Inglorious Basterds

I always look forward to a Tarantino, although you’re never sure which Tarantino is going to show up. As it happens, we get a pretty good one tonight.

The film is set during World War Two in Nazi occupied France and is played out sort of like a western. The opening ‘chapter’, as the film calls them, sets a pattern that the rest of the film will follow.

SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christian Waltz), the 'Jew Hunter', is at the farmhouse of Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), a local farmer, who is suspected of sheltering a neighbouring Jewish family. The tension builds during the scene as Landa interrogates the farmer with built in German efficiency. Landa is the ‘good cop-bad cop’ all in one, polite friendly official one minute, chilling evil bastard the next.



This is one of those big Tarantino dialogue scenes and during it you're never quite sure what’s going to happen next. The masterstroke here is that we all know what happened in the war and how that turned out but we’re now in a Tarantino parallel universe where he's prepared to take liberties with history. This is a film all about revenge, where he wants to put the boot on the other foot, rewrite history, and give the Jews a chance to get their own back. So anything can happen.

On this occasion, what probably would have happened happened, and the farmer sacrifices the family for his own survival. Only one member of the family, the teenage Shosanna, survives and manages to get away.

Then we finally get to meet the eponymous Basterds. They are a kind of Jewish Dirty Dozen with Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) at their helm. They have arrived in France with revenge on their minds and are intent on brutally killing and scalping as many Nazi's as they can get their hands on. They take immense pleasure in this project, especially baseball bat wielding Eli Roth with his own trademark style of retribution, as they give the Nazi’s a taste of their own inhumanity.



The only downside to the Basterds is that we don’t see enough of them and their crazed brand of vengeance because the film quickly moves back to Shosanna (Melanie Laurents), who is also plotting revenge. She seems to have fallen on her feet and has ‘inherited’ a cinema from an ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’, improbable though this may seem. I'm as suspicious as Landa on that one. When German war hero Fredrick Zoller gives her the eye she shuns him but when he persists in his attention she finds herself in the situation where her cinema is selected for the première of a film paying tribute to Zoller's heroics, also starring him. Equally improbable is that all the Third Reich's highest ranking officers, even Hitler, will be attending. For this reason, the première also catches the eye of the Basterds, who see it as an opportunity to bring about an early end to the war. Cue Mike Meyers, who pops up as the Allies send a film critic turned spy (Michael Fassbender) over to help and David Bowie’s ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’ is used to dramatic effect as the two fractions prepare their different plans for destroying the cinema with all inside, and as one of many nods to other films.



'Inglourious Basterds' is a collection of long scenes, loosely connected to each other, which kind of come together but the film's two similar plots never actually meet in the middle. Which I assume is very deliberate, I think he's been learning or unlearning from the Coen Brothers, depending on your point of view.

It’s been said that some of the scenes drag on, I didn't think that at all. They all stay interesting despite their length. Occasionally deeply serious, at other times humorous and you wonder whether you're allowed to laugh or not. Overall it all has a nice pace to it and the two and half hours simply fly by.

A word about Christoph Waltz, who probably stole the show in a film that contained many impressive performances. Throughout the film Tarantino made use of English, German, French and even a bit of Italian and Waltz acted in all three, as well as playing the part of Landa brilliantly. Brad Pitt’s performance is also top draw (again), all the way from his minimalist Italian to his interesting line in forehead carving. I really think I’m becoming a Pitt fan? Another one to single out is Melanie Laurents who easily upstages Tarantino's hailed new muse Diane Kruger.



Certainly one of the best films I've seen this year and I haven't even mentioned the ending.

The Time Traveller’s Wife

I read a synopsis of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ last week and it turns out it’s one of those stories that I so love... backwards... and then forwards... and then backwards again... The complexity of it means that I’d probably be lost before the end of the opening titles but I loved the general idea of it.

In the end though I needn’t have worried because the studio has done a bit of dumbing down of the story, which meant I didn’t get lost at all but the movie clearly suffered at the hands of this tampering.

At the start we see Henry, the time travelling librarian, at the age of six in a car with his mother. The car gets shunted and this triggers Henry into a time jump, his first. Seconds later, he is back in the present but standing at the road side as the car driven by his mother crashes into a lorry.

