We Hate Hollywood

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Daniel Bruhl, Eli Roth, Samm Levine, B.J. Novak, Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard, Paul Rust, Michael Bacall, Omar Doom, Sylvester Groth, Julie Dreyfus, Jacky Ido, August Diehl, Martin Wuttke, Richard Sammel, Christian Berkel, Sonke Mohring, Michael Fassbender, Rod Taylor, Denis Menochet
Rated R for profanity, graphic scalpin’, and killin’
Rating - 1 bullet hole

“They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That’s why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin’ a Nazi uniform, they’re gonna die.” - Lt. Aldo Raine

Basterds! Boisterous.  Swaggering.  Machismo-fueled revenge bloodfest.  Also, Tarantino’s most mature dialogue to date.  Some frustrating missteps - damn ego! - but ultimately a film that simultaneously defies standard war films yet pays homage to the most classic ones that many of us grew up cheering along with.

The film is probably not what you are expecting.  Tarantino has no interest in the somber World War II films of recent years such as Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, or Defiance.  He admits that he wanted to craft a film that was more of a thrilling adventure story like those 60s and 70s classics such as The Great Escape, A Bridge Too Far, or The Dirty Dozen.

Forget what you learned in school.  This is revisionist history with a cackling puppeteer.

A commentary about the fallacy of revenge?  Nope.  It’s wall to wall war chic, bolstered by terrific dialogue and delirious action scenes.

And oh how Tarantino loves his chapters.  Except this time, they’re linear.  Two story lines.  The first involves Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a good ole boy from Tennessee with Apache blood who is tasked with a special mission.  He and a squad of Jewish-Americans have an axe to grind (literally!).  Raine wants each of them to bring him “One hunurd Nat-see scalps”.  Their objective:  a brutal campaign of killing and obliterating as many Nazis as they can in occupied France.

The second story involves Shosanna Dreyfus (the sensational Mélanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman who is the sole survivor of a massacre at the hands of Col. Hans Landa when she was a little girl.  One night, she meets Pvt Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a Nazi war hero and now a propaganda movie star, who has taken an interest in Shosanna and the theater she owns.

How Shosanna’s story line and that of the Basterds merge is certainly not something I will ruin for you.  Needless to say, an opera of violence and retribution awaits.

Except for the climax, Basterds contains surprisingly little violence.  Tarantino is more interested in dialogue.  Consider the opening scene- approximately 20 minutes of a verbal sparring match between two characters.  Their speech is intelligent, deliberate, and menacing.  Seeing the film with a full house, you could have heard a pin drop during this scene.  Creepy and riveting.

One of the players in the aforementioned scene is Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), aka the Jew Hunter.  This is easily one of the best villains in film history.  That is not hyperbole.  Just the way Landa drinks a glass of milk is sinister.  He is quiet, speaks in measured tones (as well as three different languages), and oozes evil out of every pore.  An astounding performance sure to earn Waltz an Oscar nomination (he already won the Best Actor honor at Cannes).

Tarantino’s films defy categorization.  They are not products of the Hollywood factory that we despise.  Yet, his greatest strengths are also his greatest weaknesses.

He writes great dialogue but it drags on too long in some scenes (as it did through half of Deathproof).  Consider the terrific scene set in a basement pub with some German officers, some Basterds, and German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).  An effective scene in creating tension, but the dialogue used for that tension tends to drag on and show us how smart and hip QT is.

Tarantino loves to create colorful characters.  Jules Winnfield.  Vincent Vega.  Mr. White.  Mr. Blonde.  Mr. Orange.  Mr. Pink.  Jackie Brown.  Ordell Robbie.  The Bride.  Bill.   And now the cartoonish and captivating Aldo Raines.  Brad Pitt is intentionally over the top and had me laughing throughout.  The Basterds are an arresting crew, but we don’t see them together much.   Very odd.

Also, Eli Roth is an ass awful actor.  He plays a memorable character, the Bear Jew, in a role that could have easily been played by…anyone else.  BJ Novak is completely wasted here.  You literally see him in maybe 3 scenes total…in the last one, he just shows up out of nowhere.  Confounding.  Probably the best basterd is Til Schweiger.  I’d like to see an entire film built around him.

Tarantino loves to use well known actors in cameos and can do it with real effectiveness.  Doesn’t work here.  Where the hell did Mike Myers come from?  Are we supposed to keep a straight face when Austin friggin Power is giving a mission briefing?

The thing I like most about Inglourious Basterds, as well as Tarantino’s other work, is his undying passion for film and music.  It is on full display here from the opening credits to the Enrico Morricone score to the crazy but effective use of a David Bowie song in a 1940s era film.  Look for the ghosts of Sergio Leone and Robert Aldrich embedded in the print.  There are other countless homages, some of which I’m sure I missed.

Speaking of which, Tarantino does not just copy other films.  There’ s a difference between an homage and a ripoff.

This is a heavily sub-titled movie using international languages and actors which lends it an extra air of authenticity.  It has its misfires, but overall is a well played revenge fantasy.  It begs more than one viewing, so round up your own group of basterds to go see it with.  It’s a hell of a good time.

Directed by Louie Psihoyos
Written by Mark Monroe
Rating - Golden Gun

I’m not going to talk politics much on this site.  But, I’ll admit that when I hear the phrase “save the whales/dolphins”, I roll my eyes.  “Environmentalist”…”Tree-hugger”…”Going green”…these are phrases that I tend to shrug off and not give attention to.  But when I saw the trailer for The Cove, a documentary by Louie Psihoyos, I was intrigued.  I saw the movie and left shaken.

