Lost in the Inky Blackness of Fear

by Tony Dayoub

The softly lit visage of fortune teller Mrs. Bellane (Hillary Brooke, pictured above) is a reminder, mid-way through 1944's Ministry of Fear, that director Fritz Lang's films frequently (and almost obstinately) take place in dread-suffused, self-contained worlds. The setting for this noir is no different. An anti-Nazi propaganda film adapted from a novel by Graham Greene, Ministry of Fear plays out as if it were a dark nightmare in the head of protagonist Stephen Neale (Ray Milland). There are markers from the real world sketchily providing a backdrop that is vaguely lifelike. But much like in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, in which the labyrinthine New York streets don't resemble any Manhattan we're familiar with, Neale's London bears only the remotest affinity to its real-world counterpart.

UPDATED: Rosenbaum Sticks His Head in the Sand Responds

Over at the esteemed Jonathan Rosenbaum's site, he posts "Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino," a sequel to his previous post on Inglourious Basterds where he accuses the director of creating a "film that seems morally akin to Holocaust denial." In today's post he states:

I’m waiting for any of the enthusiasts for Inglourious Basterds to come up with some guidance about what grown-up things this movie has to say to us about World War 2 or the Holocaust — or maybe just what it has to say about other movies with the same subject matter. Or, if they think that what Tarantino is saying is adolescent but still deserving of our respect and attention, what that teenage intelligence consists of. Or implies. Or inspires. Or contributes to our culture.

Well, maybe he wouldn't have to wait so long if he opened the comments section on his site, and allowed some feedback. Or maybe he'd get some insight if he read some quite eloquent defenses of the film in the reviews and accompanying commentary at Dennis Cozzalio's SLIFR, Jim Emerson's Scanners, Greg Ferrara's Cinema Styles, Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running, or Bill R.'s TKoFYH , sites where intelligent debate by the film community is not only welcome, but thrives. Maybe Mr. Rosenbaum could find the guidance he seeks by looking up these discussions, instead of looking down at the rest of us. UPDATE: Mr. Rosenbaum was gracious enough to clarify some of his controversial comments at his site in a postscript to his original post, and in the comments section here (below), at Bill R.'s site, and at Bright Lights After Dark (maybe elsewhere, but these were the only sites I was aware of).

Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds

by Tony Dayoub



"We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us, and the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, at our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans will be sickened by us, the Germans will talk about us, and the Germans will fear us. Nazis ain't got no humanity! They need to be destroyed." - Lt. Aldo Raine

Happy Monday everyone. Hope you all had a great weekend. Let's get down to some way overdue business, and discuss the big movie this weekend, and perhaps this year, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. I saw it at noon on Friday, but held back on discussing it here for two reasons. One was my desire to contemplate the film a little longer than I usually do with other movies because it is complicated enough to merit such pondering. Notice I say complicated, not profound... more on that later. The second reason is because I plan on discussing it in toto, spoilers included. So anyone who hasn't seen it, please skip the rest of this post, go see it (requirement: you must see it in a theater), and come back once you have. Trust me, whether you end up liking the film or not, this is one flick that every movie lover should add to their lexicon.


Basterds is a World War II triptych with three protagonists: Nazi S.S. Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) a suave snake who has earned the nickname of "Jew-Hunter" for his ability to ferret out Jews hiding throughout occupied France; Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) is a young French Jew who manages to escape Landa's clutches before he massacres her family; and Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is the commander of a band of Jewish soldiers, nicknamed "the Basterds" by the Germans for the brutal retribution they carry out against them, always leaving scalped Nazi corpses behind. Eventually each protagonist's storyline crosses paths in curious ways, even if they themselves don't always meet, until synchronicity strikes at the end of the film, with Shosanna exacting her revenge on the Nazi elite at a movie premiere in a theater she owns, which also happens to be where the Basterds have decided to wipe out Hitler and his goons.