His elder self appears alongside him to comfort him and to reassure him about all this time jump malarkey. Henry has a rare genetic anomaly that causes him to live his life on a shifting timeline, involuntarily jumping back and forth through time. He can’t control it and has no idea when he’s going to travel or where to, except that it often seems to be triggered by stress, and that he usually travels to places related to his life, just at a different time. This could of course all just be a great ruse and an excuse for nipping down the pub when his misses isn’t looking but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. A slight inconvenience is that he never gets to take anything with him and so arrives stark naked, meaning that his first task is always finding something to wear.

In the next scene, the grown up Henry (Eric Bana) is at work in the library when he is approached by Clare (Rachel McAdams). He’s never met her before but this babe declares undying love for him. No never happened to me either. He’s oddly reluctant about her offer of dinner. Just get in there mate, don’t worry about the detail, just nod in the right places and go along with it. To his credit, his reluctant seems to have evaporated by the time she talks herself into his apartment and takes her clothes off.

Clare claims to have known him all her life because he has been visiting during her childhood and teenage years from the future but because he isn’t in the future yet, he doesn’t know that. Now I’m not sure how it’s handled in the book but we’ve just been given 90% of the plot in the first ten minutes...

Then we get flashbacks to when Henry visited her in the past but what we don’t get to see enough of is the progression of their relationship. What caused Clare, as a young girl, to fall so madly in love with him? She just seemed to believe that they were destined to be together and it was so inevitable that she never bothered to doubt it. It’s like chunks of the story have been cut out and it doesn’t help you to relate to the characters.



It’s the same with other characters. Henry’s father drifts into the story at one stage and there’s an obviously been some history there and there’s a story to be told but it never happens and his father disappears again.

The other 10% of the plot is revealed not long later when we find out that Henry dies at a young age. So that leaves us with no suspense left at all, leaving us with basically just a rom-com.

They get married, of course, which Henry nearly misses by dematerializing just before his bride walks down the aisle. Conveniently, when he time jumps he usually seems to pop straight back, although having aged or un-aged. Several sticky situations, like the one at the wedding, were avoided which could have added to the plot but equally might have ensured we ended up with an unpalatable slapstick comedy instead.



There's only one moment where he leaves for a long period of time, which causes an argument but the rest of the time it’s just played as a bit of an inconvenience, like he was diabetic or had a lisp or something like that. You would have thought his time travelling would have caused a lot more grief for everyone but you just don’t get that impression.

In fact very few people seem to notice his disappearances and reappearances or his random ageing and un-ageing, those that do just accept it, but then the makeup department seemed to simply rely on you counting the grey hairs on his head to gauge his age. It didn’t work. This was no Benjamin Button on that front, it was almost impossible to distinguish whether he was a younger or older.

They try for a baby and Clare easily gets pregnant, time and time again, each time the baby time-travels out of the womb and Clare risks bleeding to death but I’ve made that sound more dramatic than it was. Henry decides he’s not going to put her through another pregnancy and has a vasectomy. Undeterred, Clare slopes off to meet a younger pre-vasectomy version of Henry who has time travelled forward to the present and shags him in a parking lot. She falls pregnant again and this one goes full turn. Bingo, time travelling Daughter is born.



It’s a film that seems in a rush to tell its story and consequently doesn’t, it trips over itself on occasion and unnecessarily so because at only an hour and forty minutes, they had time to spare to flesh out the full story, which I’m sure is in there somewhere.

Apparently in the book, two of the things that keep Henry in the present are running and sex, as both these activities relieve his stresses. As a big fan of both, I was sad to see these aspects overlooked. He also has to avoid alcohol but it was never really explained why. Another good stress reliever surely?

What we have in the end is another film about a couple who face adversity due to their circumstances but in the end, of course, love wins through, except this has a bit of time travel in it. Apparently the book isn't as mushy.

So a pleasant enough film but incredibly disappointing. It wasn’t a film that needed too much dissecting in the pub afterwards.

Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince

It’s almost two years to the day since I saw the last Harry Potter film. After that film I blogged that I didn’t feel qualified to review a Harry Potter. I hadn't read any of the books then, and I still haven’t, so I have found the films all a bit confusing. I reckon I could easily get lost in this one too.

This film though turned out to be more engaging to me than most of the Potter films have been and miles better than the last film. Book purists, and yes I’m usually one of them, will I’m sure argue that too many sub-plots and characters were left out and that even the odd scene appeared that shouldn’t have been there but, this version, stripped down it may have been, suited me better. It left you needing to know less about what had come before or even after in the series.

Most of the baffling bits came early but even I could follow the Millennium Bridge being destroyed by the Death Eaters, so it's no wonder Harry is reluctant to return to Hogwarts, where security has been tightened to keep those Death Eaters out for his sixth year and it’s not just because he’s chosen the wrong ‘A’ level subjects. That old geezer Dumbledor persuades him to go back and Harry doesn’t seem too bothered that he has to stand up the girl he’d just chatted up at the tube station. Why Harry, why? Oh yes, of course, there’s always Ginny Weasley.

The baffling bits give way to a more human story. Ron gets to become Gryffindor's number one, as in their Quidditch goalie, thanks to Harry boosting his confidence by pretending to give him a luck potion. Good job he didn’t, statutory two year ban for drug cheats these days.



Ron's success pulls the babes; well it pulls Lavender Brown. Hermione is thrilled for them, not. Meanwhile Harry continues to have the hots for Ginny. Which is hardly surprising when she meets him in her dressing gown and then when she got down on her knees in front of him we all held our breath in the cinema... and then she tied his shoelaces.



There’s perhaps too much of the plot concerned with the vagaries of young love, Oh please someone bang all their heads together, but it lightened the darkness of the rest of it. The dark parts of the film certainly were dark and moody, also just like a teenager.

I even follow the clever bit about the tampered memory of Horace Slughorn, (see I have been listening) although isn’t that something we all do, all the time. Jim Broadbent as Slughorn the potions teacher would probably have stolen the show, had it not been for the ever excellent Alan Rickman as Snape. Harry uses the tried and tested routine of getting Slughorn drunk, with the help of Hagrid to jog his memory and fill in the blankety blanks.



Of course it all lost me a bit again at the end with all this talk of Horcruxes but Wikipedia put me straight later.

So not a bad film although I notice with each one they use more and more CGI in the sets whereas I’m sure the earlier films were basically set in real castles. They’ll probably CGI the cast next, so they can keep making films beyond the last book. A CGI Helena Bonham Carter could possibly be even scarier than the real thing, and she’s pretty scary already as the mightily strange Bellatrix Lestrange.

The lack of an ending makes it obvious there’s more to come... but of course you knew that already.

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I loved you so long)

‘Il y a longtemps que je t'aime’ better known as ‘I loved you so long’ features Kristen Scott Thomas speaking French. She plays Juliette Fontaine, just out of prison after fifteen years inside. Juliette is taken under the wing of her younger sister Léa, who goes out of her way to make her feel part of her family. Juliette seems a bit unnerved with this unexpected goodwill and at first, barely speaks at all and never mentions her life inside or what took her there. Whatever happened seems to weigh heavy on her and everyone skirting around the subject makes it worse.

She goes through the motions with a social worker and with her parole officer. An odd chap, who is obsessed with visiting the Orinoco that is until we are told that he inexplicably put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. She tries to get a job, not easy when the employers want to know why she’d been in jail but eventually she prevails. Getting back into something else she’s taken a sabbatical from for fifteen years proves a lot easier when she gets propositioned in a bar.



Right from the start, you know that there’s some big revelation on its way but the film makers keep it under wraps until the end. Details do come out but slowly. It turns out that Juliette was in prison for killing her six year old Son. Why? Well that’s the big secret. We are told that she offered nothing in her defence during her trial and that her husband testified against her.

Being a ‘child killer’ makes her a dubious guest for her sister to have in her house. Léa trusts her, which is a tremendous leap of faith considering she has two children, both adopted from Vietnam. Léa’s husband Luc clearly does not share his wife's trust, well certainly not at first, and he understandably fears leaving his kids alone with her. As the viewer, you're not sure who to side with.



