It’s Making Me Wait

Another catch-up movie post, with Big Spoilers as always.

Inglorious Basterds. Great fun — Tarantino in top form — but would I be too much of a sourpuss to note that the movie is a tad, um, disjointed? For one thing, the movie is hardly about the Inglorious Basterds of the title. I mean, can you name them? You’ve got the German soldier who joins up, and you’ve got Eli Roth’s “Bear Jew,” and… well, that’s about it, the other six were bit parts at best. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it sort of took me by surprise, especially considering the constant comparisons to The Dirty Dozen.

Nonetheless, I loved it. Tarantino excels at casual dialogue during extremely tense moments, and here there is a scene in a tavern between an English soldier pretending to be a Nazi and an SS officer who may or may not be on to him. They chat all friendly-like and even play a party game, and yet the movie practically stretches a hand off the screen and wraps it around your neck.

(This is part of what went wrong with Tarantino’s Death Proof, by the way. The banter in the Basterds tavern scene, the Vincent Vega and Mia diner conversation in Pulp Fiction, various long stretches of dialogue in the epic Kill Bill — all of these scenes take place between characters who a) might snap at any moment, and/or b) are anticipating a horrible event that could well be moments away: You are held not only by the dialogue itself but by the expectation of what must surely be coming. In Death Proof, there are long, LONG stretches of dialogue between young women with concerns no weightier than who they might meet tonight, and who, in the tradition of horror movies, have no idea they will soon be an assortment of body parts. They anticipate nothing, and so neither do we, and instead of casual chatter filled with an outlying tension, it’s all you can do to stay awake to see what happens.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. So there was quite a lot I liked here — the writing, like I said, and the performances of the main three actors. (Brad Pitt is a joy when he’s in comic mode; see also Burn After Reading.) But can I ask where that ending came from? Suddenly Christoph Waltz’s oily Nazi wants to make a deal to betray the Reich and move to America? Whaaat? Was there a single moment anywhere in the movie that makes that curveball more rational? I sort of forced my brain to refuse to consider how this made no sense, because I was having too much fun and didn’t want to screw it up by thinking. But now that it’s well after the fact, I have to say again: Whaaat?

In short: Lots of great stuff, highly recommended, but watch out for those plot holes.

Paranormal Activity. And speaking of movies with a high degree of anticipatory dread! Holy maroon, this one’s the real thing — a genius little horror movie with a slow-building payoff that keeps you riveted the whole time. There’s also a couple of special effects in here that will turn you back into a wondering child, instead of an adult jaded by a generation of lame reliance on CGI — it’s been a long time since I yelled at the TV screen, “How the hell did they do that??” (Knowing that the movie was made for about $15,000 is part of the magic act. I wouldn’t have yelled that or anything if this was a big-budget flick.) In a horror-movie matchup, this knocks Raimi’s silly Drag Me To Hell right out of the ring.