The scope of Inglorious Basterds makes it too intimidating to try to review in one go. Besides, I want to see it again and have some time to process it. It is magnificent, and one of the most controlled pieces of film-making I can recall watching. But at this point, just a few reactions. The opening scene, Chapter 1, is just breath taking. Evoking Westerns, particularly Once Upon a Time in the West, a dairy farmer chops wood in rural France. A German colonel stops by and asks to be invited inside to talk. What follows is riveting. Every gesture, every word of dialogue, the framing of every shot works to build tension. Then, near the end of the film, in the projection room, there is a shot so heart-achingly beautiful that you desperately want to press rewind and watch it over and over. (more…)

An alien mothership appears stranded over Johannesburg. The starving aliens can not leave, so they are located in a sprawling shanty town beneath the mothership. Twenty years on, crime and squalor are rife in the shanty town, and there is rising tension between humans and aliens. A large corporation, simply called “Multi National United” is hired by the UN to shift the aliens to a new camp, further from humanity. The corporation, of course, has weapons and genetic engineering projects that would benefit from the exploitation of the aliens, who come to be called “prawns” by the humans. (more…)

There are moments where you watch a sequence in a film and it’s utterly clear the joy behind the camera: the sense of invention (so this is what the camera can do here!), the delight in gaming the audience (playing familiar cards and then shuffling the deck, then cheating), the willingness to push past any sense of limits into a pure sugar rush of genre filmmaking. I smile every time I think of the Thunderdome, of Cary Grant faceplanting in the dust as the plane roars right overhead, of Jackie Chan grabbing any item in the vicinity for balletic battle, of Indiana Jones holding his hat as he first ran from varied and sundry and crazy dangers with the idol in his hand, of Chow Yun-Fat with toothpick dangling and a calm expression on his face gently wiping the blood spatter from an infant’s brow. It isn’t just that these are action sequences, done well; they’re invigorating exaltations of composition and sequence and outsized wondrous plotting.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird has at least 3 such whizbang setpieces, and it’s a dizzy blast of a film. (more…)

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker opens with a quote from Chris Hedges on the way we become addicted to war, an addiction intensely–almost lovingly–scrutinized in both her tightly-wound action film and Armando Iannucci’s tightly-wound satire In the Loop. Both films work pretty well on their own merits, as exemplars of their respective genres, but I was struck by the way each seemed to strive toward something more, toward an indictment of that addiction. Their methods, however tonally distinct, I think lead to the same impasse: both films are caught–and catch us–inside the addiction. (more…)

Not a bad tribute here.