I saw The Dark Knight Rises on Monday and it was terrific. The best super-hero movie I have ever seen, probably the best movie in a year of good movies. Dark, but then Batman has always been dark, Bruce Wayne wouldn’t have become Batman without the pain, Batman wouldn’t have been needed without the corruption of Gotham City. This is a giant, summer, blockbuster, about people, not special effects. Check it out.
Michele and I watched Pulp Fiction Thursday night and then we re-watched about 90% of it Friday night. What a masterpiece! It makes me want to watch Inglorious Basterds again, and Kill Bill (1 & 2). They are B Movies elevated to Art.
Quentin Tarantino movies are the opposite of action movies, they are all talk movies. Talk movies in which the talk seems to be wandering around aimlessly – the quarter pounder is a Royale with Cheese is maybe the most famous line, but there are dozens of great lines – only to circle back to connect in some improbable way. There are even more great bits –
Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork.
Vincent: Are you Jewish?
Jules: Nah, I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all.
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals.
Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.
Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.
Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces.
Jules: I don’t eat dog either.
Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?
this is a conversation between two killers, between two people who make the living killing people and, somehow, the conversation is also about people who make their living killing people – and great scenes that are like mini-plays. Tarantino movies are collections of scenes with very little connecting them but the scenes are so good, they don’t need the connection.
Think Inglorious Basterds, there is a scene in which Michael Fassbender, as Archie Hicox, is briefed in England
and, in the next scene they are in France and he is disguised as a Nazi sitting with the inglorious basters themselves.
There are no transition scenes, no shots of them jumping out of an airplane in the dark, or meeting up with the Americans. All the transitions are covered by dialog.
Pulp Fiction is the same way. It is really a collection of set scenes that have an overriding arc. The scenes seem to be out of chronological order but the arc of the dialog is in order. Each scene sets up the following scene, so that, at the end, when we end up at breakfast in the coffeeshop, we know we are where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are waiting. Pulp Fiction seems to be a violent movie about violent people and – I guess – that turns alot of people off but the violence is mostly offstage, just being talked about and the violent people are doing the talking.
As Roger Ebert says, “Immediately after “Pulp Fiction” played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. “It’s either the best film of the year or the worst film,” I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film. Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It’s not enough to see them once.”
Henry Hill was a low level Mafioso in the Lucchese crime family. He became famous because, when he ratted out his buddies to the FBI, he ended up having two movies tell his story. Both Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven were roughly based on his life (My Blue Heaven more roughly). Goodfellas was Michele and my first date.
I once heard Pauline Kael say that she would never date anybody who didn’t like the same movies that she did. At the time, it seemed like a good idea, and it still does. Our second movie was La Femme Nikita.
A year or so later, still together and still enjoying the same movies, we went to see a revival of The Wild Bunch at the Castro in San Francisco. Standing in line, we noticed two acquaintances we had met in Temenos workshops, Peter Kuhlman and Ophelia Ramirez, and we knew we would become friends.
In an article in the Los Angeles Times, they opined on Meryl Streep’s win. They concluded that a major factor was that actors playing real people usually win because the Academy can compare the performance to the real person. I also think it would be useful to compare the performance to to the nonperforming actor and this was a problem for Viola Davis.
I don’t remember most of Viola Davis’s parts and I don’t think that I am alone: the CIA Director in Knight and Day – which I sort of fast-forwarded through on the TV – a social worker in Traffic, a doctor – I have no idea what kind – in State of Play. (I do remember her as Mosella in Out of Sight but that only because Out of Sight is one of Michele and my favorite movies and we have seen it more than several times.) Going into The Help, I read about how everybody in Hollywood thinks she is great but I didn’t have anything to contrast her against.
Watching the Academy Awards, I did notice the stunning chick sitting on the aisle when Octavia Spencer got up to accept her award, but I had no idea it was Viola Davis. If only I had seen the real Viola before I saw her as Aibileen in The Help, I would have been much more impressed.
I saw Red Tails the other night and was particularly disappointed. I went expecting it to be not especially good but, like Peter Kuhlman, I love airplanes and once had a World War II airplane jones and I expected the air combat scenes to be at least as good as Star Wars I. They weren’t and I am not sure why. I think that part of it, but only part of it, was that a huge percentage of the movie was CG and – like the picture above – just did not seem real. CG is great when the subject is not real, but when the subject can be real, like a real P51 airplane, CG seems to breakdown.
Even the airport sets that probably were real just seemed too precious to be a real place . They came across as the kind of dioramas that they have at the National Air and Space Museum. They are interesting but they just don’t look lived in. They have all the right parts – exactly the right parts – but they just don’t transcend the collection of parts. I felt the same way about the Imperial Star Dreadnoughts in Star Wars, they just didn’t feel real like the Nostromo in Alien.
Probably what bothered me the most was the hyping of the plot. In the movie, the first time the Tuskegee Airmen go into aerial combat, we are to believe that they kick ass against a experienced German fighter group including blowing up their airfield. In their first dogfight! The story of the Tuskegee Airmen is heroic and hyping the story somehow makes it seem less heroic, not more. From everything that I have read, this movie is a labor of love so I am sure George Lucas did not want to diminish the story, but he did.