Joe Henry, Sam Phillips, and The Long Play: LookingCloser.org's Video Blog #2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5P4qDWY5sM
I'm still a beginner when it comes to iMovie. But I'm learning a little every time I work with it.
This episode, in which I learn that ten minutes is too long for this sort of thing, covers some of my favorite recent music. And it has a couple of surprises for you.
Enjoy.
And when you're finished, go visit samphillips.com and lucishaw.com, where you'll find information about two worlds abundant in poetry and insight.
Last Night, a Fire Blazed on 85th Street in Seattle...
Here's actor/novelist/pastor Jeff Berryman on the Taproot fire.
When we talk about all that Christians should learn about being artists of integrity...Read more
Opening the Door to Crimson Glory on October 22nd.
The sun came up on a day without a deadline, the first day of that kind I've seen in a long, long time.
As if he wanted to be first in line for my attention, my cat Mardukas perched on my chest, purring madly, as I woke up.
I opened the front door and gasped at the extravagant golds and reds of our Crimson Glory display—leaves the size of dinner plates, each ablaze with burgundy, rust, and yellow. It was as though their autumn exhibition, all by itself, was renouncing the ocean of fog that had engulfed the neighborhood. White clouds billowed and roiled in bewilderment, ready to surrender.Read more
N.T. Wright Visits "Planet Narnia" and Really Likes It There
N.T. Wright considers Michael Ward's Planet Narnia:
This introduction to a masterpiece is something of a masterpiece in its own right. Lewis’s ghost (whom Lewis envisaged as a possible benign presence around Magdalene College, Cambridge) has reason to be grateful that the crucial discovery was made by someone capable of expounding it with such subtlety and depth. There are tiny blemishes ... but the overall effect is remarkable. Michael Ward has written a book whose “donegality” is the medieval scholarship, the poetic craftsmanship, the philosophical acumen and the imaginative genius of the self-consciously Jovial Lewis himself. It would be a great pity if the still prevailing Saturnine mood of our times, which has belittled and sometimes even reviled Lewis as a thinker, were to blind us to his remarkable literary, philosophical, cosmological and theological achievement.
Do You Like Writing? Editing? Publishing? Need a Job?
Come work with me on this fantastic team of writers, editors, and designers.
Seattle Pacific University is hiring a new Managing Editor for Response magazine. Make a difference. The print magazine has 58,000+ subscribers, and then there are the others who visit us online.
Subscribe to the print publication for free: Email me at jeffreyo@spu.edu with your mailing address.
And find out more about the job here. Or just keep reading after the jump...
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Inglourious Basterds (2009) - guest review
In the last several weeks, I’ve had several interesting debates online about the film Inglourious Basterds, by Quentin Tarantino. I’m currently working on a two-part article of my own, describing my complicated, sometimes-contradictory thoughts and feelings about the film. It is difficult for me to give any simple response about it; I am as troubled by how the film has been marketed as I am impressed with the craftsmanship of several of the movie’s vivid sequences. So… stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, I’m happy to share with you the thoughts of my observant friend Ryan Holt, who is among the film’s enthusiastic defenders. Think it over. And for another perspective, here’s a link to Michael Leary’s response at Filmwell.]
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In the beginning, there was the “early Tarantino,” the man who gave the cinema such distinct and original exercises in pulp nostalgia like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown. These films marked a bold new voice in the realm of cinema, a pseudo-successor to a filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, but marked less with the spirit of the avant-garde than with the spirit of the fanboy. Tarantino’s films displayed, and were perhaps defined by, a kind of youthful exuberance as well as an extensive knowledge of the medium. Even when his early films made missteps, Tarantino’s excitement could be felt in every second.
