Cinema Hype

Before I start writing about Whip It, the upcoming roller derby movie slash Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, you should probably all know that I’m going through a bit of a roller derby phase lately. Maybe it’s my desire to be Pamie when I grow up; maybe it’s my friend Donna, who’s down in Richmond and supplements her double life as a PBS employee and mom to a four-year-old with a third existence as a derby girl. I like the culture of it—the combination of challenge and support, of sheer bloodlust and weird sorority-style bonding. (DC does have roller derby, and don’t think I haven’t looked into it–I’m currently without a team sport. But I don’t know, you guys. I worked really hard to grow all of these teeth.)

I thought, for about a minute, that maybe a roller derby movie would be my next creative project—that with the little renaissance swelling up in American derby these days, maybe the genre’s time had come. Before I even got the thought out, Barrymore beat me to the punch. She’s like the Jesus to my Brian: SHE found a script written by, you know, an actual derby girl. SHE knew Ellen Page. SHE had money. And, like, cameras. So when you put it like that, I think I’ll take my cue. Good day, sir!

I would be so sad if the movie looked bad; maybe I should be even sadder that it looks so awesome. Because it does look awesome. I’m calling it out now: I am going to see this, and I’m going to love it, and so is everybody else, and then statistics for self-propelled mobile violence among women in this country are going to skyrocket. Take my word for it.

(On a related note: If you are even remotely interested in Drew Barrymore, or if you want to know how she pulled off Little Edie’s crazy voice in Grey Gardens, or if you just like cool interviews of any kind, you MUST listen to her Fresh Air conversation with Terry Gross, available for free here. Not kidding. You’ll be a fan forever.)

Whip It, Drew Barrymore, Ellen Page, roller derby, Terry Gross, Fresh Air

As noted, CH didn’t make it to San Diego Comic-Con 2009 this year—2010, for maybes?—but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been communing with the geeks this weekend, via both the ether and the information superhighway. You guys: this is what Youtube was made for. And so we present some Comic-Con highlights as presented by those energetic enough to post video from their hotel rooms each night. Thanks, guys!

One of the top-flight movies making a debut was Iron Man 2, with a panel including director Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle (replacing Terence Howard as Rhodey), and new cast members Sam Rockwell(!) and Scarlett Johansson. The preliminary footage shown went over so well that Cheadle demanded that they show it twice. Audience members did not object.

Jason Bateman–who is maybe taking over movies, like, as a genre?–turned up to promote his upcoming Mike Judge movie, Extract, which takes place in a food-extract factory and stars Bateman, Ben Affleck, Mila Kunis, and J.K. Simmons, and therefore cannot fail. Period.

Cameron Diaz and James Marsden showed up to talk about their new “what would you do?”-type thriller, The Box, which comes out October 30 and is sure to be a hit, at least among the genre crowd: think director Richard “Donnie Darko” Kelly adapting Richard Matheson’s short story-turned-Twilight Zone episode “Button, Button.” Awesome and creepy.

Lastly–and much-posted-about; if the robots take over, I suspect the tweens will be responsible–Twilight: New Moon chatted about…well. Something that I’m sure I would know about were I to actually watch the panel. Should you choose to watch this, you might also close the windows: you won’t hear anything, but every dog in the neighborhood will suddenly appear at your door.

Finally, if you think Comic-Con is all about panels and celebrities, you’ve got it all wrong. This is world-class people watching. Here, some guy from Mania.com checks out (and talks to) some of the “characters” roaming the halls of the San Diego Convention Center. Just in case, you know, you’ve missed your spandex quota for the day.

Enjoy! And think of next year.

Comic-Con 2009, ComicCon 2009, Comic-Con, Comiccon, Iron Man 2, Ironman 2, Robert Downey Jr., Jon Favreau, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, The Box, Richard Kelly, Richard Matheson, Donnie Darko, Twilight: New Moon, Twilight New Moon, Extract, Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Ben Affleck, Mike Judge, J.K. Simmons, costumes

If you read this blog with any regularity at all, you probably know that I am generally unoffended by the norms of the modern romantic comedy—on occasion, I’ll even fight for these films’ right to be ridiculous. It’s not just that I like watching the quirky ingenue get the guy (though let’s face it: I do). To me, it amounts to a weird kind of genre discrimination: the same people who would never dream of demanding a lesson on gun control from a Western get their knickers in a twist when a so-called “chick flick” ends with shopping and cute boys.