Much has been made of Tarantino's highly fictitious postmodern Holocaust revisionism for, as some say, irresponsibly playing fast and loose with facts and casting the former victims as vengeance seeking "perpetrators" no better than their Nazi executioners. However, unlike the recent District 9, which tries to trick the viewer into passivity by deceiving him with the faux-documentary look at Apartheid, Tarantino clearly instructs us from the beginning to look at Basterds as an alternate history, a fantasy, by beginning the movie with the words, "Once Upon a Time... in Nazi-occupied France..." He continues to encourage a dissociation from any reality by rooting his story in the history of film versus the history of the world. For instance, most if not all of the soundtrack is made up of musical cues from other films (and anachronistic ones at that). David Bowie's theme from Cat People (1982) is heard as Shosanna "gets into character" before the climactic movie premiere. Italian Western themes are also ubiquitous. And I just about had a heart attack after I heard the "Bath Attack" theme from Sydney J. Furie's B-movie, The Entity (1981), when Shosanna is reunited with Landa midway through the film. Truth be told, I might feel differently about the "exploitation" of the subject if I had any Holocaust survivors in my family. But I don't. And from my perspective, it doesn't look or feel like Tarantino is being disrespectful of the historical facts.




Instead, by inverting the players in his drama, Tarantino is simply presenting this violent parable as a reframing of history to highlight the ease with which genocide occurred, calling into question whether the complicity and collaboration by many Germans can truly be justified by the loyalist fervor that was promoted by the Nazi propaganda machine. In this case, it is the audience that is complicit in the cathartic joy of vengeance, cheering the "Bear Jew" (Eli Roth) when he whacks one Nazi soldier with a baseball bat, delighting at Bridget Von Hammersmark's (Diane Kruger) rage-filled dispatch of a young soldier after a personal insult, and reveling in Shosanna's laughing visage onscreen and aflame as the theater burns with the Nazi High Command locked inside. Tarantino is creating an alternate propaganda here. This last image of the burning theater more than anything recalls the evil of the gas chambers (its setting accusing moviegoers, us, of participating in the same celebration of killing the Nazis did), and any pleasure we take in the film's climactic destruction of the Germans complicates our usually automatic dismissal of any justifications heard in the past by Nazi apologists who say they were swept up by the populist frenzy at the time since we, the viewers, are also guilty of the same.

It just may be that some critics are right in accusing Inglourious Basterds of luridly exploiting a horrid chapter in humanity's history. But at least it does so without hypocrisy.

Movie Review: Valkyrie - Cruise and Singer Deliver a Solid Conspiracy Thriller

There is a tendency to pile on someone when they are down, and in the case of Tom Cruise it seems he may have abetted some of that with his freakishly self-righteous behavior in front of the public eye. His capital with his audience has been severely diminished, then, due to his public persona taking such precedence over his screen one. Add to that the incredibly risky and failing enterprise of his purchase of a stake in United Artists after his unceremonious release from his longtime production partner, Paramount. His first film for UA, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs (2007) was a flop. His newest one, the troubled Valkyrie, directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men), has had its release delayed a few times, now. So what a pleasant surprise it is to report that Singer and Cruise deliver one solid thriller that could help launch Cruise back into critical favor if not necessarily commercial success. The timing for this dark World War II-era drama's Christmas release is commercially ill conceived. Certainly, they have a film that I'm sure they believed had potential for some Oscars in the technical and story realm, which may explain trying to squeeze it out before the end of the year. Frequent Singer collaborator Christopher McQuarrie and cowriter Nathan Alexander have come up with an exciting script based on the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, on July 20th, 1944, hatched by some of his closest officers. The problem is that, as we all know, they failed. It is hard to see how such a downer will succeed during the joyous holiday season. It's a shame really, because Tom Cruise is great in the role of the plot's ringleader, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Frequently dismissed as a celebrity personality more than a true actor, Cruise is excellent in the part. Just like other larger than life movie stars like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, Cruise is remarkably adept at using his public persona to inform and enhance his performances. In this case, the embattled Stauffenberg, carrying the full and sole responsibility for the execution of the plot, and then contending with the ramifications of its failure is not unlike the present Cruise, the embattled actor carrying the full and sole responsibility for the success of this film and United Artists. Stauffenberg's self-righteous arrogance contributes to the implementation of his plan before his confirmation of Hitler's death, a significant blunder as it turns out. Unlike a Sean Penn or Robert De Niro, Cruise is no chameleon in this one, although he can be (see Tropic Thunder). For instance, there is no trace of a German accent in his performance. But Singer effectively dismisses the need for one in the opening of the film using an artistic effect reminiscent of a similar one that occurred near the beginning of The Hunt for Red October (1990). Perhaps Singer is the best director to effectively interpret this story. Singer is an expert at servicing the entire cast in an ensemble drama, as is evident in The Usual Suspects (1995), and his two X-Men films, so that no one seems underutilized. Here he accomplishes that nicely, giving all the actors, such as Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard, Bill Nighy, Terrence Stamp, and Tom Wilkinson, their moments in the film. And the director brings some nice surreal touches to the film, often using the one-eyed Stauffenberg's glass prosthesis to induce a small touch of paranoia at inopportune moments. Recalling some of the best conspiracy thrillers of the seventies, Valkyrie is a suspenseful film that should satisfy even Cruise's detractors. Hopefully, it will succeed commercially as well, saving the perpetually endangered United Artists and Cruise's career. Valkyrie opens nationwide on Christmas Day. This entry first appeared on Blogcritics on 12/6/2008.