As the film progresses along Juliette slowly opens up and starts to enjoy being back in the real world again. So far, so good, it’s a strong story and well told but it starts to go awry when she discloses at a dinner party that she was in prison for murder. Almost everyone assumes it’s a joke, illustrating I suppose that the French media hadn't given her case the saturation coverage it would have got over here and that nobody has had the forethought to ‘Google’ Léa’s mysterious sister who appeared from nowhere.

I feel a little cheated at the end because having been dangling on a thread for ninety minutes, wondering what the big secret was and I have to say enjoying it... bang, the film falls down a large plot hole.

Léa finds a picture of the murdered child along with a note written on the back of his medical card. Lea gets her doctor to check out the medical card and it is revealed that the child had a fatal illness, probably from birth. It appears that somehow Juliette chose to keep this secret from her husband, her sister and her parents.

Instead, being a doctor herself, she ended his suffering by injecting him with an overdose of something and then let everyone believe that she was a child murderer. For what reason? It is suggested to punish herself. For what? Saving her son undue suffering? Whilst at the same time she punishes everyone else around her by not telling them the truth. Then there’s what her fellow prisoners would have thought of her and they would of course had tried to inflict their own justice on her. She must really like self-punishment.

After her trial her parents disowned her and told Léa to do the same. Her father took this misunderstanding to his grave, in fact it probably helped kill him, and her mother took it with her into Alzheimer’s. They will never know the truth.

Even more unlikely was the fact she managed to keep her reasons secret. It’s just not plausible. Which failed A level law student defended her? Even the prosecution would have gone digging for a motive. Didn’t they perform an autopsy? Consult doctor’s notes? It’s just like in ‘The Reader’ but more so.

This implausibility ruined an otherwise good film, which is a shame because otherwise it was excellent!

The Pianist (2002)

On September 23, 1939 Polish Radio was forced off air by the German invasion of Poland. The last live broadcast was Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, played by a young Jewish pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman. Bombs rain down on Warsaw as he plays. The other people in the studio are panicking but still he plays on. Then a bomb hits the studio and Szpilman too takes cover.



Szpilman’s account of what happened next was first published in Poland during 1946 but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin’s new Communist Government. Finally it was published in Germany in 1997 after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase.

The film of that book is a dark, depressing tale about a man and his fight for survival and it’s simply brilliant. Roman Polanski, himself a survivor of the Krakow and Warsaw ghettos, directs.

For Szpilman, life becomes one long struggle to keep his family together as the German’s move in and impose their anti-Jewish laws. The Germans rapidly increase the restrictions, forcing Jews to walk in the gutter, wear the star on their arm and anything else they can think of to humiliate them. When they get bored with that, they brick them up inside the Ghetto instead. Life in the Ghetto is at first tolerable but quickly gets worse as the persecution escalates.



The full horror of the atrocities that go on there is not spared us. Jews are often lined up for no apparent reason and shot. One woman asks a Nazi officer, ‘What will happen to us?’ and promptly finds out first hand as she is shot point blank in the head. A man in a wheelchair is tossed over a balcony because he failed to stand up when the soldiers walked in.

Finding food becomes difficult, Szpilman’s father has to barter for a single piece of caramel and then cuts it in six pieces to share it with his family. This is also practically his last action because it’s not long before everyone is being packed into trains bound for Treblinka, an extermination facility. Szpilman himself is fortunate that a Jewish policeman recognised him and saved him. This was just one of many lucky escapes that Szpilman manages.



Everything in the film is shown from Szpilman's point of view and we become part of his frantic plight for survival. We share his guilt at not going with his family, although he knows that to do so would have been futile. You can feel the hopelessness he feels, his loneliness, his desperation.

He is conscripted into working for the Germans but manages to escape and goes into hiding outside the Ghetto. From where he witness's, from a safe distance, the failed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

He manages to get help from other non-Jewish Poles and with their kindness manages to survive, moving from place to place. First in safe houses and then in bombed out ruins. He is continually hiding and fleeing, gradually becoming a shadow of his former self, visibly losing weight throughout the film and suffering jaundice along the way. All the time death via a German bullet never seems far away.

