Avatar (2009)

Here is an all too rare thing: a film that uses visual effects not to stun the audience into submission, but to create and display a totally new world. Never mind that Pandora—the fictional planet of James Cameron’s Avatar—is a place where everything seems to have evolved based on art direction rather than Darwinian theory; I feel as if I’ve really been there. Along with Oz, Middle-Earth, and that galaxy far, far away, Pandora joins the ranks of deeply, beautifully, and fully realized imaginative places. If National Geographic sent a team to Pandora, I’d buy the pictorial issue. How does a director top re-sinking the Titanic? This is how. And in 3D, no less. Avatar is a visual wonder.

Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a marine who has been injured in the line of duty and paralyzed from the waist down. This limits his prospects somewhat. It turns out, however, that Jake’s twin brother, a scientist, was involved in a special research project on the planet Pandora. The project involved using specially bred “avatars” (surrogate bodies) to blend with the natives of the planet—tall, blue, graceful, vaguely feline humanoids called Na’vi—to learn their ways. Before he could voyage to claim his avatar, however, Jake’s brother was killed by a mugger. Avatars, it seems, are expensive. Shame to waste one, especially since Jake—as a twin—is perfectly set to take over his brother’s job. The rewards, men in dark suits tell Jake, might even be lucrative enough to pay for surgery to fix his mangled spine and legs. And so Jake is off to Pandora, a planet which is composed mostly of rainforest and happens to be the one source of a powerful and costly substance called Unobtainium. No, really. Once there, Jake joins the avatar operation under the watchful eye of the cranky Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and the trigger-happy Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). It has been discovered that the primary Na’vi village (housed in a huge—and I mean huge—tree) sits right over the top of a rich Unobtainium deposit. The humans want the Na’vi to move. Of course Dr. Augustine the scientist and Col. Quaritch the marine have different ideas of how this move should be encouraged. And when Jake in his avatar body befriends Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of the Na’vi chieftain, both parties take an interest. But where do Jake’s interests lie?

There is little to nothing original about this plotline. It’s Dances With Wolves by way of Ray Bradbury, and the beats will be predictable to anyone familiar with either Westerns or science fiction. Avatar’s originality lies in the setting, not the story. So thoroughly does Cameron bring Pandora to life that, at times, the film feels more like a nature show than an adventure film. I didn’t know entirely what was CGI and what was location, and I didn’t care. Here we have floating mountains, shark-nosed rhinoceroses, brightly-colored soaring dragons that nest in cliffs like swallows, tree seeds that float and bob like airborne jellyfish, entire sections of forest that light up like glow paint in black-light, and fragile fan-like plants that retract at the slightest touch. Yes, I know the plants aren’t there, and are made of pixels—but they’re fragile. I can tell. The movie made me believe it. And the little fluorescent lizards that fly less like dragonflies than like helicopters? They’re pretty cool, too.

Much has been made of the fact that Avatar is offered in 3D,and for once the talk is merited. 3D has always struck me—even recently—as a gimmick. To reinforce this, my viewing of Avatar was preceded by a few previews reminding me of the bad uses of 3D: look! something is jumping off the screen! It’s a log! It’s a nose! It’s a chainsaw! Cameron wisely ditches this use almost entirely. He uses 3D to enrich the background rather than the foreground. The forests have real depth. The cliffs have real height (woe to the vertigo-inclined who see Avatar in IMAX format!). The creatures have real presence. When Cameron does fill the 3D foreground with something—plants, say, or floating seeds or falling ash—it serves to enhance setting or punch up the perspective. Only a few things fly at the camera—and those are rare enough to be genuinely effective. The 3D effects are not perfect. Some of the live-action 3D shots still look like 2D chopped up and rearranged. Nonetheless, this is a far more effective and subtle use of the effect than I’ve previously seen. Hollywood should take note.

Equally well-realized are the Na’vi characters (real and avatar). With their blue skin and feline ears, tails, and fangs, they are decidedly alien—and yet I could sense there was a real person in there. Neytiri and her clan are up there with Lord of the Rings’s Gollum when it comes to realistic digital creatures (no coincidence, either—WETA Digital worked on both films). Of course, credit must also go to the actors. Enough of Zoe Saldana (having a good sci-fi year between this and Star Trek) remains in Neytiri to make her by turns fierce, warm, suspicious, and (if it’s not too weird to say) more than a little sexy. Sam Worthington, playing it straight, is at least as convincing an avatar as a U. S. marine (his American accent is a little slippery). As the surly scientist-with-a-conscience, Sigourney Weaver gets to show some love of the tough and regular varieties, and the often underused Stephen Lang gets to chew a bit of scenery as a soldier from the napalm-in-the-morning school.

Avatar, like Titanic, has been running away with box office receipt records—and I would say rightly so. This is a movie that reminds us what movies have always been about: visual entertainment. For all his reputation as a gadgetmonger and gearhead, James Cameron is really a very old-fashioned filmmaker. Titanic was a classic melodrama spiked with a wicked good CGI shipwreck. The Terminator was a basic chase story, and Aliens was a war movie crossed with a haunted house story. Here we have an old school western epic, only set in space and with a budget of millions replacing a cast of thousands. Avatar is storytelling with all the stops pulled out. Those looking for literary subtlety or mythic resonance will be disappointed. Yes, there’s some social commentary thrown in: cracks about “this economy” and lines like “we will fight terror with terror.” And yes, there’s an eco-friendly, anti-corporate-raiding message to the whole thing. But these elements are tossed out as what they are, and are obvious. Themes about Jake, the family-less soldier, finding new communities with his coworkers and the Na’vi are present, but not really explored. And the central conceit of the Na’vi’s spirituality—that their whole world communicates electrically, the way brain synapses do, thus making Pandora a giant mind—is also underused, except as the source of a rousing, though unsurprising, deus ex machina (or, perhaps, anti-machina). Cameron’s Titanic collaborator James Horner is on hand to provide music, all of which is suitably grand. If Horner steals from himself occasionally, well, you should probably be looking not listening anyway.

Early in the movie, Jake, in his new avatar body, ignores all warnings and cautions and runs out into the jungles of Pandora, intoxicated with his newfound freedom and the use of new legs. Something of that breathless, headlong spirit pervades all of Avatar: a sense of freedom, newness, and exploration. There is vision behind this movie, but more than that, there is delight. At the end, I felt I had been somewhere real—not just inside a theater. Avatar is not flawless, but it is truly transporting. This is what big screens are for.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

You’ve seen the trailers, so you know there’s no deer-stalker hat and no “Elementary, dear Watson” in Guy Ritchie’s new take on Sherlock Holmes. What is in it are some solid performances (especially from Robert Downey, Jr.), some fun filmmaking tricks, a good bit of action, and a whole lot of the spirit—if not the letter—of the enduring Holmes legend. This is a Sherlock Holmes movie, all right, but not exactly like the ones before it. No one will mistake this for a BBC production.

The movie begins at the end of a case. Sherlock Holmes (Downey) and his friend, ex-military doctor John Watson (Jude Law) combine forces with Scotland Yard to nab fiendish murderer Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) just as he is about to commit another ritual murder. Seems the aptly named Blackwood has a fondness for butchering virgins amid Satanic scrawls, and has had London in a paranoid religious panic (He styles himself the devil’s wrath on mankind. Or something.). Now, however, he is for the gallows. This macabre case closed, by all appearances, Holmes and Watson return to their civilian lives: Watson to pursue his engagement to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) and Holmes to agitated boredom as he awaits his next challenge—and laments his friend’s immanent departure from bachelorhood and Baker Street. Two things, however, arise to shake Holmes from his cabin-fever malaise. One is the appearance of Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), a savvy con woman and former love-interest of Holmes who bears a couple of seductive offers of work. The second is the apparent resurrection of the executed Lord Blackwood from the dead. Since Blackwood had taunted Holmes with such a miracle after his capture, and since he was declared dead by none other than Dr. John Watson, the pair take a somewhat personal interest. Soon Holmes and Watson are embroiled in a mystery involving secret societies, illicit chemistry labs, and what looks like demonic magic. And of course, there’s the wily Ms. Adler to contend with.

Mr. Ritchie made a name for himself with a couple of kinetic crime movies set in the London underworld, and so it’s no surprise that he’s a sure hand with the seamier aspects of the story—murders, double-crosses, and politicians who say less than they mean are all in ample supply here. He also plays up the seamy side of the locale: this London is a muted, early-industrial-Gothic mud-and-brick stew—Dickens by way of Tim Burton. The plot twists and turns, sometimes ridiculously, but never cheats. We are shown everything we need to be shown, even if we—unlike Holmes—don’t realize it. This is surely a decent crime movie. But is it “Sherlock Holmes?”

Well, yes and no. The character of Sherlock Holmes is maddeningly elusive. The things we think we know about Holmes—the accessories, the stock phrases—come from later film and stage interpretations, not from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original beloved detective tales. Conan Doyle reveals little about Holmes’s dress or appearance. The detective’s appeal is in his own mysteriousness and eccentricities—and, of course, his prodigious intellectual skills. The Holmes of Ritchie’s movie has all of these, wrapped up in the rumpled charisma of Robert Downey, Jr. Downey already showed, in Iron Man, that he could play the smartest man in the room. Tony Stark, however, is a showboat. Holmes works just to please himself: because he cannot not work. With no focus, Holmes abuses substances, blows off steam in boxing matches, and engages in half-cocked experiments with anything at hand, such as guns and Watson’s bulldog (not, thankfully, at the same time). The role uses Downey’s looks to great effect, his large dark eyes always wide open, taking in everything around him, his facial tics conveying intelligence and annoyance in equal measure. His Holmes is not a contemplative man, but a compulsive one, a force of crime-solving nature. Yes, this Holmes fights a lot—but the Conan Doyle stories themselves had their fair share of fisticuffs and gunplay.

Downey is ably backed up by Jude Law’s more understated, but still dangerous, Watson. The film wisely recalls that Watson was a military doctor, a man who saw action in foreign wars, and is at least as quick with his revolver as Holmes is with his mind. Watson is Holmes’s ally. The police (story regular Inspector Lestrade makes an appearance) are Holmes’s foils. Holmes should show up the cops, not Watson, and that’s how it is here. Law strikes just the right notes: Watson is competent and sharp, but not the whirlwind Holmes is, which is as it should be. He and Downey engage in banter (much lifted wholly or in part from the stories) exactly as old friends should, with equal parts affection and exasperation. Their chemistry accounts for much of the movie’s appeal. Opposite them, Mark Strong (rapidly establishing himself in the Irons-Rickman line of creepy gentleman villains) is suitably inscrutable and menacing as the seemingly supernatural Lord Blackwood. This is a man so stylishly evil that they let him wear a black leather coat to his own execution. And as Irene Adler, Rachel McAdams at least goes smirk-for-smirk with Downey. I didn’t exactly believe the two as lovers, but they did seem to have great fun scheming together. Who knows? Maybe that’s what love is for a man like Sherlock Holmes.

The movie itself is uneven. Ritchie enlivens the first half with some nifty tricks. Holmes plans out his fights in his head before hand, explaining moves and probable consequences—a nice way of bringing sense to the inevitable post-Bourne-and-Gladiator blurs of action. He eschews expository dialogue and instead replays events after they happen, revealing how they came to happen as they did and saving Holmes some dreary speechifying. Sadly, these sorts of quirks vanish toward the end in favor of more straightforward action. The mystery is still interesting, but the movie has become less so, and that’s a bit of a letdown. One suspects that both Holmes and Ritchie are capable of more. The ultimate, uncovered plot is also probably more contemporary than Victorian, but so it often goes. To complain that this movie feels derivative in parts is a little backwards: after all, almost all our modern mystery tales are descended from Holmes. This isn’t so much a reboot of a formula as a reappropriation of it. And of course there is a set-up for a sequel or two. After all, the only one not totally satisfied when a case is closed is the restless Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes himself is, in a way, timeless. It is true that this is sort of Holmes crossed with Bond, but it’s the movie that’s modernized, not the characters. They stay rooted in their origins. As in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek movie, there are countless little details lurking about to get a nod or a chuckle from devotees of the tradition. Downey and Law are not the definitive Holmes and Watson, but I’m not sure a definitive Holmes and Watson are any more possible than a definitive Hamlet.

Ritchie and company have created two hours of good fun with some familiar characters. It’s only because it’s the legendary “Sherlock Holmes” that we want to expect more. Is Sherlock Holmes basically a mystery-action-adventure story? Yes. But it’s a smarter than average mystery-action-adventure story—and that, after all, is what Conan Doyle wrote, back when they were just stories, and not legend.

La Vie En Rose (2007)

Here’s how much I knew about French singer Edith Piaf before watching La Vie En Rose, the 2007 movie about her life: doodly-squat. And here’s how much I know after watching it: almost doodly-squat. This is one of the least factually informative “bio-pics” I’ve seen. I’m not being mean here: that’s a description of style, not quality. La Vie En Rose does a remarkable thing: it doesn’t so much look at a “life story” as simply at a life. If you want story, hit the library for books about Piaf. This is a movie of impressions.

Piaf’s father was a soldier who, before the first World War broke out, was a circus acrobat. Her mother was…a woman who thought she could sing. She couldn’t. She goes broke, and the father returns from war to pluck young Edith out of poverty to live with his own mother, a brothel-owner. Later, she lives with her father in the circus. Turns out, unlike her mom, Edith can sing, and can make money at it. So she does, first for her father, then for a pimp, then for managers. Some, she keeps for herself. She is famous. She has lovers. Her health fails and she grows addicted to various drugs to stop crippling arthritis pain. Eventually, as we all must do, she dies.

Such, I gather, is the outline of her life. But it is almost secondary in this movie. The movie instead lingers over moments and aspects: the doting care of the whores in her grandmother’s brothel; Edith’s confusion when an early benefactor is murdered by criminals; Edith’s vision, as a young girl, of Saint Therese, who says she watches over her. And, of course, the music. Piaf had quite a voice in her tiny, often bent body, and the film lets us hear it. Physically, she is embodied for the majority of the film by Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar for her efforts. Her Piaf is by turns feisty, afraid, stupid, savvy, endearing, and annoying. The performance is seamless. Had I seen this movie on its release, I might have dismissed it. But having first seen Cotillard as herself, and as a tough gangster’s moll in Public Enemies, it becomes clear how much artistry was needed to turn graceful, willowy Cotillard into fragile, arthritic Piaf (Cotillard does not, however, do the singing: you hear Piaf’s own voice). Supporting players are a mixed bag. Emmanuelle Seigner is heartbreaking as the whore who largely “adopts” young Edith, only to lose her, and Sylvie Testud is memorable as Edith’s long-time, tough-as-nails best friend Momone. Gerard Depardieu, for all his physical presence, hardly registers as an ill-fated nightclub owner.

The movie flashes back and forward somewhat, which tends toward confusion. Characters come and go without clear identification, or even sometimes resolution. And yet, by the end, it makes a kind of sense. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button used as its tagline Kierkegaard’s maxim that life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward. That movie didn’t deserve that tagline (not least because the whole premise is that Button does live backward). This one does. The final 15 minutes or so masterfully weave together one of Edith’s last public performances, her death and deathbed recollections, and a slightly earlier event where a young woman interviews Piaf with something like a version of “the Proust Questionnaire.” No coincidence, that: Proust was also French, and also knew something about looking backward at life. The movie lets these events comment on each other: things Piaf says in the interview recall events the dying Piaf remembers, which in turn fit with the notes of her singing. Some scenes recap what we have seen, others introduce new information. We learn, for example, that as a young woman, Piaf had a child, which died. Other movies would have made Freudian hay of this from the start. But the real Piaf did not reveal this to many people, and so the film withholds it as well.

And this is exactly right. We do not understand life forward. People do not walk into our lives with handy labels like “future spouse” or “career-changing expert.” Labels like that happen, and we apply them later, as needed. Nor do we know the ends of all the paths that cross ours. All biographies are constructs, and this movie understands that. It does a better job of any biography film I’ve seen, with the possible exception of A Beautiful Mind, of getting inside its subject’s head—both for good and ill. Piaf’s head was not, it seems, always a pleasant place to be. But it is where we must go to understand her life.

I’m supposed to be writing about a movie here, but I keep wanting to write about time and memory instead. That’s what La Vie En Rose made me think of, more than of Edith Piaf herself. While the movie contains its share of beautiful and wry moments (When, at the height of her career, her manager chides Piaf for holding up an appointment to let an amateur composer play her a new song, she replies, “What is the point of being ‘Edith Piaf’ if I can’t do this??”), I admired it in the end more for its artistry than its entertainment value, and some early parts are indeed tough going. It is an odd film, to be sure, but its differences are just as much virtues as flaws. American-made bio-pics, in any case, seem to be slumping of late (the recent Amelia was lamented as competent but soulless), and this offering from a couple of years ago and across an ocean provides a refreshing alternative to formula.

Even fewer words about Patrick Swayze...

This being a movie-themed blog, I suppose I should say something about the recent death of actor Patrick Swayze. Swayze was never really a big star in my Hollywood galaxy, and I only saw Dirty Dancing at most twice. This is probably a gender thing. Still, the guy managed to be in a few films of near-classic (Ghost and the aforementioned Dancing) or cult-classic (Roadhouse) status. Swayze tended to make the sort of films that, as NPR blogger Linda Holmes notes, you count yourself lucky if you find on TV on a sleepless night. This means he found his way into projects that managed to be both popular and entertaining--two traits that, strangely enough, don't always keep much company these days.

More to the point, however, is the fact that the media coverage of Swayze's death has largely focused on his character: his work ethic, his strong marriage, his devotion to various kinds of activism. Partly this is a backhanded way of pointing out his not-quite-A-lister status, which is fair: Swayze wasn't exactly Marlon Brando or Johnny Depp. But patterns are hard to fake, and if his colleagues all recall him as a stand-up guy, there's probably something to it. And that's refreshing. Swayze's death came at the tail of a week wherein we saw tennis champs and hip-hop stars behaving in some of the worst ways possible. The way Swayze is being remembered lets us also remember that, even in these times, fame need not come at the price of one's dignity or soul. And that, if nothing else, is worth a mention here.

Enchanted (2007)

Enchanted is a pleasant, silly, and occasionally subversive fractured fairy tale for those who like a little parody with their romance. A Disney product, it takes a if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em approach to the endless send-ups of “Disney movies” and turns the usual someday-her-prince-will-come genre upside down. Along the way, it takes shots at a number of familiar mouse-eared clichés, as well as at some live-action romantic comedy standards.

The movie begins like countless other Disney animated films. A voiced-over storybook narrator (Julie Andrews) introduces us to Giselle (voiced by Amy Adams), a sweet, plucky young woman who lives in the fairy tale kingdom of Andalasia. Giselle is the sort who lives in a Tudor-inspired treehouse in the woods surrounded by friendly singing animals (including a wiseguy-sounding chipmunk named Pip), and who just knows a charming prince will show up to be her One True Love. Sure enough, he does, in the form of the dashing (if a little dim) Prince Edward (voice of James Marsden). After Edward rescues Giselle from becoming troll food, the two decide to be married the next day. Unfortunately, the match runs afoul of Edward’s jealous stepmother (of course), the witchy Queen Narissa (voiced by Susan Sarandon). Narissa conspires to push Giselle down an enchanted well, banishing her to a place “where there are no happily ever afters.” That place? Times Square. Our Times Square.

And here the lunacy truly begins. The movie switches to live-action, with Adams now playing and not just voicing Giselle—who, though flesh and blood, still behaves exactly like an animated movie princess. Needless to say, she is utterly lost in rude, rainy NYC. Fortunately for her, she is discovered by divorce lawyer Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey), a single dad bringing his daughter home from karate practice. Of course the little girl, Morgan (Rachel Covey) is immediately smitten with the “real, live princess.” Robert isn’t so sure—-especially when he realizes it means explaining to his fiancée Nancy (Idina Menzel) why he has taken in an additional cute girl. The love-minded princess also plays a bit of havoc with Robert’s divorce law practice. Meanwhile, Edward (still Marsden) comes through the well to rescue Giselle with double-agent manservant Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) and Pip the chipmunk in tow.

As it moves along, the plot mixes fairy tale rescue with real-world romantic comedy, all played largely for laughs. Giselle retains her woodland-princess aura in the “real world,” and can still bond with animals. There’s a priceless scene where she enlists—-with a jaunty song—-standard New York vermin (think rats and roaches) to clean Robert’s apartment. The sight of a bona fide Disney princess chirping merrily about “scrubbing down the toilet” to a crowd of helpful house pests is pretty much worth the price of a DVD rental on this one. There’s also a huge song-and-dance number in Central Park that’s as infectious as anything from The Little Mermaid (Disney musical veterans Alan Menken and Steven Schwartz penned the songs, for added authenticity, and they seem to be having great fun spoofing themselves). Robert and Giselle also begin to affect each other, with him questioning her too-easy version of romance (“You never even went on a date??”) and her pointing out his too-dreary skepticism (“Every word out of your mouth is ‘no’!”) and giving him hints on how to romance Nancy. But they may be learning something else about themselves as well…

For all the dancing, singing, and winky jokes, however, this movie belongs lock, stock, and barrel to Amy Adams. With her soul in her eyes and her heart on her sleeve, Adams is note-perfect as a fairy-tale princess brought to life, down to every twitter, tremble, and twinkle. I particularly enjoyed the way that, when upset, she basically sighs “Oh, NO” with her entire body. But of course, Giselle is hardly ever upset. The role could easily slide into insufferable caricature, but Adams (to whom appeal seems to come effortlessly) finds just the right balance of silly and sincere to make Giselle’s transformation to physical (and eventually emotional) three-dimensionality enjoyable and actually, in its own way, believable. Giselle is a classic lovable eccentric, and the role gave Adams well-earned exposure and a Golden Globe nod.

The other “fantasy” characters are also well-drawn (if you will), and well-acted. Marsden gets his share of laughs as the relentlessly heroic though slow on the uptake Edward (he’s allowed to be much more amusing here than in his thankless, second-banana X-men role). Spall, as the shifty manservant, is in territory familiar from his Harry Potter appearances. But Nathaniel dons various daffy disguises on his search for Giselle, which allows Spall to play some silliness along with the sneak. We remember that he’s actually a rather pleasant chap under all that weasely typecasting. Sarandon also gets her live-action time in, gleefully munching scenery as selfish, nasty witch-queen Narissa. The movie pulls off a neat bit of reverse engineering: we’re used to animated characters being drawn to suggest the famous names who voice them. Here, real actors were cast who actually make credible cartoons, whether it’s Sarandon with her big eyes and queenly cheekbones, or Spall with his round, variously expressive face. Pip becomes a CGI chipmunk in the “real world” sections, and, while he no longer talks, I’d swear he squeaks in an appropriate New York accent.

The New York characters fare slightly worse. Morgan is a standard-issue cute kid. Poor Nancy is essentially around only to provide plot complications for Robert (and, ironically, accomplished Broadway star Menzel gets no songs). She doesn’t register, and it tips the story’s romantic hand too far too early. If there’s a weak link, unfortunately, it’s Dempsey, who looks the cute-lawyer-cum-nice-guy-dad part just fine, but can’t seem to make Robert a real New York Prince Charming. It’s hard to say exactly what goes wrong. Part of the blame has to go to the screenplay—-Robert is a bit underwritten—-though Dempsey’s approach to the role is also a little too laid back. He should have a repressed sparkle, but he too often seems to be only a nice but bland guy. Really, though, Dempsey is simply overmatched; Adams just plain steamrolls him in their scenes together.

The movie itself stumbles a bit by resorting to a conventional ending (although, depending on your movie viewing history, it may not be the convention you expect), but by that time I’d grown to have enough affection for the characters (especially Giselle) to pull me through. And if some of the visual effects toward the end look a little cheesy, it’s best to pause and reflect that, well, this is a film that started with singing bunnies. Overall, this is a fun bit of filmmaking: a genre parody that is also a quality example of the genres it spoofs, and a family film that doesn’t insult the intelligence of any age groups concerned. After all, what are romantic comedies but fairy tales for adults? As an attempt to get the best of both those worlds, Enchanted manages to be (you guessed it) rather enchanting.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Just when you thought this summer’s movies couldn’t get much weirder, here comes Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a rip-roaring, fast-talking mash-up of war movie, western, film noir, movie criticism, and God-only-knows-what-else. It’s bizarre, violent, and eccentric, and to say it plays fast and loose with history is the understatement of the summer. It’s also incredibly well-made and vastly entertaining. Tarantino is admittedly an acquired taste – some love him, some don’t. Those in the first camp will find the filmmaker in “glourious” form with this film.

The movie begins “once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France.” A French farmer gets a visit from Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Nazi officer recently assigned to hunt down Jews remaining in the area. He smiles and asks for a glass of milk. He is just here to tie up loose ends, he says. But Landa is not the clumsy bureaucrat he seems. He slyly deduces that the farmer is hiding Jews. He finds them, and orders his soldiers to open fire. Only the teenage daughter of the Jewish family, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), escapes alive, fleeing across the fields.

Next we are introduced to the “inglourious basterds” of the title: a crew of American soldiers (mostly Jews) handpicked by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) to secretly parachute into France and, as Raine bluntly puts it, kill Nazis. Raine is from Tennessee, and claims to be descended from American Indian warriors. He orders his men to collect Nazi scalps. He’s not kidding. Soon, even Adolf Hitler has heard of “Aldo the Apache” and his brutal Basterds. One of them, Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) has a special talent for dispatching Nazis with a baseball bat to the head. He’s not kidding, either.

A few years into the Basterds’ reign of terror, we meet Shosanna again, living in Paris under an alias and running a cinema. She meets a young Nazi (Daniel Bruhl) who has a keen interest in film (and in her). Turns out he’s a decorated war hero, and the star of a propaganda film made by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man. He thinks Goebbels should be interested in this young woman, too—but not for the reason you think. Meanwhile, the Basterds are assigned to hook up with British and German secret agents as part of a plot to kill Goebbels at the propaganda film’s premiere. Only it seems the premiere is being moved to a new, smaller venue. Guess who owns it.

All these plots and people (plus a few more) come together in ways only Tarantino could devise. Along the way, the movie dips into many and varied wells of cinematic and cultural inspiration. Consider the opening, where the officer hassles the poor farmer. Tarantino overlays it with Beethoven played on Spanish guitar, and we realize that this is a riff on all those “spaghetti western” scenes where some bad dude harasses the local peasantry. Or consider the later scene in a tavern where at least two double agents are drinking, which is as tense as anything Ian Fleming or Graham Greene ever served up. Tension is a key ingredient in Inglourious Basterds. Alfred Hitchcock is said to have explained that when a bomb under a table goes off, that’s surprise—but when we are told there’s a bomb under the table but don’t know when it will go off, that’s suspense. A number of bombs—real and metaphorical—take their time going off in this film. Being a Tarantino film, there is violence aplenty, but this time the director saves it for controlled bursts. We know it’s coming, but not always when or to whom. This underlying tension helps keep the film from dragging over its 2-½-hour length. The movie asks for enagement; there are treats for the brain as well as the eyes here.

The acting is also a treat. Pitt is the “name” actor here, of course, and he tears into Aldo Raine with gusto, affecting a Tennessee twang and a mouthful of backwoods trash-talk. Raine literally takes no prisoners. With a never-explained scar on his neck and a mean, sneaky moustache framing his upper lip, the lieutenant leads his Basterds on their Nazi-killing sprees with what can best be described as delight. Raine is the distillation of every movie cowboy-soldier from Patton on down, and he really does want them Nazi scalps. It’s a performance that’s funny and fearless, and it confirms my belief that Pitt does his best work in quirky, comedic roles. On the Reich side, the find is Waltz. Movie Nazis are always cruel (as real ones tended to be), but Landa is actually smart. He affects a smarmy, slightly effacing manner and looks uncomfortable in his uniforms. But this is an act. The charm masks a ruthless intellect, and his lopsided smile never quite reaches his eyes. This is a man who can create menace by ordering food. He is a worthy antagonist not because of his firepower, but because he’s a brilliant detective. Waltz makes Landa a memorable villain; his presence lingers. Of course he and Raine are opposite numbers—skilled and dedicated hunters who tend to season their actual orders with their own agendas. You think you’ve seen these characters in movies before. Not these guys, you haven’t. Naturally they end up face-to-face. Think you know what will happen when they do? Guess again.

Surrounding these two are the usual treasure trove of odd Tarantino characters. Laurent, equal innocence and hatred shining in her big pale eyes, brings to Shosanna some of what Uma Thurman brought to the heroine of Kill Bill. Diane Kruger does a nice femme fatale turn as a German actress-cum-Allied-agent, and Michael Fassbinder strikes all the right plummy notes as her British contact. And if it looks like Eli Roth knows his way around a deadly bat, well, of course he does—he’s the guy behind the gruesome Hostel movies.

Oh yeah—the “revisionist” history. It’s no secret that Inglourious Basterds “basterdizes” (if you will) actual events quite a bit. Big deal. If this movie is about World War II, then Jaws was about sport fishing. WWII is just the backdrop. Somebody’s tails had to be kicked, and it may as well be Nazis (against almost any other enemy, actually, the actions of Raine’s men would be beyond appalling). There is real history on Tarantino’s mind here, but it’s the history of cinema. Above all, this is a film about movies. Almost every character knows or loves movies. Film as a genre and as a physical medium figures prominently in several key plans. The British agent is also a film critic. Goebbels preens and fumes like a Hollywood studio head. Raine’s troops view the execution of Nazi officers as “the closest we get to going to the movies.” I can’t recall a more self-consciously cinematic picture.

The self-attention is worth it, though. In his early efforts, Tarantino sometimes seemed to be trying too hard to be cool. This time, he seems to be trying harder to make a good movie, and he has. If the word can ever be applied to his kid-in-a-candy-store approach, this is the most mature film Tarantino has made to date. All the usual quirks are there—the whip-crack dialogue (even in subtitles), the obscure cultural references (G. W. Pabst will be getting his share of Googling), the preposterous characters and, yes, the bursts of over-the-top violence. But it all hangs together better than some of his other efforts, and the technique never overwhelms the story. Yes, District 9 was more thought-provoking, and Star Trek was more of a flat-out romp, but from a variety of purely artistic standpoints, this is the best movie I’ve seen this year. It may not make converts of anyone who’s not a Tarantino fan, but it proves once again that he’s a force to reckon with on the big screen. I can’t think of anyone else who could have made this film work. Actually, I can’t think of anyone else who even could have thought of this film, and I mean that in the best possible way.

District 9 (2009)

Neill Blomkamp’s engrossing (and sometimes plain gross) District 9 works the very un-funny flipside of all those noble “first contact” stories: what if, instead of treating the first aliens we encountered with reverence or tact, we humans treated them in the same rotten, self-centered way we’ve been treating each other for centuries?

The situation, cleverly filled in for us by talking-head “interviews” and “news footage” in the early minutes of the film, is this: a massive spaceship glides to a stop over Johannesburg, South Africa (why not?). Alien creatures are found inside, scared, lost, and malnourished. Apparently they cannot operate their own ship. Initial humanitarian (alienitarian?) outcry from around the world demands that the creatures (nicknamed “Prawns” due to their spindly, crustacean-like appearance) be helped, and so they are loaded down into a holding camp near Johannesburg. But, as so often happens, good will starts to run out. Once it appears that the Prawns are here to stay, no one wants the tall, ugly, clicking, trash-eating creatures in their backyards. Anti-Prawn riots break out, anti-Prawn signage goes up (my favorite: “No non-human loitering!”), and the refugee camp swells grossly into “District 9,” the slum that gives the film its title. Because the Prawns come with the requisite nifty not-of-this-world technology, of course weapons manufacturers are very interested. When it turns out that only Prawns can work Prawn weapons, though (something about DNA compatibility), even big business loses interest, and, with public opinion on the slide, the Prawns have to go.

Governments in South Africa and elsewhere have long since washed their hands of the refugee creatures, so the job of “relocating” the Prawns falls to a contractor: a security corporation with the ominously banal name of Multi-National United (MNU for short). Working with hired soldiers, MNU workers are supposed to canvass District 9 and get (force) Prawn recognition of trumped up “eviction notices” so that the Prawns can be shipped to an even rattier tent city (“District 10,” of course) farther away from the Johannesburg suburbs. There is nothing respectable about this operation. Oversight of it rests upon a weasely MNU middle manager named Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely), whose most remarkable achievement thus far has been marrying the daughter of the corporation president. Wikus is, of course, flattered, and heads for District 9 looking to pad his resume and full of chipper condescension. Prawns leave; Wikus gets his picture on TV—everyone (but the Prawns, of course) wins. But while on assignment, Wikus has a close encounter with some alien biotechnology that forces him to start taking a much more personal interest in the fate of the Prawns, especially when he learns what MNU really has in mind for them.

District 9 is the second science-fiction film this summer (along with Moon) to remember that sci-fi can be based on speculation as well as spectacle. This is that rare summer film that grabs you first with its premise, and only then with its visual effects (somewhat uneven here, though the all-CGI Prawns look great). Because the action takes place in writer-director Blomkamp’s native South Africa, much has been made of the film as an allegory for that country’s former Apartheid policies. That’s there, of course, but the xenophobia and corporate cruelty on display in the film represent a pretty general face of the evil that humans do. That South Africa was once the poster nation for this sort of unpleasantness is to the film’s benefit, but I don’t think it’s the whole point. Nigerian gangsters are also on hand to victimize the Prawns, and the mock newsreels show people of many accents wishing the Prawns would just go home. This is a film about human nature, and Blomkamp’s use of a quasi-documentary feel for the first half of the film helps lend realism to its sci-fi premise. We could be watching reality TV here, or a CNN special report.

And then there’s the lead character. I learn from a little internet reading that “Van Der Merwe” is a common South African name for characters in jokes, like Sven and Olle are for Garrison Keillor’s Minnesotans. And indeed, Wikus has much more in common with Steve Carell’s character from “The Office” than with the type of guy usually played by, say, Hugh Jackman. He cracks painfully lame jokes with underlings, calls everyone his mate, and chews out the hired soldiers for having more bullets than “the rules allow.” Wikus is, in short, a jerk. At first we follow him because he is the apparent focus of a documentary on the “relocation” effort. Sometimes we wish he wasn’t, especially when he merrily “aborts” a shack-full of incubating Prawn eggs (this involves a flamethrower). And yet, the screenplay doesn’t make him an utter monster. He likes his job. He really loves his wife, and she (rare for a boss’s daughter in movies) really loves him back. Wikus is not evil; he’s just selfish—but the movie shows how easily the one can slide into the other, and how close the most “normal” of us is to either at any given time. Copely’s acting is not the stuff stardom is made of, but he accomplishes the feat of letting us root for Wikus without necessarily liking him.

District 9 is also savvy in the way it portrays the Prawns. At first, we only see them as others do—they’re subjects of news reports and punditry, as well as some wretchedly inept running commentary from Wikus. Slowly, however, the story reveals them on their own terms, and we realize that some characteristics (like trash-eating) are the result of circumstances and are not innate to the Prawns themselves. Like all disparaged ethnic groups, they’re not nearly as backward as outsiders think they are, and like all refugees, they’d like themselves to “just go home,” too. It’s to the film’s credit that it allows this change in perspective to sink in slowly, and that it never goes so far as to rob the Prawns of their potential danger. After all, we gun-and-knife-toting humans are no cupcakes, either.

This is not to say that District 9 is a masterpiece of subtlety. This is a film with a summer release date, after all, and by the end we’re firmly in action-movie territory. The themes remain, but they’re buried under gun-centric camera angles and splattery casualties that owe more to shoot-‘em-up online video games than to Orson Scott Card novels. Still, it’s admirable when a movie merely puts its brain to one side by its end, instead of abandoning thought altogether. And the ending, if not completely "happy," is satisfactory, with pretty much all the major players receiving what they deserve, including, I would argue, Wikus. After all, the guy has a lot to learn.

This is Neill Blomkamp’s first major directing effort, and it is a good one. It may well merit a sequel (and there are enough openings in the story to allow one). I more appreciate that its premise and story merit reflection. I don’t know that District 9 is the best movie of the year, or even of the summer. I do know that I saw it two days ago, and I’m still thinking about it. To me, that alone is worth the ticket price.