At the turn of the millennium, the “middle Tarantino” took over. This Tarantino seemed to be in more in love with himself than the films he was making, descending more and more into self-indulgence and less impressive craftsmanship with outings like Kill Bill and Death Proof. Such films offered glimpses of a potentially brilliant filmmaker beyond what he had previously achieved, but they also gave shape to Tarantino’s most juvenile instincts. Tarantino was willing to play on a slightly bigger scale (he was now tackling the action genre with gusto), but these films lacked the tightness of his previous efforts, and, on occasion, the dazzling style. At times in both films, Tarantino seemed less like himself and more like another filmmaker trying to provide a pastiche of Tarantino’s established style. One could be forgiven for thinking that the Tarantino had begun his decline as cinematic artist.
Now a new Tarantino has emerged, arguably a better one than either of the previous versions. He shares many of the same stylistic hallmarks as the two previous Tarantinos, but he also demonstrates growth, with a greater understanding of his own craft and the kind of story he has been telling. With his latest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has finally made the leap from a distinct filmmaker to a great one, producing a film both of remarkable style and craft, but also of impressive substance.
Whether Tarantino actually knows the full extent of what he’s managed to produce in Basterds is up for debate. Tarantino has declared that he does not write with subtext in mind, and merely delights in what he finds afterwards. In other words, he enjoys playing film critic to his own work. Whether it was in his mind beforehand or after he had finished the script, interviews give the indication that Tarantino knows exactly what he’s made in Basterds. In these interviews, he’s not only disputed some of the simpler readings of Basterds, but has claimed that he was very much trying to make something more ambitious than his previous films (apparently viewing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood caused Tarantino to realize that he needed to take things up a notch). Indeed, the film itself makes this point rather overtly; with the kind of self-assured arrogance and bravado only a filmmaker like Tarantino would attempt, the last line of Inglourious Basterds is “This may just be my masterpiece.”
Such a claim would be damning if the film failed to deliver, but Basterds may genuinely be Tarantino’s finest outing. Stylistically, Basterds manages to impress. The visual palette for the film may be more restrained than in other Tarantino films, but it follows in the tradition of the World War II period piece, with the occasional dash of Tarantino attitude, carefully saving its full strength for the astonishing climax, which arguably contains the most iconic image of Tarantino’s career. If nothing else, the quality of the production design gives the film an aesthetic elegance not present in his other works.
But Tarantino has always been a writer’s director, and his writing has never been sharper. Basterds showcases Tarantino’s usual desire for toying around with his structural concerns. The narrative unfolds at a unique pace, in a unique way, often indulging strange asides. But rather than awkward, it feels strangely coherent, a mix of constant surprise and satisfactory development. Inglourious Basterds boils down to a two-and-a-half hour suspense game, each sequence upping the ante until things (literally) explode. The very fact that Tarantino can produce a twenty minute dialogue sequence and maintain the simmering suspense throughout puts him in the league of the best writer/directors around.
Such moments would not work if the characters failed to engage, but Tarantino has become more successful at his ability to craft fictional individuals. In previous Tarantino films, characters spoke almost interchangeably in so-called “geek speak,” with super-cool tone and obscure references to pop culture, and sometimes even with the same rhythms. Here, Tarantino offers distinct vocabularies to each of these individuals, each with the same level of affection, and the film is gladly devoid of the gimmicky references that have clouded his previous films (where references to the history of cinema occur, they do so because they are justified by the characters and the story itself).
Brad Pitt’s Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of the Basterds, is exactly the kind of character we expect from Tarantino, broadly drawn and darkly funny. As in Burn After Reading, Pitt excels and delivers pitch-perfect comedic timing. But Melanie Laurent’s Shosanna, stunning and subdued, feels more like a character from a Bertolucci film than one crafted by Tarantino, only dressed up in expected Tarantino-isms during a rather striking moment set to David Bowie’s “Cat People.” This disparity between characterizations would produce a rather schizophrenic film were it not for one more lead character to bring them together: Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa. Landa, a villain for the ages, treads both the more cartoonish waters of Lt. Raine and the more subdued territory of Shoshanna, goofy one moment, composed and charming the next, and cold and vicious soon after.