But even I cannot, in good conscience, hang with the trailer for The Ugly Truth, which comes out Friday.

So let’s see: under the guise of “educating” Abby (Katherine Heigl) about men (gee, how nice of him), Mike (Gerard Butler) gets to turn her into his own perfect girl, no questions asked? The way I see it, this turns out one of two ways: 1) Abby falls for Mike and vice versa, and as they lean in for the first kiss of their happily-ever-after life, she thanks him for imparting so much knowledge to her feeble brain; 2) Abby plays Mike and gains a modicum of self-respect, and then thanks him for imparting so much confidence to her feeble psyche; or 3) Mike falls for Abby “just as she is” (thank you, Bridget Jones), reforms or doesn’t, and she gets to thank him for screwing with her self-confidence and then putting it all back together. In none of these cases does anybody get the karmic pleasure of beating him over the head with that baseball stadium hot dog. So, basically, tragedy ensues.

Why does “If he doesn’t like you, it’s his loss” have to become “If he doesn’t like you, it’s your fault”? Doesn’t this girl have any friends? Sure, we all do crazy things in these situations, but this would be their cue. Even worse, maybe the self-esteem pep talk comes out of Mike’s mouth, in which case Abby can officially thank him for teaching her the ways of the big, manly world (and then make out with him). As Liz Lemon so wisely pointed out that one time, “It’s like those Dove commercials never even happened!”

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s a marketing thing. I notice that The Ugly Truth is written by two women; maybe it has hidden depths and is actually all about self-actualization, and Abby decides she’s happy being her awesome self without the benefit of all these handsome man-gods running around. We can only hope. But as it currently stands, I think even Rebecca Bloomwood would roll her eyes and go shopping instead. As well she should.

The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl, Gerard Butler, romantic comedies, rants, feminism, Liz Lemon

I expect that the only people that are more excited about this trailer than I am—the basic fact of its release, anyway—are the people who made it. The Amelia Earhart biopic has been bopping around Hollywood for at least a decade now—originally, Meg Ryan was slated to star, and this was before her hair got long and her lips got big. Think You’ve Got Mail-era Meg hopping into a biplane, and here we go.

On the other hand, whether it’s the spirit of Earhart or just the irresistible nature of a woman pilot lost at sea, somebody was going to put this on the big screen eventually. Leading ladies come and go, but a spunky woman who dares and fails, well, that’s catnip to the filmmaking type—even if it happened in 2032 and starred Elle Fanning as the original flygirl, Amelia Earhart was inevitable.

That said, I hope it’s fun. I trust Hilary Swank to be excellent, but I’m not sure I trust her to have a good time, in which case I’d frankly rather watch Amy Adams’s adorably screwball Earheart from Night at the Museum 2. This is, after all, a woman that titled her autobiography For the Fun of It—surely anything dry or over-serious, anything resembling Seabiscuit with a woman instead of a horse, wouldn’t have (sorry about this:) flown. I’m not saying the drama isn’t there; I’m not saying Earhart’s courage and pluck aren’t significant. But we’d better get at least a hoot and/or a holler out of Swank, or this critic will be mightily disappointed.

Amelia Earhart, Hilary Swank, Amy Adams, Richard Gere, Night at the Mueum 2, Amelia Earhart movie, biopics, Seabiscuit

“Ooh, look at John Krasinski. Who knew he could pull off the beard? Lookin’ good, Halpert.”

“He kind of looks like Dad at a young age.”

“We’re not going to talk about that, okay?”

“Okay.”

“So.”

“So.”

“Sam Mendes doing comedy. That’s healthy, right?”

“Something that doesn’t automatically make me want to bury myself alive? Sure. We’ll chalk that up for progress.”

“I wonder what a Sam Mendes funny mood looks like.”

“Probably like the American dream turning sour, only slower than usual.”

“That’s mean.”

“It’s not my fault. American Beauty AND Revolutionary Road?”

“Point taken.”

“Oh, wow. Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida (his wife, a writer who surely gets tired of being known mostly as his wife) , you say?”

“That’s very…hip. Or, wait. Do hip people read Dave Eggers anymore, or is that over?”

“I don’t think the font is helping, either.”

“Very Wes Anderson.”

“A little derivative.”

“Borrowing other people’s pretentiousness. Awesome.”

“Does that make it bad?”

