VIDEO REVIEW: Inglourious Basterds

I finally saw Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds on home video a few weeks ago. It was the first Blu-Ray movie I have seen from Netflix and I was very favorably impressed with the latest film from the man who brought the world Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.

The film uses a similar conceit that was employed in Kill Bill, in that the story is split into chapters, which are basically filmed set pieces.

Of course, most films are actually structured as a series of filmed set pieces, but Tarantino writes and directs his film in such a way that the narrative backbone is immediately apparent to the viewer.

Although Inglourious Basterds was released in 2009, I didn't see it until the first few days of 2010, so although it would have definitely made my Top 10 (probably even the Top 5) list of best movies of 2009 and I want to be a stickler about the rules.

Inglourious Basterds has now been nominated for 8 Academy Awards: Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Sound, Sound Editing and Best Supporting Actor. In fact, Christoph Walz has won nearly every Best Supporting Actor award this year (Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, etc etc) and is considered a lock for the Oscar. He plays Cololnel Hans Landa, an urbane Nazi, more commonly known as "The Jew Hunter." It is a part which tears up the scenery, but I am not really that big a fan of the performance.

The film's plot contains typical Tarantino flourishes: sparkling dialogue, bloody violence, broad humor and strong female characters. The story has been described as a Jewish revenge fantasy, since it is about an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler (and most of the top leaders of the Third Reich). It also features Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raine who recruits and leads a team of Jewish-American soldiers to kill and scalp Nazi soldiers. Aldo and his gang become so successful that even Hitler himself knows their name. I thought Brad Pitt was excellent in the part. Other standouts for me were Diane Kruger as Bridget von Hammersmarck and Michael Fassbender as Archie Hickox. Mike Myers has an amusing cameo as British general with a pitch perfect British accent.

Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's most commercially successful film and is probably his best film to date (although I have a soft spot for the Kill Bill movies, but it really shouldn't take 4 hours and two movies to tell that tale).

Running Time: 2 hour, 33 minutes. MPAA Rating: Rated R for strong graphic violence, language and brief sexuality.

OVERALL GRADE: A/A-.

ACTING: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
PLOT: A.
IMPACT: A-.

2009 Oscars: Nomination Predictions

Tomorrow morning at 5am PST (Thursday January 22) the 81st Academy Award nominations will be announced for films released in 2008. The Golden Globe awards were previously announced on Sunday January 11th. After seeing the actual nominations on Thursday I will post a more extensive post with my predictions for the Top 8 awards. In previous years, Mad Professah has done pretty well in predicting both nominations and wins. Last year I won an online Oscars predictions contest (by picking 18 out of 24 awards correct) that resulted in having free Netflix for 6 months!

Best Picture

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

Best Director

• Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
• David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
• Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight
• Gus Van Sant, Milk

Best Actress

• Cate Blanchett, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
• Angelina Jolie, Changeling
• Meryl Streep, Doubt
• Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road

Best Actor

• Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
• Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
• Sean Penn, Milk
• Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Best Supporting Actress

• Amy Adams, Doubt
• Penelope Cruz, Vicky Christina Barcelona
• Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
• Kate Winslet, The Reader

Best Supporting Actor

• Josh Brolin, Milk
• Robert Downey, Jr., Tropic Thunder
• Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
• Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
• Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire

Best Original Screenplay

• Woody Allen, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
• Dustin Lance Black, Milk
• Jenny Lumet, Rachel Getting Married
• Tom McCarthy, The Visitor
• Robert Siegel, The Wrestler

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire
• Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon
• Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, The Dark Knight
• Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• John Patrick Shanley, Doubt

Total Nominations

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 9
2. Slumdog Millionaire, 8
3. Frost/Nixon, Milk 6
4. Doubt, The Dark Knight, 5

MOVIE REVIEW: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one of the leading contenders for the Best Picture of the year but has been receiving wild ecstatic raves and vicious pans from the filmerati.

The Oscar nominations come out on Thursday January 24th and most Oscarologists expect "Ben Button" to be in the elite group of Best Picture nominees, and may have the most nominations overall.

As the above pictures indicate, the film stars Oscar winner (The Aviator) Cate Blanchett and (2-time) World's Sexiest Man Brad Pitt and was written by Oscar-winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump). Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) also has a pivotal role. However, the real star of the film is the stunning visual effects that depict the reverse-aging of Brad Pitt's character Benjamin Button as well as the forward-aging of Cate Blanchett's Daisy.