Movie Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - Innocence and Horror Overlap to Create a Powerful Story

Mark Herman's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, adapted from the 2006 book by John Boyne, is a riveting look at the Holocaust from the perspective of Bruno (Asa Butterfield), an 8-year-old German boy. Bruno's father, Ralf (David Thewlis), is a Nazi soldier who has just been promoted. His wife (Vera Farmiga), is proud of her husband's advancement, and oblivious to the horrors the Nazis are secretly perpetrating against the Jews in the name of the Fatherland. The promotion forces Bruno and his older sister to move to the country with their parents. When Bruno spies a faraway farm populated by strange workers in pajamas through his bedroom window, he asks his mother if he can go play with the kids in the pajamas. His mother and father have a quick argument, which leads to the boarding up of said window. Ralf has been given the post of commandant over a concentration camp, a fact that Bruno's mother never wants her son to find out. Bruno, intrepid explorer that he is, ends up meeting a boy, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), on the other side of the electrified fence surrounding the camp. He visits the boy daily, providing food and learning about Shmuel's second-class status as a Jew. While Bruno tries to reconcile the denigrating daily life his friend faces at his father's camp with the kinder image he has of his dad, Bruno's mom's sanity starts to erode as the full impact of the atrocities committed on the Jews is slowly revealed to her. Boyne's story is moving, but even though the film seems to be earning recommendations by family groups, caution should be used when taking anyone under fifteen to see it. The film's ending is strong. It does not shy away from bringing the full horror of the Nazis' campaign of terror right to the commandant's family's doorstep. Thewlis is particularly effective in this scene, as a man who has made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of a way of life that helps him repress his own feelings of inadequacy. The film's power lies in the juxtaposition of an innocent's comprehension of the horrifying events that surround him. Again and again, director Herman reminds us of these twisted overlaps. The pedestrian buildings of the camp almost look innocuous when surrounded by the beautiful countryside. It is only the dark smoke of the crematorium slicing its way across the sky, while Bruno swings on a spare tire from a tree, that signal the sickening cruelties of the camp. The kindness of Pavel (David Hayman), the family's Jewish servant, when patching up Bruno's knee after a fall, is shown in relief to the same man being beaten to death by a young Nazi soldier (Rupert Friend) after he accidentally spills the soldier's wine glass. Herman never lets you forget that the Nazi's ideology may not only have been beyond the boy's comprehension, it may be beyond most of humanity's. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas opens Friday, November 7th, in limited release in theaters across the country. Still provided courtesy of Miramax Films.