None of these protagonists, or even any of the characters in Inglourious Basterds, can be considered virtuous. Tarantino did this intentionally (he suggested at a press conference that if the film has a moral, it could be “everybody is everybody,” that there are no strict definitions of hero or villain), flipping the roles that World War II cinema has traditionally applied to the two competing forces in World War II. Here, the American forces fighting the battle are vicious and brutal, near psychopathic in their bloodlust. Raine orders his troops to utilize the fighting methods of the Native American Indians, a reference which in and of itself calls to mind America’s own past moral failures as much as it connects the face of Jewish vengeance with that of another culture. While the two historical figures, Hitler and Goebbels, are turned into comic buffoons without much humanity, the remainder of the Nazi’s are given a kind of humanity that the American Basterds never manage. Colonel Landa, the most villainous figure of the bunch, may not be a Nazi at all; he even states at one point that he participates in the Nazi party not because of any fervor, but merely because the Nazis offer an avenue to utilize his own unique talents. Last of all, Shosanna, the holocaust victim of the story, emerges as an innocent victim at the beginning of the story, but turns into a chillingly vicious seeker of vengeance by the end. Thus, the title of the film seemingly not refers to the titular group of American warriors led by Lt. Raine, but the whole spectrum of characters on display. In Tarantino’s picture of World War II, everybody is a basterd.
Thus the scenes of so-called anti-Nazi violence defy simplistic categories of revenge fantasy. The first notable event, where the Basterds watch with glee as a Nazi officer is beaten to death with a baseball bat, gives the Nazis a palpable humanity and a kind of nobility, while the Basterds are painted as bloodthirsty sociopaths who delight in bloodshed. A shoot-out in a bar gives a Nazi officer the role of an innocent casualty, a young father just trying to survive to parent his newborn child. The spectacular climax of the film goes for the edge of a horror film, recalling the climax of Carrie; the brass of the Third Reich all meet their maker, but they are a faceless mass of individuals trying to escape the horrible fate of burning alive in a horrible spectacle.
As with Kill Bill, Tarantino illustrates that revenge can never be quite as clean and tidy as we expect it to be. Shosanna learns that the hard way. She spends the film expertly crafting her grand revenge in the cinema (in a rather poetic move on Tarantino’s part, the cinema itself brings down the regime of the Third Reich, a retaliation for the Nazi’s ruination of the promising German cinema culture in turn for a propaganda machine, another idea running through this film’s subtext), but never lives to enjoy it, largely because even she, who has more reason to hate the Nazis in a deeply personal way than anyone else in the film, cannot keep her categories straight. She takes pity on a Nazi officer, and her act of mercy deprives her of her life. Only her ghost — footage she recorded and spliced into the Nazi propaganda film on display — watches the Nazis meet their end.
Despite painting his world in shades of gray, Tarantino does allow for one kind of firm moral judgment. In Basterds‘ last scene, Colonel Hans Landa receives poetic justice of an almost Dantean order. Throughout Landa has displayed himself a man of no principle or ethic, and he makes the attempt to slip effortlessly from his identity of Nazi “Jew hunter” to the identity of war hero, shaking off his legacy of brutality. But savage warrior Aldo Raine, a man of some kind of code as well as a man of blood, refuses to let that happen. In the way Tarantino films the scene, the person of Landa almost vanishes from the frame, replaced by the bloody image of the swastika that Raine carves into its forehead. Perhaps there are some identities we create for ourselves that are so unspeakably monstrous we can never truly escape them.
But when Tarantino is so intent on having so much fun at the same time — after all, he has laced his film with an abundance of humor — can all of this hit home? Such ideas have, in all likelihood, been lost on the vast majority of the audience who went to see the film, who merely had a good time. But the fact that the film works as entertainment does not deny the story’s depths or complexities, and those who enjoy it just as a good time are only crediting Tarantino’s aptitude for entertaining cinema, not denying his ability to tell a story that is something more.