Taiji, Japan hides a very dark secret.  It is such a guarded secret that most of the residents there are unaware of what goes on in the shallow waters of that hollowed-out rock formation.  For years, fishermen there have gone out to sea in roughly 13 boats and embark on what is essentially a herding operation that can last for days.  Because of a dolphin’s super-sensitivity to sound - hence their use of sonar - the fishermen attach steel pipes to the sides of their ships and bang them mercilessly.  It literally drives the dolphins crazy.  Between the aural assault and the prolonged journey, the dolphins are exhausted by the time they reach this secret cove.  Representatives of dolphin exhibition companies (ie, SeaWorld - although the film points out that SeaWorld no longer acquires their dolphins this way) pick out the dolphins they want to train.  After they have paid for and procured the show-dolphins, the massacre begins.  Dolphins are speared repeatedly and their throats are cut.  The sea turns red with blood as the dolphins thrash about and scream.  It is an intense and disturbing sound.  During these fishing periods (lasting up to 6 months), up to 2,000 dolphins are killed.

Why the hell would anyone do this?  The first obvious answer seems to be “Well, it’s cultural”.  Bullshit.  The documentary points out that while Japan is heavily involved in the whaling industry and that whale meat is a delicacy, dolphin meat is not considered a delicacy.  In fact, dolphins are revered by most citizens even in Taiji.  The disturbing truth is that the dolphin meat is packaged and sold as “whale meat” and is being consumed in mass quantities by the population.  Even more disturbing is the fact that the dolphin meat is highly contaminated with mercury thanks to massive, unchecked, and unregulated  factory pollution.  The result is alarming rates of birth defects in Japan, especially Minamata disease which aggressively attacks the neurological system causing severe deformities as well as limitations or loss of limb movement, sight, hearing, and speech.

The government is also to blame.  Outrageously, this contaminated meat went into school lunches in Japan for years (it was finally stopped recently).  Government officials are also responsible for spreading disinformation in telling the people that dolphins are pests and this fishing practice is necessary for “pest control”.  They believe that whales and dolphins eat too much fish.  Gee…maybe that’s because IT’S A WHALE?  Funny how we insert ourselves into an ecological system and try to make it better.  Always with disastrous results.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of problems that Louie Psihoyos and Ric O’Barry are pulling back the curtain on.  Ric O’Barry is a hell of a guy.  He was the dolphin trainer on the TV show Flipper.  It was through this job that he began to realize a serious disconnect between the way that humans interact with dolphins.   In fact, he believes that Dorothy, one of the dolphins he trained, committed suicide in his arms.  Ric says that when you spend enough time with dolphins, you can read their body language and you can tell when they are depressed.   Dolphins are not meant to live in captivity.  One day, Dorothy swam into his arms, stared at him, took one final breath (significant since they are voluntary breathers), and sank below the surface.  He was accused of her death and even arrested for trying to help her escape.  He never tried to free her but he vowed from that day on that he would free as many as he could.

Whenver he makes one of his many trips to Taiji, Ric is followed and sometimes even questioned by the local police.  He and his crew believe they are also followed by the Yakuza (Japanese mafia) who have heavily vested interests in this fishing practice that Ric wants to end.  At the cove itself, they are confronted by hostile fisherman who try to provoke them into a physical confrontation, so that the police can arrest Ric (which has happened many times).  The problem is that no one has ever been able to film the slaughter because of the security.

Enter Louie Psihoyos and his team of scuba divers, activists, and thrill-seekers.   They received assistance from Industrial Light and Magic in designing high-definition cameras to be hidden in fake rocks that blended with the landscape (some of them underwater) and trees around the cove.  The problem was how to plant them.  These operations account for the films most thrilling and nail-biting sequences as they evade foot patrols to plant the cameras.  The film ends with a few minutes of the footage that they captured.  It is shocking and will leave an indelible impression on you.

As yo up probably know, dolphins are highly intelligent creatures.  They are trained through sign language yet do not possess hands.  They - like whales - communicate through a variety of sounds using nasal airsacs located below the blowhole.  They are pranksters.  They have been observed sneaking up behind pelicans and snatching their tail feathers.  And they have an uncanny relationship with humans.  One surfer in the documentary tells a riveting story of a dolphin saving him from a shark attack.  Someone in the film posits that maybe we should turn our focus away from the search for intelligent life on other planets when we have dolphins.  These are special creatures.

How we treat animals says a lot about us as a person.  The book of Genesis tells us that we have dominion over the animals.  They can be used as a food source but we are also to respect them.  Whether or not you believe in the Bible, I think most people can agree that what goes on in Taiji is abhorrent.  There is a scene in The Cove in which a scuba diver swims with a whale.  It is amazing to see two creatures of such varying sizes swimming together in grace and harmony.  There is a bond of trust there.  It is absolutely breath-taking.

Some will scoff at the film and brush it off as animal-rights propaganda.  Well, propaganda is not inherently evil.  The word itself has been given a bad name from despots and sadistic government officials who use it to oppress their own people.  But by definition, propaganda can be used to help people or organizations.   I am not an animal rights activist by any stretch of the imagination.  I’m not an activist of any kind really.  I’m not a vegetarian.  But, I know the difference between right and wrong.

The Cove is in limited release but is probably showing somewhere in your city.  See the release date schedule.