Seventies Cinema Revival: The Boys From Brazil

by Tony Dayoub



Ira Levin, author of such high concept novels as Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives gave us an interesting bit of science fiction with his novel The Boys From Brazil. The 1978 film adaptation attracted no small amount of talent. Starring film greats Sir Laurence Olivier (Wuthering Heights) and Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird), and directed by the once great Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton), the film is a guilty pleasure that has stood up surprisingly well thirty years later.



A frail looking Olivier, who had only two years prior played a sadistic Nazi torturer in The Marathon Man, now plays a Simon Wiesenthal-like Nazi hunter named Ezra Lieberman. Tipped off by young Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg in a very early role) that the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele (Peck) is alive and well in South America, Lieberman chooses to dismiss the man as a crank. For Lieberman, this is not new information. But when Kohler disappears after uncovering a meeting between Mengele and some of Hitler's top officers (one played by James Mason), he decides to investigate. Starting from Kohler's preposterous premise, that Mengele and his associates plan to assassinate 94 civil servants throughout Europe and North America, Lieberman goes on to discover a much more frightening conspiracy.


Mengele has implemented a plan, years in its formulation, to create another Hitler. Through cloning, and attempts at duplicating the Nazi leader's family environment (hence the assassination plans, since Hitler's civil servant father died when he was only 13), Mengele hopes at least one of the offspring will become the Führer of a Fourth Reich.


Lieberman starts grasping what is occurring at a gut level. This after he visits two unrelated women (played by Rosemary Harris - of Spider-Man fame - and Anne Meara - Ben Stiller's mom), in different parts of the world, whose husbands met an untimely death, and finding that their sons (Jeremy Black in multiple roles) look identical, while bearing a strong resemblance to Hitler himself.

Levin based his novel on extrapolations he made of some facts regarding Mengele, for example, his fondness for hideous experiments with children, particularly twins, during his tenure as Chief Medical Officer in Auschwitz, where he was known as the "Angel of Death". Another example was the plot point based on rumor that Mengele was hiding in South America, a rumor later proven to be true when Mengele died in Brazil in 1979.

Schaffner brings the same epic yet gritty flavor to the movie that he was known for in films like The War Lord (1965), Patton (1970), and Papillon (1973). Like in Papillon, which starred two film giants, Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, he benefits here from the tension created between Olivier and Peck. One feels the world turning topsy-turvy in Brazil just as it did in Schaffner's earlier sci-fi classic, Planet of the Apes (1968). Add to that, a wonderful score from Jerry Goldsmith, who collaborated with him so successfully in Apes, and you've got a thriller that flirts with, but never falls into parody. Listen to the score:



Peck is especially impressive as a black-hearted villain that so perfectly embodies the basest evil found in humanity. Well-known for his ability to portray decent human beings such as Mockingbird's Atticus Finch, Peck brings a particular exuberance at the chance to play such a role reversal from the parts he's been known for in the past. His ferocity is on display in the final confrontation between Lieberman and Mengele. Anyone who thinks you can't have a suspenseful fight scene between two elderly men has not seen this film. Olivier and Peck grapple on the floor while barking dobermans surround them, ready to attack the fight's victor. But Peck's vicious streak is most evident in the scene where he attacks a crony at a Nazi banquet, for failing to assassinate one of the men he's been assigned to. When the henchman's wife starts wailing in fear, Mengele growls, "Shut up, you ugly bitch!"


With other notable actors such as the legendary Uta Hagen (she taught both Pacino AND De Niro), Denholm Elliott (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Prunella Scales (Fawlty Towers), and Michael Gough (Batman), the film should be of interest to young performers.

At the Oscars, Olivier was nominated for Best Actor, Goldsmith for Original Music Score, and Robert Swink for Film Editing (the 123 minute film moves at a brisk pace).

A remake by New Line Cinema, to be directed by Brett Ratner (Rush Hour), was in the works for 2009, but with New Line folded into Warner Bros., the production is now in question.