Inglourious Basterds stands as a fascinating work of art, one of those rare films that plays broadly and viscerally and intelligently at the same time. Basterds may fall short of perfection (the movie often feels like a condensed version of a much larger World War II epic), but who needs perfection? Inglourious Basterds is always astonishing. Tarantino’s proved that he has still got it, and we can only hope that he does not lose it anytime soon.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
[This two-part post about Quentin Tarantino's style and the release of Inglourious Basterds was originally published at Good Letters, the Image blog. I have also posted a guest review of the film by Ryan Holt.]
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NOTE: The following post contains spoilers.
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Part One
In elementary school, I read an interview with the young star of my favorite sitcom, Mork and Mindy. That was thirty years ago. But I still recall Robin Williams’ remembrances of childhood — particularly his love for model-making. And it wasn’t just ordinary model-making. He’d take several plastic model kits, mix up their pieces, discard the instructions, and glue the stuff together into bizarre machines, robots, and vehicles of his own invention.
This comes to mind whenever I see a Quentin Tarantino film. Does any contemporary filmmaker work with more childlike enthusiasm? Tarantino’s movies are audacious pictures made with pieces from the puzzles he loved as a young man. Recently on Jimmy Kimmel, he explained that his dream of adulthood was shaped by his father’s mastery of movie trivia. He wanted to become a “movie expert.”
Mission accomplished: Tarantino’s scenes can be footnoted as heavily as T.S. Eliot’s poetry. Few directors demonstrate both an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and command of its techniques. Few deliver bolder images, develop more colorful characters, or pen dialogue that sticks the way his does.
But you can also tell that the young Tarantino wasn’t raised on kids’ stuff. His imagination drew from reservoirs of violent media. The story goes that, on his seventh birthday, Tarantino was “treated to” a double-feature of The Wild Bunch and Deliverance. He lived on a diet of crime flicks, martial arts and samurai epics, and exploitation films.
Speaking of Williams — there’s a moment in The Fisher King when his character pulls a champagne-cork wire from the garbage, cleverly twists it into a dollhouse chair, and remarks, “You can find some pretty wonderful things in the trash.” That’s what Tarantino does again and again, crafting memorable moments of cinema from the lurid, the crass, and especially the violent.
I haven’t come to bury Tarantino, but I haven’t come to praise him either. No filmmaker leaves me feeling so conflicted, torn between admiration and revulsion. Two things complicate my experience. First, the violence. It’s not that his movies are violent; it’s how they’re violent. He knows how to make us squirm like bugs pinned to a board. He cultivates riveting suspense through conversation and editing, until the threat of violence becomes certainty. The violence itself isn’t so remarkable — it’s that edgy and tangential talk during the buildup, and in the bloody aftermath. But he does it so often, and to such extremes, he makes me feel tortured.
Which brings me to the second point: He never lets me forget that he’s there, enjoying his own power over the audience.
I’ll never forget Reservoir Dogs. Those gun-toting crooks came to life through dialogue that was both hilarious and profane. And despite its extreme violence and nerve-wracking suspense, the film’s conversations were riveting — they were musical, percussive, hilarious, ironic, tangential, and full of surprises. Every scene seemed to be a place set for unexpected discussion.
Still, in that now-legendary scene in which a merciless torturer smugly carved up a captive policeman, he tested the limits of his audience’s endurance. But for what purpose? I went out feeling as if I’d been tricked, seduced into witnessing something obscene, something harmful. No justification I’ve read seemed sufficient; the whole sequence seemed designed to frazzle our nerves.
A friend praised the film — specifically excited by the torture scene — saying “I haven’t felt so alive in a long time!” It made me wonder: Is Tarantino drawn to the adrenalin of violence because, having lived on a steady diet of the stuff, he’s become “comfortably numb”? I’m still wondering.
