'Inglourious Basterds' and the power of propaganda

The first thing you see on the screen in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a title card that says, “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France”. In film geek shorthand that’s a nod to Sergio Leone’s masterpiece of the spaghetti western genre Once Upon a Time in the West, and Tarantino has said in interviews that this is a spaghetti western that just happens to take place during World War II. But more importantly, as with Leone’s film Tarantino uses “Once Upon a Time” to let the audience know up front that what they are about to watch is a fairy tale, and any expectations of realism or historical accuracy should be left at the door. Because believe me, realism and historical accuracy are the least of this movie’s concerns.



The story proper begins with Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) intimidating and manipulating a French farmer via trademark Tarantino dialog into revealing where he has hidden a Jewish family. Landa then has his soldiers kill the family, but the girl Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) manages (and to at least some degree is allowed by Landa) to escape. Meanwhile, a special unit of Jewish-American soldiers has been assembled by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Their mission is to go undercover in France and kill as many Nazis as possible, in the most horrific ways they can think of. In addition, every member of the Basterds is expected to scalp their victims.

Returning to Shosanna, we find her now living undercover in Paris as a theater owner. She winds up hosting the premiere of a new Nazi propaganda film after a chance meeting with its star, Nazi war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl). When Shosanna discovers that all the highest ranking members of the Third Reich will be attending the premiere, she comes up with a plan to take them all out. The Basterds learn of the premiere as well, and not knowing of Shosanna’s plan set one of their own in motion.

Okay, for those of you who just want to know if the movie is fun, and don’t really care to dig too deep: yes, the movie is a lot of fun. It’s everything you expect from Tarantino – the great dialog, memorable characters, references to obscure pop culture trivia (my favorite this time being one character using the alias “Antonio Margheriti ” – look it up), near perfect use of music, and of course the crazy, over the top violence and action. But like Kill Bill Volume 2, this is a more mature Tarantino. Basterds feels more personal, and although he still borrows from other movies, it’s done in a less obtrusive way.

Despite what you may have been led to believe by the trailers, Brad Pitt is not the star here. He’s a blast hamming it up, but his Lieutenant Rayne is more of a large supporting role. The real star of the film is Melanie Laurent, and her strong, believable performance anchors the film and gives it a much needed sense of weight to balance the exploitation movie antics of Pitt and his crew. Christoph Waltz has gotten the lion’s share of acting praise for his portrayal of Landa, and it’s certainly deserved. However, I was also impressed with Bruhl, who has the difficult task of playing a character you dislike yet still need to feel some sympathy for.

Okay, now to go looking for deeper meaning in a movie that most people probably just want to sit back and enjoy with a bag of popcorn and a coke. Most critics have seized on a quote from Tarantino that the film is about “the power of cinema bringing down the Third Reich”. That’s true up to a point, but I see Basterds as being just as much, if not more, about the power of film to do evil, specifically in the form of propaganda.

There are overt references in Basterds to Leni Riefenstahl, the female director who made the infamous German propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. And then there is Stolz der Nation, the faux German propaganda film-within-a-film we see in Basterds. Stolz heroically depicts how Zoller single-handedly kills hundreds of American soldiers. In one of the few moments in Basterds to humanize a German character, we see that Zoller is clearly uncomfortable with this cinematic depiction of his deeds, even as the audience cheers. Later there is a scene involving Zoller and Shosanna where the film exerts its power over Shosanna at a critical moment. She knows the film is a lie, and knows Zoller for what he is, but for just a split second it affects her and she pays a price for it.

Stolz is the kind of thing we are used to seeing as propaganda, but is it really so different from watching the Basterds beat, scalp, and gun down dehumanized Germans while making wise cracks? What are The Basterds if not a kind of propaganda? They are essentially cartoon characters, calling to mind the covers of WWII era comic books (almost without exception drawn by Jewish artists) where Captain America or the like would deliver a roundhouse punch to Hitler, or some bespectacled caricature of a Japanese soldier. Of course when the propaganda is on our side, we tend to look at it as just harmless entertainment. Propaganda is something those other bad countries make, not us. But regardless of how deeply you choose to look into this film, it’s one of the most daring and original, not to mention fun, movies of the year. 4 out of 4.

*** Note ***

Lest anyone say they weren’t warned, large portions of this film are in various foreign languages with subtitles. If you’re illiterate I can understand this being a problem, but since you’re reading this review I can only assume that’s not the case. Suck it up and read a little. Also, there are some extremely gory and violent scenes in this movie. If you’ve ever watched a Quentin Tarantino movie before, this should come as no surprise. If anything, this is kind of tame after the non-stop blood orgy of Kill Bill. Still, I feel it bears mentioning for those who might be unfamiliar with Mr. Tarantino’s body of work.

***

Brains and Prawn: A Review of 'District 9'

District 9 takes place in an alternate history where an alien spaceship arrived over South Africa in the early eighties. Unable to leave, and with their leaders seemingly gone, the aliens (called “prawns” by some due to their resemblance to large bipedal crustaceans) are quarantined in a shanty town known as District 9. It’s now 28 years since the aliens first arrived, and squalor and crime have firmly taken hold.



The film follows Wikus (Sharlto Copley), a worker at the company in charge of dealing with the aliens. While going door to door to tell the prawns they are being moved to a new camp farther away from humans, Wikus finds a strange alien-made cylinder. A strange liquid inside the cylinder gets on Wikus, causing him to mutate into an alien/human hybrid.

