2009. Starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.
The lady who handed me my ticket asked me, why do they call them “Inglourious Basterds”? I knew there was a 1970s movie with the same name, but I wasn’t completely sure whether this was one of those Tarantino homages — like how his film company is named A Band Apart, or how Sonny Chiba appears in Kill Bill as a past-his-prime samurai sword artisan. So I muttered, I don’t know, I haven’t seen the movie yet — maybe they’re like the Dirty Dozen?
I wasn’t too far off. The men who make up the Basterds don’t have chestfuls of medals, but their Jewish heritage for motivation. As their commander Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) informs them, they have one mission when it comes to Nat-zees: “They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and they need to be destroyed.” And Lt. Raine’s plays his own heritage — a Tennessee-born Apache — for shock value by demanding that his unit scalp the German soldiers, with the goal of inflicting fear throughout the German Army. Those who resist giving information meet “the Bear Jew” (director Eli Roth in a nasty role) who totes along a much-dented baseball bat. Those who are spared after giving up German positions are released, after a painful branding.
Pitt doesn’t have all that many lines as Lieutenant Raine, but he makes nearly every one of them memorable. As does his counterpart, Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa, the one they have taken to calling the “Jew hunter.” Charged with rounding up the few remaining Jewish families in occupied France, Landa enjoys his life and his mission, toying with everyone in his path, always seeming to interrogate even when conducting a simple conversation. An opening scene portrays him at his best, already knowing the answers he tortuously cajoles from a farmer.
Tarantino again employs multiple story lines to draw us into the film’s conclusion set in, of all places, a theater. The owner with a mysterious past (Melanie Laurent, my new favorite actress) is ordered by German authorities to host the premiere of a propaganda film seen as high art by the Nazi brass, and begins to plan the welcome she has in mind for the sawed-off asshole with the familiar mustache.
Inglourious Basterds is bloody, talky and long, and filled with little moments that make you cringe and laugh — just like every other Tarantino movie I’ve seen. And like the Dirty Dozen, the Basterds — introduced with the spaghetti-western strings of Ennio Morricone — take their mission to heart.
There was a website I found years ago that posted ridiculous screenplay pitches (unfortunately, the site has passed on, I believe), half of which involved time travel specifically for the purpose of killing Hitler. As Charles Bronson fans know, there’s nothing so satisfying as a revenge fantasy, and the Nazis are a much-deserving enemy. As Lieutenant Raine points out, they sure are anxious to get out of those uniforms when the world turns against them. Inglourious Basterds is a good reminder of what to do if they pop their heads up again.
You know that you’re a success when your name is used to represent your creation and, in the same breath, endows in it a sense of quality and authenticity. I’m going to defer to the many guitarists who are mourning the 94-year-old Les Paul online today, who love what he created and did with his life — they are better than I am at describing how his work changed the world. But I want to acknowledge the passing of this man and what he accomplished.
By all accounts, a master with a guitar in his hands, Lester Polfus didn’t settle for what he had. He innovated, attaching amplified strings to a 4-by-4 piece of wood — lovingly called “The Log” — when he was dissatisfied with the volume of his acoustic guitar. Brought aboard by Gibson Guitars, he continued to innovate, developing the solid-body electric used by so many musicians, whose sound is loved by so many music fans. He is also credited for multi-track recording and numerous recording techniques. Always innovating, exploring and crafting new possibilities. I’m so proud to count him among the many talented and restless folks to come out of my home state of Wisconsin.
It’s a safe guess that Les Paul held a guitar in his hands nearly every day of his 94 years. But after he mastered it, he transformed it. It’s a sentimental cliche to talk about the big concert being staged every night in heaven. But I bet there are a lot of tributes tonight to the new guy, who inspired so many.
RIP Mr. Paul.
2007. Starring Casey Affleck, Brad Pitt, Sam Rockwell. Directed by Andrew Dominik.
A film that announces its conclusion in the title promises to cast the events through some very subjective filters. The legend of Jesse James, I’m sure, is known by most people much like it’s sung by a barroom busker (nice cameo, Nick Cave), mistakenly crediting Jesse with stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He also gets the number of Jesse’s kids wrong.
But it doesn’t matter, because legends are legends, and as John Ford taught us in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. You won’t sell many picture postcards of thieves who shoot fellow thieves in the back.