In one of the `safe house' there is a piano. As he sits at it and we hear music playing, we think he’s gone mad and the sound of his playing will give him away but then we see his hands are moving above the keyboard and realize that the music is playing only in his head.

His final hiding place is the attic of a bombed out building where he discovers a large can of pickles which might just keep him alive until the Russians come. The pickles though are his undoing. He makes such a din trying to open them that he is discovered by a German officer. You expect another quick shooting but when the officer finds out he ‘was’ once a pianist he tells him to play. After so many years of being unable to play you wonder at his capacity to pull this one off but after a few tentative chords, he does. This seemed to save his life and the officer ends up helping Szpilman, bringing him food and, finally, his overcoat.



When the Russian troops finally liberate Warsaw, after all he’d been through to survive; Szpilman is almost killed by his rescuers when they see the German coat he is wearing. Their shots miss him and then when they realise that he’s a Pole, they ask

“Why the ****ing coat?"

Szpilman manages to gulp a reply,

"I'm cold"

The officer who helped him tries to contact Szpilman from the pen he is incarcerated in and although Szpilman tries to find him, he fails and the officer is taken away to a Stalingrad labour camp where he was to die seven years later.

When broadcasting resumed on Polish Radio, six long years after it was bombed off air, it was with the same piece, Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp Minor and the same pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman.

I was riveted from start to finish and although it can be hard to watch at times, it is a remarkable film. Szpilman is portrayed as a man that we can all relate to and that you care about what happens to. What would we have done in his situation? He doesn’t try to be a hero; he is just a man doing what he can to stay alive.

Also the film doesn’t try to judge anybody, although that would have been easy to do and just gives you the historical facts and what affect it had on one man's life.

The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 2002 and won Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I had to check to see what defeated it for Best Film that year. Now I haven't seen Chicago and no disrespect to it but I imagine most people who saw it back in 2002 will have forgotten it by now. Had they seen the Pianist instead, they wouldn't have forgotten it so easily. This film will stay with you for some time afterwards.

There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were just 240,000.

Easy Virtue

Easy Virtue is based on a 1920's play by Noel Coward but I assume it's a fairly liberal adaptation. The male lead is John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), who marries a thoroughly inappropriate girl, the glamorous Larita (Jessica Biel), a racing driver whom he met in France. Naturally he's thrilled to have landed himself such a delightful catch but he should have kept her to himself. His mistake is taking her home to England to meet his family.

The first words his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) utters to her new daughter-in-law are ‘Oh, you're American’ and it's all downhill from there. She immediately resents Larita's presence as part of the family and proceeds to be as vindictive as possible towards her. This is all before she finds out that Larita has been married before, to a man who died in suspicious circumstances.



John’s mother believes in upholding the traditions of the aristocracy whilst Larita has no intention of fitting in with that sort of lifestyle. Unfortunately for Larita, she is also poor and the Whittakers desperately need their son to marry into money so that they can maintain that lifestyle. It’s post World War One Britain and the status of the gentry is fading fast. His mother had hoped that John would marry his childhood sweetheart Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy neighbour.



The polar opposite to his mother is his father, the wonderfully sardonic Jim (Colin Firth). Firth is simply fantastic as the father. A man so disengaged from the family and all it stands for that he spends most of his time in his workshop. He's a World War One survivor, dresses down, unshaven and shuns the traditional country pursuits. He approves when Larita objects to fox hunting on moral grounds and then when asked ride with the hunt, does so on a motorbike. He likes Larita and sees her as a soul mate.



Easy Virtue is a romantic comedy and then some. There’s some great visual ‘gags’ some of which are so quick they’re easy to miss which means it doesn’t work too well on the small screen and would be better at the cinema on a bigger screen. That said there's nothing subtle about the 'traditional' can-can which doesn't endear Larita to John's sister or the nasty end that became of the Chihuahua (dog lovers should look away). There’s also the subtlety of songs such as ‘Car Wash’ and ‘Sex Bomb’ redone in period style.