“It might make it annoying. But that’s not the same thing. It looks sweet.”

“It looks like Garden State redux.”

“I do like this song, though.”

“And aww, look, there’s Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

“And that chick from Sweet Home Alabama who had a baby! In a bar!”

“And Allison Janney, who is everything I want to be when I grow up.”

“Six feet of fabulous?”

“Exactly.”

“So it can’t be all bad.”

“I think it looks good.”

“Yes. Good. If you can wade through the one-third-life crisis fumes.”

“Yeah. That.”

“So I’ll meet you at the theater?”

“Wear your Dunder Mifflin t-shirt.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Away We Go, John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Sam Mendes, Sam Mendes comedy, Allison Janney, Melanie Lynskey, Sweet Home Alabama, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida, Jim Halpert, Dunder Mifflin, Wes Anderson

The first trailers for the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie are out, and…hmmm. Either Ritchie and Co. don’t get it, or the trailer guys want us to think they don’t.

It’s not that I have a problem with action movies, or with action comedies, or with literary characters being nudged in the action-ish direction*. Heaven knows I love a good horse-and-buggy chase as much as the next girl, and even Holmes’s boxing badassery comes straight out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Anything Holmes should be a bit of a nail-biter—the man eventually gets pushed off a waterfall and then mysteriously re-animates, for goodness’ sake!

But it just seems like what we see here misses the point, a bit. Not that Robert Downey, Jr. can’t pull off thrilling heroics—see: Iron Man, etc.—but his particular skill set lines up with the role of Holmes in so many other brilliant ways that running and jumping out of (or into?) harm’s way doesn’t seem like the best use of his time. Turn up the sardonic dialogue! Let us see the deep-seated pain lingering behind the constant stream of sarcasm! Don’t they know him at ALL?

I think—I hope—that Ritchie and the writers know all of this. The dialogue we do hear is appropriately snarky; some of the details of the trailer (boxing, opium use, Watson) are straight-up Doyle canon. And so I’m tentatively calling this trailer a marketing ploy, an attempt to convince us that “you’ve never seen a Holmes like this before!” (when, in fact, we’ve all seen basically all possible Holmeses before in one pop culture context or another, but whatever). Ritchie’s rendition may have more thrills and spills than your average Victorian detective story—he does have a thing for a certain kind of lo-fi action—but I tentatively expect enough content sandwiched in to make it not just exciting, but good. Or maybe I’m just naive. Hope springs eternal, right? And if not, dude, I totally know Madonna and will sic her on you. Don’t think I won’t.

*Okay, I might have a problem with literary characters being nudged in the action-ish direction. It depends on the literary character and the degree to which light sabres are involved. What can I say? I’m a purist.

Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes trailer, Sherlock Holmes Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Watson, Guy Ritchie

So, hey! Welcome to summer! Bang bang! Kiss kiss! (Or is that backwards?) Have you overloaded on shallow eye-candy fun yet (…before Memorial Day, but hey, it’s possible)? Need a little post-Apocalyptic memento mori for this fine May morning? Well, here: the first trailer for The Road is out.

I’m just going to come out and state the obvious: somebody’s stacking the Oscar deck here. Let’s see:

The novel of The Road (about a father and son [and possibly mother?] trying to survive after the wiping out of most of the human race) won the Pulitzer Prize, and the last Cormac McCarthy adaptation worked out pretty well. Viggo Mortensen, while not widely known for his clear-headed and easygoing nature, seems to make the method thing work for him (prediction: it will soon come out that he “borrowed” a small child and they lived together in his car for six months, eschewing showers, technology, and gun-control laws, all in the name of research), and his nomination for the Russian mob film Eastern Promises didn’t turn into an actual statuette. Charlize Theron’s already won Best Actress, for Monster, and may get the chance to double up, this time with her own face. The only unknown quantities here are screenwriter Joe Penhall and director John Hillcoat, both Australians relatively unknown in the States.

Of course, these things don’t always work out as planned—if there were an actual equation for popular success and/or Oscar domination, well, a whole lot of colossally bad movies would just be twinkles in various writers’ eyes. Remember Rendition? The Fountain? And those aren’t even that new. Clearly, good source material + good actors + Oscar track record does not = actual quality. And is it me, or is the post-Apocalyptic genre a little extra-susceptible to this sort of situation? Maybe the director’s vision just doesn’t jibe for us; maybe we just can’t or don’t want to see our neighborhoods reduced to piles of smoking rubble (though that seems unlikely, given the number of post-Apocalyptic movies that actually get made). Maybe the starkness of the setting just makes any residual silliness that much more evident. It’s hard to say.