Casey Affleck turns in some nice work as the moony-eyed Robert Ford, who along with his brother Charlie (Sam Rockwell), joins the James Gang for a late-in-the-career train robbery. Robert has been obsessed with Jesse James since he was a child, reading of the gang’s exploits and memorizing details about Jesse that he believes mirrors his life. But after the robbery and Frank James’ dissolution of the outfit, Jesse rides across country, visiting his comrades and dispatching them.
Jesse (Brad Pitt) is depressed and paranoid, and can’t sleep. The surviving members of the gang believe he’s capable of reading minds, somehow knowing their motives from far away. When he appears riding toward them in the distance, they begin to doubt their courage, and enough of their guilt shows through to confirm his suspicions. Down to his final two friends, Jesse collects the Ford brothers for a planned bank robbery and they go along, expecting all the while to have their brains blown out by their distrustful leader.
The assassination of the increasingly erratic James could have been performed by Charlie, but Robert seizes the moment. Immediately they race to the telegraph office and send a confession. Soon the brothers are on stage, re-enacting the deed over and over again for a paying audience. But the boastful yarn of shooting a legend through the back wears out quickly, and Robert Ford spends his days dragging his notoriety behind him. “You know what I expected?” he asks of a lover years later. “Applause.”
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is visually beautiful, shot at times with a lens that centers its focus and blurs the periphery, much like photos of the era. There are scenes of incredible, simple beauty that really amaze me: sunlight creeping across a wooden floor; a muddy road between houses that has yet to become a street, a field of dry wheat whose rustling hides the conspiratorial voices of the Ford brothers plotting their betrayal. There is a quick scene of Affleck splashing bathwater to chase away a cow that is so lovely that it nearly made me forget to question why his hot bath was taking place in a field so far from the house.
And in nearly every shot taken from inside a house looking out, there are windowpanes of old glass, whose imperfections skew and distort the view beyond. But two-and-a-half hours of authentic sets and inventive lens effects cannot take away from a narration that falls somewhere between Ric Burns and Vin Scully. I don’t know if I could have followed the story without all the spoken subtext, but it might have been more enjoyable to try.
So the legend of the gunslinger lives on, fair or not, while Robert Ford has been vilified. In the end, there is someone willing to track Ford down, to fire an assassin’s gun and scrape off a little residual fame for himself. And seeing that reminded me of a moment earlier in the film, when a bandit warned of being caught alone with the legend Jesse James, who robbed and killed innocent people and kept the money for himself. “Don’t let him get behind you,” the thief warns, well aware that Jesse wasn’t beneath shooting a partner between the shoulder blades. It’s almost as if some legends are just regular thieves and cowards viewed through those beautifully imperfect windowpanes.
Today marks the first day of my second year without a job. I don’t get tired of saying that it’s not so bad — every day is like that laundry day you add to the end of a long vacation. The biggest hit has been to my savings, but I figure that if the period spent rescuing my self-esteem while mourning my father wasn’t a “rainy day,” I’d never save enough for a real downpour.
Back in the dark days, coming home from another unrewarding day at the office, that Bright Eyes song would always drift into my head. Especially, the verse that goes:
Now and again it seems worse than it is
But mostly the view is accurate
You see your breath in the air as you climb up the stairs
To that coffin you call your apartment
And you sink in the chair, brush the snow from your hair
And drink the cold away
And you’re not really sure what you’re doin’ this for
But you need something to fill up the days
A few more hours. . .
My Dad, who worked hard, never understood watching the clock, knowing that your life includes those same hours you can’t wait to see pass. He never had a job in which the ideas and energy you offered were refused. He was made happy by working and passed that trait down to his bratty kid — who unfortunately chose to work in an industry in which The Office doesn’t seem like a fictional place.
A full year has passed now, and there have certainly been doubts that I’d ever work again, and days when things didn’t go right, but there has never been a day as miserable as the average day in that office. Every day since walking out of that slowly sinking, drain-circling pool of poisoned dreams has been a stroll through a world of possibilities. I’m not going to join the circus as it passes through town, but I could. I’m not going to pursue my dream as Super Bowl-winning quarterback at this stage. But I’ve decided that I’m going to be happy, somehow, doing something.