Ultimately though, it isn't just a comedy. The brilliance of the film is how it explores the relationships between the various family members. There are some great exchanges between John’s Mother and Larita, who can give as good as she gets. Thrown into the mix are John's sisters, who don't know what to make of Larita at all, and some interesting staff members. Larita could have been a breath of fresh air blowing away the entrenched stuffiness of the family but is seen as more of a cold wind demolishing it.



As well as Firth, there are great performances by Biel and Scott Thomas and well most of the cast.

In the end, Larita whirls out in much the same fashion as she whirled in, realising that she’s totally wasted on John, advising the daughters to run away and destroying the Venus de Milo.

The final scene is interesting too. If this was the way the original play finished, then it would have been greatly subversive for its day. ‘Easy Virtue’ is a bit off the wall, which is probably why I liked it a lot.

Chéri

I liked the look of the pedigree of Chéri because the film was from director Steven Frears and writer Christopher Hampton both of who worked on ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ twenty plus years ago. That film featured Michelle Pfeiffer and she stars again here. There are other similarities between the two films, both being French period pieces and both involving libertine-esk behaviour or so I thought.

The synopsis for Chéri looked good. It promised the son of a courtesan being initiated in the ways of love by an older woman. Ah, a young boys dream.

The film opened with an annoying voiceover which explained about the ‘Belle Époque’ and what a ‘courtesan’ was, but thankfully the voiceover didn’t last long. A courtesan is, in this case, a woman who offers her charms to clients, usually rich folk in return for some of their money. These tend to be long-term arrangements, not brief encounters.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays one such upmarket prostitute, Léa de Lonval, who’s feeling that perhaps she’s getting too old for all this and she’s considering retirement. However she is persuaded to embark on one last assignment by a former colleague and ex-courtesan, Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates). Bates, incidentally, is as good as ever, not that I can really picture her younger self as an appealing courtesan doing the deed.



Léa agrees to spend a few weeks ‘educating’ Peloux’s 19-year-old son Fred (Rupert Friend). He has known her all her life as an auntie and when he was young she christened him Chéri, while he knows her affectionately as ‘Noo Noo’ or perhaps ‘Nu Nu’.

What they haven’t done before though, is get off with each other, obviously, and it somewhat spoils the film that this happens within seconds of Peloux giving them the green light. There’s no chase. Pfeiffer doesn’t have to be talked into her task and Chéri certainly doesn’t need asking twice. Our Fred, you see, is no shrinking violet. In fact he’s been a bit of a playboy and has been quite adept at putting it about, which is why his mother wants him with Léa and away from praying on other more impressionable young girls. Which is a shame, because had Chéri been more innocent then Rupert Friend would have been perfect as a blank canvas for Pfeiffer to work on but he’s not really believable as an object of lust for her. Surely an experienced woman such as Léa would have eaten him for breakfast and been bored to tears by lunch.

Apparently not, their few weeks’ turns into six years of living in sin, as their not terribly dangerous liaison blossoms into a full-blown romance. Quite what she saw in him I have no idea.



I’m also not sure what she educated him in. She certainly didn’t make him any more of a gentleman. He comes with very few redeeming features and he doesn’t seem to develop any under her tutorship. She even ends up paying for him rather than making money out of him.

The romance comes to an end when the Machiavellian Peloux corrals Chéri into an arranged marriage with some young crumpet that she’s found for him, the daughter of another courtesan.

Married life, unsurprisingly, doesn’t suit him and he soon comes running back to Léa’s boudoir offering her a second bite at the Chéri. Sorry couldn’t resist that.

Naturally she takes him back just long enough to ruffle her chiffon before she packs him back off to his wife.



Michelle Pfeiffer is as good as ever and looked the part, Rupert Friend does ok too but it’s a pretty uninvolving film, you just don’t feel much attachment to the characters. At the end, we are told that Chéri is tortured by his love for what he can’t have, a woman who is too old for him. Unfortunately this is the first time we get any inkling of this, at least from such a dramatic angle. The story of an ultimately doomed affair between an older woman and her toy boy could have been dramatic all the way through. It’s not particularly steamy either, despite all; the ‘educating’ going on. Dangerous Liaisons it certainly wasn’t.