Until further notice, though, I’m going to hang a little awards-show hope on this one. Bring on the rubble!

The Road, TheRoad, Road, Cormac McCarthy, Viggo Mortensen, The Road trailer, trailer, Charlize Theron, post-apocalyptic, post-apocalypse, science fiction, Pulitzer Prize

I can’t believe we haven’t talked yet about the trailer for Julie and Julia yet. It’s been out for, what, two weeks? Three weeks? Where have I been? The land of negligence, apparently. Here’s the trailer:

I really, really want to like this movie. I like the book, possibly more than it really deserves. I like the trailer, though I balk a bit at the cutesification of it, what with the pop music and the cutie husband and all (the husband in the book is what you’d probably call a mensch, but maybe not a hottie; menschhood is apparently not good enough for your everyday casting director). And I know how these things go: I’m going to chalk all of this up to the whims of the marketing department and not to writer/director Nora Ephron. Ephron’s had her share of stinkers in the past few years (Hanging Up, Bewitched), but somehow I trust her here. I have to believe that she’s working off of passion, and that we’ll see a little bit of that onscreen. (We’d better.)

I was, at one time, ambivalent about the casting of Amy Adams as Julie Powell; this trailer assuages some of my fears. To some extent, Adams will always be adorable, but here she’s not written as adorable, which is key—Powell herself is decidedly un-cutesy. The scene on the kitchen floor (”There’s STUFF ALL OVER THE FLOOR!”) indicates that all may indeed be well here; since Powell spends much of the book having freakouts of various scales and proportions, the collapsing and the moaning are pretty important. Also, the non-Disney-princess haircut doesn’t hurt.

And, to be honest, I hadn’t thought much about Meryl Streep as Julia Child; Julia is by far the lesser presence in the book (as far as direct “screentime” goes), and anyway, she’s Meryl Streep. What, you think she can’t pull of Julia Child? But now that I see her, it’s all lovely. She’s got the voice and the wonderful blowsiness of Child, but it’s more than that. From what we see here, I think she’s got a bit of Julia’s soul. I can appreciate that.

So…carry on, Julie and Julia. I’m ready when you are.

Julie and Julia, Julie/Julia, Julie Powell, Meryl Streep, Julia Child, trailers, Nora Ephron

Have you seen the trailer for the Adam Sandler/Seth Rogen movie Funny People?

It looks pretty good, if maybe a bit generic: an up-and-coming stand-up comedian (Rogen) befriends and is fostered by his own favorite veteran comedian (Sandler) , only to find out that his hero of dying of cancer. The cast is fun (I’m particularly taken by Eric Bana as the much-mocked Australian husband), and all indications point to a touching and uplifting ending to complement the obligatory raunchiness. Pure Judd Apatow.

The most interesting part of this trailer, though, isn’t even in the movie: it’s the card that reads “the third film from Judd Apatow, director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.”

The reason they’re pointing this out is that Apatow’s name has, for better or for worse, become synonymous with a certain brand of comedy—raunchy geek humor, usually about boys (overgrown or otherwise), usually involving Rogen or Jonah Hill or both. Funny People is Apatow’s third time directing, but his seventh writing and fifteenth producing credit in the last five years (not including TV projects and awards shows). Some of the movies he’s produced have been good, and some of them have been bad, but they all came out in a short period of time and they all had his name on them; at this point, he seems to take the blame even for copycat movies that he didn’t even make. In this trailer, somebody is trying to indicate that this is one of the good Apatow movies. We’re not talking Step Brothers, here.

There’s always been speculation about whether Apatow’s success will last, at least at this kind of breakneck pace. The guy’s got to sleep sometime, right? At this point, it’s probably fair to say that, were he never to make another movie, his influence is here to stay—enough imitators have cropped up to make the Apatow-style comedy a mark of the times. But the fact that somebody felt the need to point out that Funny People isn’t “just another Apatow movie” isn’t totally toothless; while he’s clearly working hard and enjoying his own success (i.e. being famous and making more movies), there’s also a sense that being “just another Apatow movie” might be a bad thing. Are we getting sick of him? Should he have been more selective with the movies he put his name on? Or is he wise to associate himself with as many people and projects in Hollywood as possible?