By contrast, I loved Pulp Fiction. It wasn’t the violence. Its cast of buffoonish crooks were hilarious in their obvious error and moral relativism. When Vincent Vega, purchasing drugs from a dealer, lamented the moral depravity of a young punk who had scratched his car with a key, I howled.
So much stylistic mastery, so many conventions overturned — and all of it stitched together with affection and humor. Meanwhile, the short stories progressed from tales of wish-fulfillment revenge to a conclusion in which a violent man cast off violence and determined to “walk the earth” as a nonviolent savior. It was full of Tarantino’s typical “Look what I can do!” bravado, but I began to hope he was maturing.
Jackie Brown impressed me even more. Tarantino the Show-Off took a step back. He submitted to the conventions of a genre story, and lifted up his actors and the storyteller — Elmore Leonard. I walked away believing in that world and thinking more about the story more than its artist.
I wrote admiring reviews of Kill Bill, Volumes One and Two, exhilarated by its amusement park ride through the styles of fight flicks from around the world. But something troubled me. It was the sense that Tarantino was showing off, switching genres and tones acrobatically to prove how adept he was with each. Worse, he couldn’t resist those sequences that put us on the rack again, to see how far he could stretch us. And that opening line — “Do you think I am… sadistic?” — seemed like just another wink to the audience, making it all about him.
But by the time I saw Grindhouse, I was tired of the exhibitionism. For all that he did well in his half of the film, Death Proof, he was still in show-off mode, his own expertise on other movies becoming the very subject of his work.
While I can agree when critics point out all that he does so well, I’m not drawn in anymore. I can’t suspend disbelief. My enjoyment of his strengths is failing because he’s always pointing to himself, even as he jolts the audience to see how much they can take.
Do you think I am… moralistic? Whatever. I don’t want to be a bug squirming on a pin, justifying the abuse because the torturer’s bait is tasty and the violence makes me feel “so alive.”
So...what about Inglourious Basterds?
Part Two
Inglourious Basterds is one of the year’s most talked-about films. And rightly so.
It takes chutzpah to tell stories of Jewish-American soldiers who hunt Nazis, capture them, then bash their heads in and scalp them. And an additional dose of ego to illustrate an alternate ending to World War II, in which various agents set a trap for the Nazi leaders.
Most viewers relish the sight of an enemy defeated. So Inglourious Basterds, offering audiences the chance to see history’s most notorious criminal suffer as his victims suffered, seems a shameless ploy for box office success. Sure enough — Basterds is a huge success. And you could feel the celebratory glee in the audience as Nazis were beaten to a bloody pulp onscreen.
But the movie is audacious in ways that impress me as well, ways that typically sentence a film to obscurity. I won’t argue with critics who praise Tarantino — or should we thank Brad Pitt? — for drawing American moviegoers to a lengthy, subtitled picture built primarily of long conversations across tables. That should broaden the horizons for many moviegoers — and, hopefully, the studios.
And while Brad Pitt gets the marquee credit, Basterds’ true star is a little-known German actor named Christoph Waltz. Waltz plays Col. Hans Landa, the Nazis’ own Sherlock Holmes, known as “the Jew Hunter” for reasons that become obvious. Many call it a “star-making” performance, but Landa’s performance is so complex that I wonder how many future scripts are worthy of his gifts. Landa is frightening, funny, unpredictable, and inspired — the most interesting villain I’ve seen since Hannibal Lecter.
Also compelling, Melanie Laurent plays the Jew that Got Away — a young woman who slipped through Landa’s fingers. Shosanna looks like the younger sister of Kill Bill’s The Bride, and carries the same capacity for long-term revenge. By comparison, the titular Nazi-killers are not much more than comic relief. Shosanna is the film’s beating heart, a rhythm that quickens as she finds opportunity for spectacular vengeance.
