Inglourious Basterds part 3
Thirty-eight minutes into Inglourious Basterds, something very strange happens — the movie starts over, for the third time.
Inglourious Basterds part 2
Lt Raine is huntin’ Nazzis. Hitler is, predictably, upset.
Something kind of unusual happens about 20 minutes into Inglourious Basterds: the movie starts. You can feel it as you’re watching it, after the slow-burn suspense of "Chapter 1," here’s a scene you recognize and understand: a tough, take-charge army officer barks out the details of a secret mission to a cadre of elite soldiers. Hooray, the viewer thinks, now I’m oriented, now I know where I am, this is going to be a "men on a mission" movie, like The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare. The first scene was just a long setup for the Col Landa character, now we’re going to meet the dog-faced American soldiers who are going to kick Landa’s ass.
Inglourious Basterds part 1
LaPadite vs Landa in an epic pipe-off.
For a minute or so, it looks like the protagonist of Inglourious Basterds is going to be Perrier LaPadite, a humble French dairy farmer just trying to eke his way through World War II in the French countryside with his daughters. Into LaPadite’s island of relative calm comes Col Hans Landa. The opening scene of Inglourious Basterds is over 15 minutes long, which is extraordinary in and of itself. 15 minutes is a huge amount of screen time to spend on a scene, especially an opening scene, especially a two-handed opening scene where one of the characters will never be seen again. That’s just the beginning of the daring and audacity of Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay.
Television Zombies text
A few weeks ago, I did a little thing for the Television Zombies podcast, describing how I go about analyzing The Venture Bros. For those who missed it, the text of my thing is below the fold.
apropos of nothing
I drove past the Music Hall Theater in Beverly Hills the other day. They’re showing Sugar and Moon and their marquee looked exactly like the above image, the two movies’ posters jammed together for a display.
Had I not already seen Moon, I would have guessed that they were showing one movie called Sugar Moon. “One’s black, one’s white. One’s big, one’s small. One’s close up, the other is far away. One’s in front of a bridge, the other is in front of an op-art design. One carries a duffle bag, the other carries an astronaut helmet. Each prefers his title in the lower left-hand corner. Together they fight crime. Sugar Moon.”
Memory Lane, part 2
Yesterday I posted a bunch of flyers I made for my monologue shows back in the late 80s – early 90s. Today I’m posting a bunch of flyers I made for various play productions during the same time. Don’t forget to click to enlarge.
Memory Lane, part 1
I came up in show business as a playwright and monologuist in the late 1980s. My beat was the East Village of New York City. I didn’t have a computer back then — my plays and monologues were written on a clackety old Royal Portable that dated from the Koren War. And my flyers were all assembled by hand. I had no layout tools at my disposal, so I leaned into the crude aesthetics of the punk rock I loved — I slapped together things I found on the street, I doodled in the margins, I made all the scotch tape visible. Instead of trying to make my flyers look slick, I emphasized their shabbiness. If you weren’t there, they probably won’t make much graphic sense.
It’s also worth pointing out that all these images were meant to be reproduced in black and white, at Xerox machines at Kinko’s. Sometimes they looked better that way, sometimes much was lost.
Do remember to click on any of the images to see them bigger.
Happy faces, action movie division
In the past few days, I’ve been researching the "happy face" phenomenon, where the studios intentionally drain whatever dramatic tension exists in a poster image for the sake of selling more DVDs. Mostly I’ve looked at comedies (here and here), but one of my readers suggested I also investigate the packaging of some of my favorite action movies. I did, and the results were, to say the least, disturbing.
Read more
Television Zombies
Long-time WADPAW reader the most pressing issues of our day TV shows. Chris has been following my Venture Bros analysis and asked me to contribute a little something to his show, and I was happy to oblige. The podcast can be heard here or through your nearest iTunes thingy. My contribution, where I gas on about how I go about my VB analysis, is toward the end, but the whole show is certainly entertaining enough to listen through, and features a guest-opening from Rusty Venture himself.