Readers, what do you think?

Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Funny People, Jonah Hill, Eric Bana, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Step Brothers

I think that, somewhere in our quietly keen little hearts, we geeks knew this was coming. Sure, Hollywood loves its musclebound heroes and its shoot-em-ups. The big guys rule the roost. It’s like high school in a John Hughes movie. But we must have known that we’d have our day, and I think May 22 is that day.

You guys, it’s a movie! About the Smithsonian!

On some level, my inner geek is deeply, deeply gratified by this very concept. I never saw the first Night at the Museum, though it was by all accounts fun and charming. But I love the Smithsonian and basically everything it stands for (…with the possible exception of the Museum of Natural History, which is full of dead things that we could see, alive, at the National Zoo). If I have my story straight, this movie’s like spending a day at the museums without all that walking around. All those dioramas! All those fact-filled plaques! Also, uh, I hear the exhibits come alive, which, again, maybe not the best thing in the case of the Natural History. Just saying.

Not that DC in the summer is lacking for tourists (Friendly note to all those well-meaning, disoriented tourists: Please do not stop at the bottom of the Metro escalators! Thank you!), but I think the world needs to hear this. Forget the amusement park; come see the protozoa instead! Besides, you may as well get used to it. After this, the geeks will be your overlords anyway.

Night at the Museum, Night at the Museum 2, Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian, Smithsonian, geek movies

The new trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen debuted last week, and it looks like it’ll be playing before Star Trek starting this weekend. Much of the cast and crew from the first Transformers has returned for the sequel, including action-movie heavy-hitter Michael Bay, master of the disorientingly close-up action shot.

Here’s the trailer:

So…let me get this straight. In the new Transformers movie, Shia LaBoeuf is Chuck Bartowski?

Let’s see: Sam (LaBoeuf) encounters an ordinary object, apparently planted in his path by some higher entity. Against his will and almost without his knowledge, said object provides top-secret information to his brain. When presented with certain sensory stimuli, his brain accesses the related information provided—one might say “uploaded”—to his head. Shall we call these episodes “flashes”? The bad guys want what’s in his mind; hijinks and misadventures ensue. I suppose Megan Fox is supposed to be Sarah in this scenario; wouldn’t it be so much cooler if, all this time, Sam’s biker-chick girlfriend has been reporting to the CIA? (Or is that just me?) (Also, Sarah Walker could totally take Mikaela Banes, just so you know.) Will the role of Crazy Scott Bakula here be played by John Turturro?

I could go on like this all day.

(…OMG, who plays Captain Awesome?)

Truthfully, though, this looks like fun; I’m especially taken with the shot on the ocean floor, assuming that alien automotive robots have mastered anti-rusting technology. Because, really, THAT would be disappointing.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen comes out June 24.

Transformers 2, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers, Shia LaBoeuf, Chuck Bartowski, Sarah Walker, Megan Fox, Michael Bay, John Turturro, Scott Bakula, Chuck

I’ve sort of wanted to be BFFs with comedian/actor/woman-about-town Charlyne Yi for awhile now. You might remember her one-episode stint as Grace Park, Kenneth’s Jerry Maguire-misquoting love, on an old episode of 30 Rock (I tried to find an embeddable video of this, as it’s one of my favorite 30R moments ever, but was foiled by the weak-but-apparently-not-that-weak copyright law on the internets); she also pals around with Judd Apatow’s pack (”Apatown,” apparently) and turns up in the odd movie. Now her own movie, Paper Heart, has won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, and is due out in August. It’s almost too coyly cute to be believed:

Doesn’t it look adorable, and yet also infuriatingly cute? The question here may be phrased in terms of another hipster touchstone movie: will Paper Hearts be like the first ten minutes of Juno (i.e. unwatchably twee) or like the last hour and a half (honest and funny and kind of a heartbreaker)? Alternatively, which will wear out first: Michael Cera’s charm or his penchant for playing awkwardly lovable young men? (You’d think we’d be getting towards the end of that particular rope, but the facts indicate otherwise.) I bet it also has a killer soundtrack.