This is clearly film-making at a very high level, with the art direction, cinematography and score particularly notable. The producers of this film often work with Steven Spielberg and clearly they intended The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to have the magic of some of his classic films and/or Forrest Gump. Sadly, "Ben Button" does not reach those heights; it is a very good, but not great film.

The central conceit of the film, that someone would be born very old and physically age in reverse actually is quite effective. This plot device actually provokes some serious ruminations on the nature of life by the viewer which is often the hallmark of great art. Interestingly, despite having a structural lack of suspense (we know that Benjamin Button is going to have to "grow young and die") Eric Roth's script does an excellent job of still providing twists and turns that surprise and delight.

Both Blanchett and Pitt give spellbinding performances. Pitt, especially astounds in his physical ability to embody younger and younger versions of himself. However, I was also struck by Blanchett's even more difficult (albeit more traditional) performance that contains more physically humbling scenes. Taraji P. Henson plays Brad Pitt's adoptive mother as one of several "magic negroes" that mar the film's emotional impact. The shooting of the film in and around New Orleans, Louisiana does provide an interesting emotional frisson as well as the inclusion of the somewhat controversial Hurricane Katrina sub-plot featuring Julia Ormond.

Overall, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one of the best films of the year; with outstanding performances by both lead actors and an intriguing plot devices that provides an opportunity for self-reflection.

Running Time: 2 hours, 46 minutes, MPAA Rating: PG-13.

OVERALL GRADE: B+/A-.

ACTING: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
PLOT: B+.
IMPACT: B+.

Hot Straight Guy Donates $100k Against Prop 8

Brad Pitt, one of the stars of the current #1 movie in the country, the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading, has announced that he is donating $100,000 to support the fight to defeat California's anti-gay ballot measure Proposition 8.

Shockingly, Pitt is the first A-list celebrity to publicly donate to the campaign to prevent the elimination of the right to marry for same-sex couples in the state of California.

He said in a statement:

"Because no one has the right to deny another their life even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn’t harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8."

Variety reported that openly gay billionaire David Geffen has donated a mere $50, 000 and openly gay agent Brian Lourd has donated $5,000.

REVIEW: Babel

I finally got around to seeing Babel this long weekend. It was the last of the Best Picture nominees that I saw and this may have influenced my impressions of the film. I am generally a fan of the director Alejandro González Iñárritu's work. I loved his films Amores Perros and 21 Grams, which were also both written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed and produced by González Iñárritu.

Babel has the now-familiar structure of seemingly unrelated stories following a particular theme with characters whose relatedness the audience has to figure out during the course of the film.

The four stories are: a member of a bereaved American couple (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett)visiting Morocco gets hit by a stray bullet, two young Moroccan brothers who try to alleviate their goat tending boredom by firing a long range rifle at a faraway tourist bus, a deaf-mute Japanese teenaged girl (played by Best Supporting Actress nominee Rinko Kicuchi) who is estranged from her recently widowed father and desperately seeking intimate (male) attention from strangers in Tokyo and two very young white children who live in San Diego go on a road trip with their Mexican nanny/housekeeper (played by Best Supporting Actress nominee Adriana Barraza) to her son's wedding across the border in Tijuana with her irresponsible nephew (played by hottie and González Iñárritu favorite Gael Garcia Bernal) at the wheel.

As you may have noticed, one of these stories is not like the other: the Japanese teen angst story. The other arcs follow the travails of innocents who are put into mortal peril due to circumstances beyond their control (a stray bullet through the tour bus window hits Cate Blanchett's character, the two boys are caught up in an anti-terrorist militaristic response by the investigating Moroccan authorities and the two kids and caregiver are abandoned in the deadly Mexican desert due to some questionable behavior by Garcia Bernal's character. I am pretty sure the fourth story was included so that the director and writer could include Japanese sign-language as a mode of communication displayed in the film, enhancing it's multicultural bona fides by supplementing the more prosaic languages of (American) English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic which had already been included.

The score by Gustavo Santaolalla (Best Score Oscar for Brokeback Mountain) is quite interesting and inventive with a sonic palette which includes Mexican hip-hop, Japanese disco, Moroccan vocal pieces as well as his own signature evocative string arrangements. I particularly mention the music because there are many significant scenes of the film without dialogue where the score communicates the emotion of the moment.

All in all, though it's hard to say what Babel means in the end. I believe the inclusion of the fourth story dilutes the narrative impact of the film. I sort of agree with what one wag said on public radio: "Babel should get an award for most directing in a film" (and that's not really a compliment).

GRADE: B+.