An Inglorious Movie Recommendation - Tarantino's Basterdly Great Flick

Quentin Tarantino's movies don't usually appeal to the over 60 crowd, never mind take up a solid half hour of a car trip with your parents worth of discussion. But


did.

This is one hell of a movie. Because it's Tarantino entertaining (yes, the man deserves to be made into an adverb), because it's a movie an over 14 year old person can enjoy and is still making bagazillions, and because it's far more thoughtful than you might think at first.

And as a Jew watching the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy of a movie that probably every Jewish child (boy, for sure) had - of beating up on and killing Nazis (though maybe my fantasies weren't quite so scalping grotesque graphic) let me be straight: watching German soldiers, even the SS soldiers, getting beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat did not fill me with glee.

And here's a more subversive thought - I'm not sure that's what Quentin was hoping for. I'm not sure this film is even as much the Nazi killing porn the majority of viewers assume it to be. Once/if you've seen the movie ask yourself this: at the movie premiere, why was Hitler laughing? What was he laughing at? Quentin's thought about this more than we have, I'm certain of that. I believe he's pointing a finger at us, the viewer, indulging in the violence. Don't get me wrong, Tarantino's having his cake and eating it too, because we all know he lurvs the violence. But he's commenting on it too.

Food for thought from a film that was also Tarantino delicious with suspense (best opening scene of the year; there I said it), genre bending (in that it incorporates countless of them) and filled with some truly killer killer performances.

If they were allowing me to nominate over at the old academy I'd be voting for Christoph Waltz (the most evil f'n bastard I've loved hating on screen in decades) for best supporting actor. Brad Pitt was witty and solid, for sure[+]. Waltz, and in four languages no less, was sinister and hilarious and over-the-top and yet never hammy. It's a performance a mother would love if your mother was Stanley Kubrick (RIP).

[+see footnote if nerdy enough, or bored enough, or just feeling clicky. it happens to the best of us.]

Writerly Quote of the Month

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either.
-Robert Graves

"District 9" - A Great Summer Thrill Ride of a Movie with a Brain

It restores my faith in the summer blockbuster.

This is not a trailer but a 30 second TV spot that I chose specifically because it spoils very very little.

Dave Eggers

Like everyone under 45 who wants to succeed as a writer I think about Dave Eggers. I too wanted to really dislike his first book, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," a memoir nominated for the Pulitzer that was number 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, about how Eggers, at 21, wound up raising his little brother after both his parents passed away of cancer. I've read the book twice. For perspective, even multiple movie viewing, single album a thousand times listened to, AGO visited three times in one month obsessive lovers of certain pieces of art like me don't often re-read books of non-fiction. That's cause a great yarn or a highly informative text doesn't generally require a second read. Eggers' first book is way more than a good yarn. It has moments of pure poetry. The kind of deep pools worth dipping back into.

A few years back, whilst I was in Japan, I learned of a popular literary journal, The Believer, and submitted a story or two to this magazine that turns out to fall under the umbrella of McSweeney's, the independent publishing house Eggers founded (I repeat: the independent publishing house he founded) (they didn't Believe, btw, but oh well). Have I mentioned yet that this guy was born in the 1970s and that he's not yet 40?

Steadily gaining curiosity, and still in Japan, amongst the four aisles devoted to English literature at the Doshisha University (where I taught) library, I found and read a book of short stories Eggers wrote called "How We Are Hungry." Not the least bit competitive I hoped it would be pretentious and terrible. It was honest and brilliant.

Then, three years ago he comes out with "What is the What," a fictional retelling of the real-life experiences of a Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng. Eggers wrote the book from Deng's perspective. Pretty damn impressive, if you ask me. Haven't read that one though, I have to admit.

What I did do last year was watch him on TED and was again rather taken with the lad. Turns out that in his spare time, when not writing Pulitzer nominated worthy books and publishing magazines (not to mention the movie scripts he wrote, "Away We Go," w and the upcoming "Where the Wild Things Are), Eggers likes to create literacy programs for children.

None of this is exaggerated. It's all true! Even Wikipedia says so.

But I tell you all this because Dave has got a new book out, "Zeitoun," which in typical Eggers fashion is packaged brilliantly. It's a non-fictional account of a Syrian-American (surname: Zeitoun) New Orleans resident and his experiences riding out Katrina. The NY Times review says that, "50 years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun."

I'll be buying the thing in hardcover. That's how talented I think this guy is. Thirty plus dollars worth. Ok, granted I'm using a gift card, but still.

"The Hurt Locker" - A Movie Recommendation

-I wish you could have seen it on the big screen.

Granny May's Way

The game of bridge requires you play in pairs. In the old days, at least, and certainly in the old days in South Africa this meant a husband-wife partnered as a team. Granny May (my maternal grandmother) was a master player who loved the game and played alongside her husband, Alf, until he died when he was thirty-nine; May too wasn't yet in her forties. After my grandfather's passing, May's bridge friends stopped calling her. No husband, no bridge partner. Life can be that cruel.

Crueler still, you might say, was that when someone's partner was ill or away, they would call May and ask her to play, to fill in for the missing player. How many in that situation, myself very much included, might well be inclined to tell them to go jump in the lake (to use a favourite expression of my father's because mine would all include obscenities). May, however, an optimist of a magnitude so high the glass would always have a little something in it, darling (she called everyone darling), would respond to the bridge request - every time - smiling, saying something like, With pleasure, that she'd love to come and play. The result of which, of course, was that any time they needed an extra person May was the first they'd call.

Bridge would continue to be a great source of pleasure in a wonderfully wise and contented woman's life whose legend, twenty years later, proudly lives on.

Judd Apatow is either really really smart or really really lucky

I saw Judd Apatow's "Funny People" on the weekend and actually kind of really liked it, maybe even really liked it a lot, at times, at those times that I didn't think that this was just a bunch of really amateurish acting with some middle-of-the-road writing that was going to make a hell of a lot of money.

This brings me to a question:

Is Judd Apatow, who has produced pretty much every comedy you can name in the last five years, and who previous to "Funny People" wrote and directed "The 40 Year Old Virgin," and "Knocked Up," talented? And if so, how talented? Do his comedies even dare rival my dearly beloved comedies of the 80s (the Bill Murray era, the era of "Fletch" oh Fletch!)?

Cause I find myself really flip-flopping on this guy. You?

Don't Worry, I didn't know what the Pentatonic Scale was Either

A friend so creative he lives his life as an artist not through a medium like writing or painting, at least not nearly so much as in the way he lives his daily lived life, who drinks of life without filter, without need for filter, who was and is the first and only suburban guy I've ever known who could talk to the homeless guy on Queen Street the same way he'd have talked to the CEO on Bay Street (pardon the Toronto references, but better root for the home team than give some banal New York address), he was the one to show me this.




Thanks, JB.