comedian, is murdered, and Rorschach, a ruthless vigilante who wears a piece of cloth on his face that reflects his changing moods, like a Rorschach Blot (one of the niftier effects of the movie), takes up the investigation and, paranoid, assumes that someone is “picking off costumed heroes.” The movie follows mainly Rorschach as he bounces around the city, meeting up with old heroes and warning them that they could be next, flashbacks intercut as we see these characters and learn more about the life they led and the hand they had in the costumed vigilante “fad.” None of these people have superpowers, except for one Dr. Manhattan, a victim of the token “science experiment gone wrong” scenario, who has near limitless powers in bending matter to his will, and is on the US’s side, being one of the main reasons the world is on the brink of war. To Dr. Manhattan, there are same amount of particles in a dead body as in a living one, and time exists all at once, so it is all inevitable, and he doesn’t see much point in stopping nuclear war.

*Takes a deep breath.* This just scratches the surface of what is an elaborately deep, complex maze of interlocking stories and backstories, flashbacks and narrations. The movie obviously can’t include everything from the book, but for things they cut out there are visual hints peppered throughout the movie for the observant. For the most part, what they cut out isn’t completely necessary to the movie version of the plot, and the few changes from the original don’t really glare out that much, but there are a couple of changes that should be taken issue with – one of them Rorschach. Jackie Earle Haley gives him the perfect, scarred, hollowed out voice, imbuing him with a frightening insanity – however, the script of the movie ends up making Rorschach out to be some sort of hero – whereas his psychopathic nature is never in question in the book (they cut out a scene where he ties a man up and lights the building on fire and watches it burn for an hour), several times in the movie it almost seems as if we’re asked to cheer for Rorschach, with an extended camera focus on Rorshach breaking the glass in someone’s hand, or a meat cleaver diving into brain tissue.

And that’s another problem with Snyder’s direction here – what he chooses to focus on. Good, solid, intense action scenes are entirely necessary, as they’re a frequent part of the book and breathtakingly illustrated, sometimes entirely without dialog for two or three pages. But when Snyder goes into an action scene, he seems to milk it for all its worth – like the fight between the Comedian and his murderer at the beginning of movie, unnecessarily long. Other unnecessities bug the mind, too – like the soundtrack, where in nearly every case it’s some 80’s tune that heavy-handedly is smashed onto the scene and removes you from the conflict rather than escalating it. Not every song is bad, I mean they’re all good songs, it’s just questionable that a movie like this would need it. The images, script, and score all speak enough – do we really need more piled on there?

Trimmings such as these, here and there, would have made for a more streamlined movie, and even would have allowed more character development for other sub-explored characters like Nite Owl II, played with easygoing goofball charm by Patrick Wilson, or Adrian Veidt, who retired two years before US law forbade masks and now runs a super successful toy line based on the heroes and villains he worked with and fought, respectively. He’s played by Matthew Goode with a self-assured confidence that radiates outward from him, appropriate as he’s the only other man on the planet who has been called a superhero besides Dr. Manhattan.

And now we get into the characters and actors who are portrayed amazingly well, so let’s start with perhaps one of the most fascinating characters in graphic novel history, and certainly one of the more daring and visually gorgeous ones in cinematic history, Dr. Manhattan, who used to be Dr. Jon Osterman, re-creating his entire body from scratch after it was obliterated in a science experiment, and, through this, having gained a knowledge of how everything in the world fits together. The scene where we observe the creation of Dr. Manhattan is a chaotic yet quietly haunting, chilling scene, simple orchestral score soaring over the whole thing, intertwining with the images flashing by, a picture worth a thousand words at least every five seconds. Most impressive about Manhattan, though, is Billy Cruddup’s performance, who has to put into every word, every facial expression, every tic, the voice of a being with knowledge that wouldn’t fit inside any human’s head, and is unavoidably saddened and detached because of it. He’s not a character without emotion – but he speaks in a monotone voice, and his emotions have to be conveyed through that voice. It’s a brilliant, searing, intense performance and puts Cruddup on a level with such Oscar winning actors as Daniel Day Lewis and Javier Bardem. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian is rough, gruff, and completely accepting of humanity’s unavoidable savagery. And Laurie Jupiter, who is Dr. Manhattan’s gilrfriend/Nite Owl’s love interest, has an intricate backstory that ties into most of the threads in the movie, and she’s played with a sad, mournful reality by Malin Akerman, a woman who is brokenhearted that her lover can never truly feel the same way about him, a woman who also terribly misses the good old days of going out and kicking ass as a superhero, but who knows it can never be as it once was.

Perhaps one of the most controversial things about the movie has been Snyder’s change from the book’s ending. While slavish devotion is evident all across the rest of the movie (and for once, this devotion doesn’t seem inappopriate, but rather, necessry and part of the reverence we should give this material), Snyder decided specifically to change the ending, which, actually, ends up working better than what the book did, given what came before in the movie. Truth be told, it’s actually debatable whether the book’s way of doing it was particularly necessary at all – the way the movie wraps it all up together just seems like the natural way to go. It changes it without changing the spirit, and that’s what’s most important, and what Snyder seems to have an excellent grasp of here. If you’re one of those people who scrutinize the script line by line and criticize every single instance where the movie dared to change something from the book, well, why exactly are you watching a freaking movie then? A completely, 100% true Watchmen would have been unwatchable – because this graphic novel was never meant to be a movie, staying true to its spirit while also being fairly devoted to keeping the look and feel of it is the way to go, and this end result is explosive, shocking, superhero filmmaking at its best. Watchmen is not a masterpiece, but it’s very satisfying and an astonishingly well-pulled off big screen adaptation of the supposedly un-filmable novel. Whatever the case, it’s probably the best we’re ever going to get.