When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.
And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.
This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too. …Read more
Way back in May, I discovered (long after the rest of the world, I thought) that the 2005 German film Downfall had become unlikely fodder for a huge number of YouTube spoofs. This weekend, Virginia Heffernan looked into the meme for the New York Times. In my post, I commented on the irony that although millions of people have now been exposed to Downfall via the various YouTube spoofs, the videos don’t work as compelling advertisements for the movie itself. Now Heffernan notes that the ubiquity of Downfall as seen out of context not only fails to promote the film, but actually damages the experience of watching it:
I was really into that video that was going around last week, of the scene from Downfall transformed via subtitles into the story of Hillary Clinton’s last stand––not just because I dislike Hillary Clinton, but because there’s a goofiness to it that makes it seem more clever than your typical “this politician is just like Hitler!” joke. A lot of my favorite parts are too obscene to excerpt, although I do like it when s/he slams “those fainting sissies over at MoveOn.org” for “choking on their tofu because I voted for the Iraq war!” But I think I was most impressed by what I thought was the novel choice of material––a 3-year old German film detourned into YouTube propaganda? How imaginative!
Um, turns out, it’s not as novel as I thought. A twitter from Chuck Tryon alerted me to the news that Downfall has been the basis of YouTube parodies long before the Hillary clip came to light. Many of these parodies reconfigure Hitler as a frustratedXbox user; Hitler also has problems using Vista, is unhappy to hear that his favorite soccer team has lost the Champions League Final, and is absolutely irate at an underling’s suggestion that he buy a new Mustang. There are so many Downfall spoofs on YouTube that I’m almost positive I was the last one to know that spoofing Downfall was, like, a thing that people did.
Almost all of these clips have view counts on YouTube in the six or seven figures. Downfall was the second-highest grossing foreign language film of 2005, but it still only made about $5.5 million. Almost certainly, more people in this country have now seen a clip from the film wrangled into a new context than would have ever seen the film in its original state. Downfall thus becomes part of the cultural conversation, but at the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these clips could effectively function as commercials for the film. Maybe it’s sad or maybe it’s totally appropriate, but it seems clear that the general YouTube user would be able to summon way more excitement for the concept of Hitler on the phone with Microsoft tech support, than they would for the concept of Hitler…doing Hitler stuff.
Of course, like many others I would wish for them to have never existed, because millions of lives are more important than any number of classic movies. But the Nazis did happen, and they continue to populate cinema for better or worse. We all know about the latest product of Hollywood’s Nazi fetish, Valkyrie, and we’ve seen a ridiculous trailer for a new Russian Hitler farce titled Hitler Kaput!, which shouldn’t be confused with Germany’s recently announced Hitler comedy Mein Kampf, based on a play by George Tabori (I Confess). And now, because we still need Nazi sci-fi, there’s Iron Sky, for which a teaser trailer (see above) has just been released.
Oh, so THAT’S why the studios didn’t send a rep to that L.A. City Council meeting about how the writers’ strike has devastated the local economy––their bottom lines are doing just fine. According to Jill Goldsmith at Variety, shareholders love the idea that the conglomerates are finally “cutting costs [and] getting tough with talent,” and thus seem prepared to support the AMPTP companies through the long haul.
The Anti-Defamation League has decided to forgive Will Smith for telling an interviewer that Adolf Hitler “woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was `good.”’ Yes, on the Thursday after Christmas, this is news enough for me.
Missing things like this is why I should never go on vacation. I learned of the video above via a Screenhead post which popped up in my RSS reader, but for reasons unknown to me, no longer exists.
The gist: David Lynch went to Berlin to talk about transcendental meditation. At a press conference, Lynch was joined on stage by “Raja” Schiffgens, Germany’s leading proponent of TM, who announced that Lynch’s foundation had recently purchased Teufelsberg, a large hill in Berlin constructed out of rubble from World War II, with the intention of building a TM center on top of the hill. The Raja then went into a spiel about how the center would neutralize negativity and help create “an invincible Germany…invincible against all alien influences” When asked by an audience member to explain this concept of invincibility, the Raja compared Germany’s quest for invincibility to that of a soccer team (?), to which another audience member responded, “Adolf Hitler wanted that too.” The Raja’s comeback? “Yes, but unfortunately he didn’t succeed.” That’s when all hell broke loose.
I’m not sure if the Hitler fracas had anything to do with this, but if my Babelfish translation of this article is in anyway accurate, Lynch and co. have since been denied permits to build on the Teufelsberg. Lynch has since issued a statement in response to the hullabaloo, which reads in part: “I don’t want to have anything to do with Hitler. We all know he was not a good person who did terrible things.”
Based on Paul’s recommendation, on our last day in Telluride I went to the encore presentation of People on Sunday. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Paul’s endorsement of Sunday’s fully-modern depiction of courtship, I was equally taken with its utopian treatment of working class leisure. People on Sunday is as much a love letter to the proletariat as the films of the Bolshevik giants, but politics are ultimately pushed aside for a celebration of a pursuit of happiness that’s in some way about transcending social class. As a snapshot of the last wave of youthful abandonment before the Hitler era, it’s a heartbreaker.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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