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.
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David Hare has been writing for the theater since the 1970s, has served as Royal Dramatist to the Royal Court Theater in London, has been the Associate Director for the UK’s National Theater, is an accomplished director of both theater and film, and was knighted in 1998. That’s a pretty impressive resume on its own, but in the past few years he’s also become known for writing successful adaptations of novels.
In the past few years he’s adapted Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for film, and his latest is Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, which pairs him again with director Stephen Daldry. I spoke with Hare in Los Angeles, just after he’d (thankfully) recovered from losing his voice.
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Flame & Citron, directed by former Dogme 95 auteur Ole Christian Madsen, walks a thin line between ass-kicking assassin movie and dense WWII period drama. The film recounts the true story of Bent and Jørgen, code names Flame and Citron, as they cruise around occupied Copenhagen offing Danish Nazis and German officers. In addition to action flick and period drama, the film also features a healthy dose of noir. The spare lighting and superb camera work showcase solid performances.
The film opens with several scenes of Bent and Jørgen carrying out their grim duty, knocking on doors, killing their mark, moving on, all overlaid with voice-over by Bent, which is both informative and moving. The plot steadily thickens, scene by scene, as more characters, each with their own motivations, begin to play a role. The ballooning cast of players is too much to keep track of in a first viewing, but this may well be the point. As the sabotage and double-crossing mounts, we’re forced to trust that Bent and Jørgen are doing the right thing, even if it’s confusing and ugly.
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(Complete interview with Paul Schrader available here.)
Adam Resurrected is the new movie by Paul Schrader (Affliction, Auto-Focus) premiering here at Telluride 2008. I was at the first screening which was also the first time Schrader ever watched the movie with an audience. “I realized watching it how exhausting it is, ” he told me right after the screening, “And it’s full of extremes. Literally, that old saying ‘you don’t know whether to laugh or cry’ is true here, and some scenes I think either emotion is fine with me.”
It’s in the navigation of extremes that my crush on Jeff Goldblum, who plays the title character, was born. I’m not one to get into Oscar buzz, but I will with Jeff and even add easily excerpted blurbs: Jeff Goldblum is magnificent. Jeff Godlblum’s peformance is a tour de force. I want to make out with Jeff Goldblum in the back of his Toyota Prius. Like how Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview (There Will be Blood), would have seemed flat or absurd in another actor’s hands, Jeff Goldblum’s wry delivery and velvet wit take the absurdity of Adam Stein and make him believable. …Read more
In the Telluride catalog, Slavoj Zizek calls The Great Sacrifice, “the supreme achievement of the Nazi melodrama.” Before the film’s screening at the festival Sunday morning, in Zizek’s inimitable way, he put the work of director Veit Harlan into context. “[Harlan was] one of the Big 3 of Nazi cinema. Number 1 was Leni Reifenstahl, number 2 was Douglas Sirk. These two, I think, they can be redeemed. [With] Leni, the impotence of the analysis starts with, you think she’s a bad girl…but it doesn’t work. Douglas Sirk, I have greater suspicions there. But Harlan, he is the ultimate, he can not be redeemed. But he is a breathtaking visual talent.” For perspective: later Zizek noted that when he “despises” someone or something, he uses words like “brilliant” or “breathtaking”; when he actually respects them, he says “they are not completely an idiot.”
Its maker and its message may have been despicable (and Zizek’s post film lecture, summarized below, left no doubt that Harlan made the film with Nazi ideals in mind), but there’s no question that The Great Sacrifice is a breathtakingly visual film.
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The epic battle between McCain and Obama will shape America’s future. To prepare, we look at an eerily similar battle from America’s past, the 1960 primaries between JFK and Hubert Humphry, as portrayed in Robert Drew’s verité classic, Primary.
Karina stays in for the weekend watching back-to-back movie marathons to settle an age-old debate: Who’s better, Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire? Also, she shares her fantasy of seeing Olympic gymnastic ass-kicker Nastia Liukin star in a prison-break exploitation flick. It never hurts to dream…
On a more serious note, we talk to director Richard Berge about his documentary The Rape of Europa. The film recounts the heroism of WWII monument men, soldiers tasked with protecting the most priceless artifacts of Western Civilization. Berge tells the story of two veteran monument men debating the film’s central question: can a work of art be more valuable than a human life?
(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)
0:00 - Intro, send us your Olympian movie pitch
3:55 - Primary
12:33 - Karina on Gene Kelly vs. Fred Astaire, and Nastia Liukin’s future in Hollywood
24:16 - The Rape of Europa
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Michele Ohayon’s Steal a Pencil For Me, like her previous documentary, Cowboy Del Amor, is a bittersweet paen to love born from startling circumstances. Whereas Cowboy delved into the surprisingly successful relationships arranged for a fee between American men and Mexican women, Pencil tells the story of two Dutch Jews from different social classes whose love blossomed in the most unlikely of places: a concentration camp
The poor, married Jaap meets young diamond heiress Ina at a dinner party; the two chat all night with the assumption that, due to Ina’s elevated social class and Jaap’s ball and chain, they’ll never meet again. Soon after, Jaap and badly matched wife Manja are deported to Westerbork, a detainment camp where Jews lived in relative comfort before being shipped off to the labor/death camps. Ina is sent to the same camp several months later. With his wife living in the same barracks, Jaap begins a tentative relationship with Ina, based on late night walks and furtive “necking.” When Manja finds out about the affair, she forbids it, and Ina and Jaap carry on by writing letters. Ina and Jaap are eventually sent to Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died, but are separated before the liberation. When they reunite in June of 1945, Jaap immediately moves to get a divorce so that they can marry. They’ve been together ever since.
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