One side effect of his mutation is that Wikus can now use the alien weapons that have been useless to humans until now. This makes him valuable both to the company he works for and the Nigerians who run the criminal underworld in the camp. Also interested in finding Wikus so he can get the cylinder back is Christopher, a prawn with a young son who needs the device so he can return to the mother ship and, from there, home. Whether he wants to do so simply to help his people or to return to earth with more ships to lead an attack is unknown.

District 9 is mainly escapist fantasy, but like the best science fiction it has something to say about the real world in which we live. The resemblance of the alien slum to apartheid era homelands is no coincidence, but one could just as easily find similarities to concentration camps or Palestine. And the private contractors hired to manage the aliens can't help but evoke Iraq and the Blackwater incident.

The prawns are an extreme example of an alien “other”, but by using them the movie shows just how easy it is to marginalize and vilify those who are different, even by those who have endured the same experience themselves (we see both white and black South Africans expressing disgust and hatred for the prawns). We also see the dehumanizing effect this has on those being oppressed, and the full range of negative effects that result.

This is the first feature film for director Neil Blomkamp, and his inexperience does show a little. This is most glaring in the awkward attempt to blend documentary style footage with a more traditional dramatic narrative. The whole point of using a faux documentary approach is to create more of a sense of realism, but the way the film keeps switching styles only serves to make the viewer more aware that they are watching a movie. It didn’t ruin the movie for me, but there’s no denying that the stylistic shifts are distracting, and that takes away from the film enough that it bears mentioning.

Still, while I would have preferred a more uniform approach, the story District 9 tells is compelling and the world it creates is unique and fully realized. Hell, it’s just nice to see a movie that doesn’t think that being entertaining and having some substance are mutually exclusive for a change. Check this one out. 3 ½ out of 4 stars.

Would You Like Entrails With Your Beverage?

The revolution will not only be televised, it will be sponsored by stimulant laced sugar water (Rockstar), licorice flavored booze (Jagermeister), and a trendy mall "lifestyle" store (Hot Topic) that has pretty much done its best to reduce a once meaningful underground music scene to just another commodity. That's the Rockstar Mayhem Festival in a nutshell. I never thought the day would come when bands like Slayer and Cannibal Corpse would be seen as viable elements in a corporate marketing campaign, but that's the world we live in now. Okay, enough editorializing. On with my review of the show, which I caught at Pittsburgh's Post Gazette Pavillion this past Saturday, August 1st 2009.




The show started at 2:15, but my wife and I didn’t get there until about 4:30, so we missed the first 4 bands playing on the small side stages. We did get to see metalcore bands Black Dahlia Murder and Trivium. Both groups played with passion and ferocity and displayed considerable musicianship. Since these bands just aren’t my cup of tea stylistically, to review them any further wouldn’t be fair to the bands.



The last band to play on the side stages was death metal icon Cannibal Corpse. I’m not a huge fan of these guys, but they have a few songs I like and there’s no denying their brutality and musicianship. Corpse opened up with the title track from their latest album Evisceration Plague before dipping into their back catalog of family friendly numbers like “F@#$ed With a Knife” and “Make Them Suffer”. The band closed out their set with the crowd pleasers “Hammer Smashed Face” and “Stripped Raped and Strangled”. Wonder which song Rockstar will use for their next commercial?



Things moved over to the main stage after that for Cleveland’s Mushroomhead. These guys have been around since 1993, releasing three albums independently before finally gaining national attention in the early part of this decade. To my ears they’ve always sounded heavily influenced by Angel Dust era Faith No More, with a bit of metal, rap and industrial thrown in for good measure. They’ve got an excellent singer and front man in co-vocalist Jeffrey Nothing, who I used to see in the mid eighties when he was still singing for Cleveland metal band Purgatory under the name Jeff Hatrix. The guy’s still got the pipes, and while I’m not going to race out and buy any Mushroomhead albums tomorrow, the band put on a really good show.



Next up on the main stage were Massachusetts based Killswitch Engage, another metalcore band, or so their Wikipedia page describes them. Whatever, sounds like metal to me. Anyway, these guys were really good. I found their playing perhaps a little too precise for my tastes, but their songs were catchy and lead vocalist Howard Jones (no, not the eighties new wave guy) was excellent. They got a really good crowd response, and gave props to the metal gods with a fine rendition of Dio’s “Holy Diver”. Again, I probably wouldn’t buy one of their albums, but I liked these guys more than I expected to.



Finally, as night began to fall, Slayer hit the stage. Despite pushing fifty, these guys still play with all the fire and intensity of a young band with something to prove. The only downside to their show was they only had an hour long set, so what we got was essentially a “greatest hits” show, with the new song “Psychopathy Red” thrown in for good measure. Nothing from the first album, but the band did pull out “Chemical Warfare” and “Hell Awaits” from the early days. And of course they found room for classics like “Angel of Death”, “War Ensemble”, “Dead Skin Mask”, and “South of Heaven” in their 13 song set. Vocalist Tom Araya missed a few lines of “Angel”, but otherwise it was a flawless performance that really got the crowd pumped up.



Then Marilyn Manson came on and sucked all the energy out of the venue. Look, I actually like a lot of Manson’s stuff, especially from the first 3 or 4 albums. But even older songs like “Irresponsible Hate Anthem” and “Disposable Teens” were performed lethargically by the band, and Manson’s vocals were just awful. It was embarrassing, and after about 30 minutes of it I decided to cut my losses and leave. A good portion of the crowd had the same idea, and even those die-hards who stuck around didn’t seem that into it. The crowd that had been slamming and screaming during Killswitch Engage and Slayer were just standing or sitting there, trying in vain to find something to get excited about. I may not have liked all the other bands on the bill, but every one of them put on a tight and energetic show. Manson just looked like he was going through the motions. Time to hang it up, dude.