Paper Heart is a “hybrid documentary”—not a mockumentary, but a mix of fiction and documentary. One assumes that the road-trip footage, and maybe the parts with her friends/crew, are the unscripted part, and that the Yi/Cera storyline (they play themselves) came with at least some forethought, though it’s hard to tell where that particular line sits—which is probably the point. Either way, I’m excited to see more of Yi’s work out there. And, hey, I still want to hang out. Even if you don’t like hair-braiding and boy-story-telling, I’m always up for a good script-polishing session! Call me!

Charlyne Yi, Paper Heart, Michael Cera, Sundance, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, hipster movies, Juno

Who knew, ten years ago, that amusement-park location films would be anything even resembling a profitable genre? In fact, who knew they’d be a genre at all? The meeting can only have gone something like this: “…so, how’d you like our pitch for this character-driven coming-of-age comedy?” “Actually, we were thinking….rides. Can you do that for us?” (If this freaks you out, consider this: it seems like the next great frontier for this kind of thing is classic board games, with films of Monopoly and Candyland and a re-make of Clue all in the works.)

And yet, following in the extremely lucrative footsteps of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and the less-profitable Haunted Mansion, this week marks the release of Adventureland, a film that doesn’t actually take place anywhere near the Indiana Jones ride (or Disneyland, period), but will forever be included in the ranks of Movies About Crowded Places in Disneyland just by virtue of its title.

This seems like the kind of movie that could go either way, but leans in a promising direction. The cast is a strange one: take one rising indie star (Jesse Eisenberg of The Squid and the Whale and The Education of Charlie Banks fame), one actress who’s certain to be running from the Twilight movies for the rest of her life, two Saturday Night Live cast members—both just about ready to make the break for the big screen—and a random assortment of character actors, and stick them all on film together, and you’ve got Adventureland. Preliminary buzz is mostly positive, and the movie was written by Greg Mottola, best known for having written Superbad. So we’ll see. If all else fails, the real Adventureland will surely never fail us, right? Right.

Adventureland, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Bill Mader, Kristen Wiig, Greg Mottola, Superbad, Pirates of the Caribbean, Monopoly, Clue, Candyland, Disneyland, board game movies

Well.

So that’s over.

Is it all right if we all just breathe a collective sigh of relief? This year’s Oscar season felt, among all the glamor and the drama and the fun of choosing picks, like a long drawn-out brawl and much ado about nothing. It seems like most people were surprisingly happy with the ceremony itself—not a harsh word against Hugh Jackman all day—and that’s more than the Academy has said for itself in awhile. Kudos, all; now shall we all take a vacation?

Or just look at what’s coming up instead? Here’s the montage of upcoming releases they played at the end of the ceremony (nice touch, Academy!):

I almost don’t want to ruin this by talking about it. There’ll be plenty of time for dissection later. For now, just sit back, relax, and take a look at all of the good things to come. I think we’ve all earned it.

Oscars, Academy Awards, 2009 releases, new movies 2009, 2009 clip reel

Well, ladies and gentlemen, here we have it: the first misspelled anti-(I think)-Nazi comedy? bloodbath of 2009 (though, of course, surely not the last). Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds stars the reliably excellent Brad Pitt, surrounded by a line-up of semi-unknowns and Cloris Leachman, going undercover in WWII France to defeat the Germans. Whether or not the Germans, as a political force, will actually be defeated seems dubious, though obviously many individual Germans are bound to eat it. From the trailer, it’s not exactly Valkyrie and it definitely isn’t Defiance; minus these kinds of inappropriate comparisons, what’s a wary critic to do?

There’s really only one right answer here: Make a pro/con list, as follows:

Reasons to See Inglourious Basterds

- Brad Pitt having a good time
- Brad Pitt doing his best impersonation of Jon Stewart doing his best impersonation of George W. Bush
- Brad Pitt saying “Nat-sies” a lot
- B.J. Novak doing…whatever it is he’s doing here
- Attempts at simulating a Coen brothers movie without involving the actual Coen brothers

Reasons To See Bambi Instead
- Exceeding amounts of gratuitous violence
- ANOTHER Nat-sie movie
- Attempts at simulating a Coen brothers movie without involving the actual Coen brothers

And the biggest con of all: “You haven’t seen war until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino.”

To which I say: There are so many myriad things in this world that I don’t need to see through Quentin Tarantino’s eyes, I don’t even know where to begin the list. Why start with World War II?

Case closed….maybe.

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, Inglorious Bastards, Brad Pitt, BJ Novak, B.J. Novak, Coen brothers