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.

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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.

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Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 3

Part 2 of Death Proof begins with the "Psycho scene," where an "authority figure" declaims, for the audience’s benefit, the subtext of Part 1 — Ranger EarlMcGraw tells us what we’ve already grasped, that Stuntman Mike is a dangerous psychopath who crashes his "death proof" car into women’s cars for his sexual gratification. The scene is a gentle dig at Psycho‘s famously inept coda, but Tarantino adds a couple of icky layers to it: first, he includes Dr. Block, a character from Death Proof‘s co-feature Planet Terror, and gives her a weird, violent reaction to kindly, wizened Ranger McGraw, a reaction that can only be appreciated by watching the other movie (Dr. Block having her own problems with men). Then, after McGraw has finished his spiel on Stuntman Mike and his sick pathology, he announces that he’d rather follow the Nascar circuit than investigate Mike’s crimes, placing Mike’s MO in the broader context of a national malaise: there are millions of people who find some level of gratification watching stock cars smash into each other.

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Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 2

It sounds like a strange comparison, but Tarantino, in one way, reminds me of Spielberg, in that his movies are always thematically quite dense. Death Proof, like, say, Jurassic Park, features a strong theme that resonates down to the smallest of details, from broad story outlines to the tiniest of gestures.

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Favorite Screenplays: Death Proof part 1

Quentin Tarantino’s movies are explosions of meaning.  They spew significance of many different kinds in every direction on a shot-by-shot basis.  Every element of every shot is fraught with references, usually to other movies.  As such, they invite multiple readings from a number of different points of view and philosophical schools.  For instance, I just read a book-length monograph on Pulp Fiction that examined every aspect of the movie but one — what the characters in the movie do and say.

I am not smart enough or cool enough to catch every one of the thousands of references that give Tarantino’s movies their postmodern punch — I’ve never seen a Shaw Bros kung-fu movie, for instance.  So I will limit myself in this analysis to what I do understand: characters and their motivations.  And I will leave the examination of angles, design choices, costumes, hairstyles, cultural freight and songs to others.

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