But in spite of the film’s marketing pitch — Come to the hyperviolent hootenanny! — Tarantino has something better than vengeance on his mind. The film subverts its much-anticipated finale so that viewers’ vengeful impulses are challenged. Tarantino has never told a story of white hats versus black hats; he knows that Nazis can have moments of nobility, just as righteous Allied warriors can exercise craven bloodlust. There’s a lot here worth discussing. I’ve come to appreciate that this really is a brilliant film. Read Ryan Holt’s review here, and a lengthy conversation at The House Next Door: Part One, Part Two.
Nevertheless, the movie's failure to captivate me has a cause: Quentin Tarantino. How was I to see the film’s strengths clearly? This is a guy who pumps up a crowd of fans before a screening, shouting, “YOU GUYS WANNA [EXPLETIVE] UP SOME NAZIS? LET'S BRING IT!" Does he enjoy this? Is he baiting them into a situation where their eagerness for revenge fantasies will be complicated?
Further, if I’m to appreciate any of his provocative questions about violence, he would do well to leave behind the gratuitous, graphic images that have become his trademark and inspired so many time-wasting imitators. Torture scenes, on-camera sodomy, eyeballs plucked out and squashed underfoot, an ear carved off with a pocketknife, and on-camera scalpings have not added any value to the movies in which they occurred, and they’ve disrupted my suspension of disbelief. His urge to affect his audience interferes with his capacity to inspire and enlighten them.
And if you want to encourage thoughtful reflections on violence, why glorify the notorious “torture porn” director Eli Roth with a major role in the movie — especially when he can’t act?
Some of Tarantino’s defenders have summoned the words of Flannery O’Connor: “To the hard of hearing you have to shout.” But the shocks in O’Connor’s work came in a context that made them revelatory, and from conviction that the “hard-of-hearing” should be jolted out of complacency. Isn’t it also true that too much gratuitous shouting might be the cause of cultural deafness in the first place? Can’t too many unnecessary jolts make us numb?
Tarantino’s words in the second paragraph of this article — (caution: graphic sexual terms) — demonstrate his preoccupation with playing the puppeteer and making us jump when he pulls the strings. Such declarations make me reluctant to join his audience again. I don’t go to the movies to be manipulated, tortured, or violated in any way.
I’m interested in art that leads me to something more than what I think I want, and something bigger than the artist’s ego.
Tarantino also disrupts my interest during the movie, interrupting my attention with “stunt casting” (like Mike Meyers in a distracting cameo) and references to his own past triumphs. In the opening scene, Landa gulps down a “tasty beverage” provided by his host — his target — in an obvious reference to Pulp Fiction’s Jules. Later, the voice on a telephone is obviously Harvey Keitel — a clever but distracting cameo included as a wink to his fans.
We’re also constantly informed, through allusion and dialogue, of his commentary on other films. Each scene seems to announce the scenes that inspired it. (Basterds’ climax revises the end of Cinema Paradiso.)
Tarantino is, at times, like one of those popular, flamboyant, egomaniacal orchestra conductors, gesticulating wildly and turning to the audience to make sure we know that the show’s about him.
It’s a shame, because the concert really is impressive.
Increasingly, I’m grateful to artists who refrain from speaking publicly in a way that disrupts the audience’s experience of their own work. Some have gone to almost preposterous extremes to remain invisible. The novelist Cormac McCarthy is reclusive, and the director Krzysztof Kieslowski was tight-lipped, downplaying any suggestion that his work might be meaningful and inspiring.
By contrast, Tarantino has boasted that some of cinema’s greatest masters are his “peers,” and he praises Paul Thomas Anderson’s powerful There Will Be Blood because it encourages him to “step up his game.” It’s a sport, you see, and the best director will win.
He concludes Basterds by declaring a personal victory. A smug, knife-wielding character smirks at the audience — yes, we’re given the perspective of the victim — boasting, “I think this might just be my masterpiece.” To seal the deal, the director sucker-punches us with the bold text: “Directed by Quentin Tarantino.”
As if anyone could have forgotten.
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One of the most surreal moments in my adventures online: