May 21 2009
This Movie Could Be the Coolest Ever
Alright, the moments when I would like to spend my time surrounded by the snobbiest of the French snobs, and even worse the people from elsewhere who like the ambiance of being surrounded by the snobbiest of the French snobs are few and far between. Yesterday was one of those days.
Yesterday Quintin Tarantino premiered his latest tour de force , Inglorious Basterds, at the Cannes Film Festival. The preview is here:
Something that many didn’t get before Tarantino is that there is absolutely an art form to gratuitous violence. Anyone can just rack up the body count and hope no one will notice, just like anyone can throw paint on a canvas and call it a Jackson Pollock, but Tarantino has mastered the whole plurality of forms of filmed violence. From the stylized mass killings in Kill Bill to the grusome and gritty slicing off of the ear in Resevoir Dogs, it’s there. It looks to me like it’s about to get taken up a notch.
What is a cooler idea than just saying “Screw it” and brutalizing the Nazis. We have movies about how hard WW2 was, we have movies about the strong and cruel Nazis victimizing the Jews, and for some reason that escapes me we don’t have many movies about how in a lot of ways we dominated the hell out of those goose-steppers. It’s a perfect archetypal setup, there’s the example of all that is evil, and so we kill the hell out of it.
I’m sure there will be more to it, but it’s the slaughter I’m looking forward to.
Stupid thing doesn’t open until August, but yeah, it should be awesome.
It looks very fitting.
His scripts are amazing, my favorite is Reservoir Dogs, but what’s great about Tarantino is he makes high art out of forms of film that the snobs would generally consider the lowest form of the art. A heist movie, pulp, spaghetti westerns, comic-style action, graphic novels, blacksploitation, he appreciates the art in these, which is what leads to his appreciation of the art of gratuitous violence.