Sounds as if Tarantino’s new movie Inglorious Bastards is another tedious failure. I’ve always associated him in my mind with Peter Jackson – both of them were outraging film festival audiences with movies like Bad Taste and Reservoir Dogs at the time I first became interested in film. Then they went on to direct masterpieces that confounded the expectations they’d set for themselves: Jackson made Heavenly Creatures and Tarantino Pulp Fiction, the high tide marks of the independent film movement of the 1990′s. And then both of them lost their way artistically; Tarantino lapsed into lazy film-geek hipsterism, Jackson went off to become a wanna-be Spielberg.
Of the two I’m most optimistic about Tarantino – I think his biggest problem is his ego; his movies are lazily written and poorly edited but he is still a great director. Somewhere in the mostly dreadful 5+ hours of Kill Bill there is the best 90 minute kung-fu movie ever made.
If Inglorious Bastards is another flop then surely his reputation as an auteur will be about done, he’ll be forced to work with professional scripwriters and editors and – I suspect – start making great films again.
As for the rest of the festival it sounds as if Jaques Audiards A Prophet is the star of the show so far. I’m intrigued by Alain Renais Wild Grass. From the AVClub:
Eventually, it reached the point where I found everyone onscreen so inexplicable and repellent that I thought the film could only redeem itself by killing them all off, at which point Resnais loads almost the entire dramatis personae onto a rickety private plane and gives the wheel to somebody distracted by his open fly. “Wait, maybe I love this picture,” I suddenly thought. Then something else happens, which I’ll allow you to discover for yourself. Then a little girl we’d never seen before turns to her mother, also previously unseen, and asks, “Mommy, if I come back as a kitty can I munch on kitty nibbles?” (That’s from memory and as subtitled, but it’s pretty close.) Cut to black. FIN. Number of reviews so far that have even glancingly mentioned this crazy non sequitur with which Resnais chose to conclude his “elegant comedy of manners”: Zero. They’re just pretending it didn’t happen.
Renais is always worth paying attention to. He still can’t afford to retire and has constant problems getting financing but has kept on making intriguing intelligent films into his 80s. Everyone thought back in 1997 that On Connais La Chanson would be his last film. (Woody Allen springs to mind and funnily enough Everyone Says I Love You was in production at the same time as On Connais).
“My American Uncle’s” critique of Behavourism is spot on. Turning to for inspiration Ayckbourn was a good move too. Perhaps Tarantino could find someone similar.
Although refering to the greatness of Hiroshima Mon Amour is a sure sign of interellectual pretense it is nevertheless one of the great films.
Comment by Neil — May 21, 2009 @ 8:17 am
I secretly love ‘Last Year in Marienbad’.
Comment by danylmc — May 21, 2009 @ 8:19 am
The true measure of Peter Jackson will be the upcoming movies ‘Dam Busters’ and ‘The Lovely Bones’, both different and (in the case of the Lovely Bones) not a Speilberg blockbuster. My only real complaint about him is he makes his movies too long, ‘King Kong’ was about 1 hour too long and ‘Lord of the Rings’ about 2 movies too long.
As for Tarantino, I think he had a couple of good ideas (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction) and now he is running on reputation alone. I wonder when his backers, the Weinsteins, will pull the plug? They lost a lot of money on that whole ‘Grindhouse’ thing.
I don’t think we need Tarantino to come right we need a new Tarantino.
Comment by ieuan — May 21, 2009 @ 10:09 am
Writing, directing and producing large films does not make Peter Jackson a wannabe Spielberg: It makes him a director who can make the films he wants to. There’s a lot to love about his Lord of the Rings movies, and I’m looking forward to seeing him return to single movies such as The Dambusters that have the enviable benefit of – shock, horror – a fully completed script *before* filming starts (unlike LOTR).
And I admit that a small, evil part of me wishes the Nazi zombie time-travel movie had been true…
http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/05/01/peter-jackson-to-direct-nazi-zombie-time-travel-movie/
Comment by Ataahua — May 21, 2009 @ 11:02 am
They both need reining in by editors. In the early stages of Jackson’s career there was always someone saying ‘no Peter, it can’t be four hours long, cut stuff out’ and he had to do it. Whereas now he’s so successful he can make movies as long as he wants even if he really shouldn’t. I’m not sure if Tarantino had a similar thing going on, but I do know that Kill Bill would have been a lot better as one normal length movie. It’s not like it had a complicated plot or anything.
Tarantino’s recent films have started to make me see flaws in his earlier movies. I think his major problem is that he has no interest in anything other than films – he’s not even interested in people except as film characters, let alone in politics, philosophy etc (except where he can use it reference the Kung Fu tv series or something). Pulp Fiction is still one of my favourite movies but now I’m very aware that there’s absolutely no sense of any of the characters being real people with any existence off camera.
Comment by Helen — May 21, 2009 @ 11:52 am
“Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful young Jewish woman whose family were slaughtered by SS Col Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz. She got away and (somehow) attained not only a new identity, but also ownership of a Paris cinema which is to play host to the premiere of Dr Goebbels’s latest propaganda movie, in the presence of the Führer himself. Her plan is to incinerate the entire first-night audience by bolting the doors and igniting her vast inflammable stock of nitrate film.”
I guess you either think the above sounds awesome or you don’t. I happened to love both parts of Kill Bill, so I’m probably in the former category.
Comment by Jake — May 21, 2009 @ 11:56 am
[...] Dimpost linked to this review, I can only concur. It isn’t funny; it isn’t exciting; it isn’t a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn’t emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that. Brad Pitt gives the worst performance of his life, with a permanent smirk as if he’s had the left side of his jaw injected with cement, and which he must uncomfortably maintain for long scenes on camera without dialogue. [...]
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