Salon.com > Inglourious Basterds

The great villains you least expected

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:01:00 +0000

Three-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston is finally going bad. No, not "bad" as in Walter White, Cranston's meth-making chemistry teacher from "Breaking Bad." Like bad bad. Evil bad. Last week, the news broke that Cranston had snagged the role of Vilos Cohaagen, the greedy, murderous dictator of Mars in the "Total Recall" remake. Vilos was played in the original by Ronnie Cox, director Paul Verhoeven's go-to corporate slimeball.

Cranston seemed an unlikely casting choice for a villain; while actors like Cox can get away with playing a certain kind of corporate tough guy, Cranston has always struck me as too vulnerable to ever be amoral. Or maybe it's just that I will forever associate his face with the goofy dad in "Malcolm in the Middle."

71 movie spoilers in one supercut

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:19:00 +0000

Supercuts are videos that take a bunch of other media (usually famous movies or TV shows) and mashes them together under a common theme, like the supercut of grossest movie kisses and sweetest make-out moments from television that we posted on Valentine's Day. Basically, supercuts are the visual equivalent of a Girl Talk song, and they can range in concepts from famous last words in film to every time someone on a reality show has said "I'm not here to make friends."

Michael Fassbender, future superstar

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:01:00 +0000

If Michael Fassbender's rapid career ascent doesn't lead to a long career as a movie star, he definitely won't have the media to blame. The 32-year-old Irish-German actor, probably best known to general moviegoers (at least until now) for playing Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino's World War II pastiche "Inglourious Basterds," is pretty much a journalist's dream. He's charismatic and handsome -- having placed very high on Salon's 2010 Men on Top list -- but also friendly and unassuming. He's a professed movie buff, who acts completely delighted to be hanging out with me in a New York hotel suite on a chilly afternoon, doing goofball Orson Welles impressions and dissecting the upside-down gender politics in American director Cary Joji Fukunaga's new film of "Jane Eyre," in which Fassbender plays the haunted leading man, Mr. Rochester.

“Army of Crime”: Real inglorious bastards of the Resistance

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

Nobody's likely to confuse French director Robert Guédigian's dense, multi-stranded French Resistance flick "Army of Crime" with the extended "Saturday Night Live" sketch that is Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," or with Jean-Pierre Melville's brooding, downbeat 1969 masterpiece "Army of Shadows." But this is a solid, spellbinding drama based closely on real history, which along the way offers a not-so-subtle commentary on the diverse, immigrant-rich society of contemporary France.

Like all modern nations, France always represented a confluence of different peoples, but for many years the official republican ideal prevented much public discussion of ethnic differences, and enabled a quasi-official racism and anti-Semitism. In the very first scene of "Army of Crime," Guédigian -- himself a native-born French citizen of Armenian ancestry -- calls this dramatically into question. As a busload of wartime prisoners is transported to an unknown destination by their Nazi-collaborator jailers, we hear an unseen narrator reciting an honor roll of names, each one followed by the phrase "mort pour la France" ("died for France"). The surnames are Polish or Hungarian or Armenian or Jewish or Russian or Italian -- hardly any would have been recognized by a nationalistic Frenchman of those years as "truly French."

Straight to DVD: “Planet Hulk” & “Cabin Fever 2″

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:30:00 +0000

When I first opened the screener of "Planet Hulk," I hoped the 81-minute animated feature would deliver an actual planet full of raging green muscleheads yelling, "Hulk smash!" while perpetually pounding on each other. Barring that, I'd've settled for an adaptation of the Harlan Ellison-scripted "Incredible Hulk" No. 140 (1971) where our favorite gamma-powered brute finds true love on a subatomic world populated by green people, only to have it all ripped away by a bug-eyed alien named Psyklop. That's how far back me and ol' Jade Jaws roll, folks. Instead, "Planet Hulk" is the straight-to-DVD version of a more recent popular run of comics where Hulk fights for his life in some interstellar gladiatorial games, kind of like the Starz Network's "Spartacus: Blood and Sand," but without all the softcore porn.

Movie News Now: Berlin, Apatow, Spidey and more

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:18:00 +0000

Reviewers at indieWIRE are so unenthusiastic about the Berlin International Film Festival that they're deeming it a "two-star" festival. According to Shane Danielson, "There were some good films, though not a lot. But then, there weren’t many outright stinkers, either. The market hummed along without seeming to achieve much, either in terms of major sales or -- to use that all-purpose industry index -- 'buzz’."

Variety reports that Judd Apatow and Paul Feig, the duo responsible for the much-celebrated "Freaks and Geeks," are set to produce a new film starring Kristen Wiig of "Saturday Night Live," who also co-wrote the screenplay. Apatow will handle producing duties, while Feig will direct the movie rumored to be about "women competing to plan a friend's wedding party."

In other movie-collaboration news, it turns out Scorsese and von Trier are not discussing plans to make an updated version of "Taxi Driver." The gossip gaining strength throughout the hype-incubator known as the Internet is "unequivocally false," said Scorsese’s publicist, Leslee Dart.

Oscar duel: Is Quentin Tarantino a great director?

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:30:00 +0000

During a public appearance in London last month, Quentin Tarantino told the audience that with "Inglourious Basterds," he is now an auteur; he has established a body of work that can be analyzed as a whole and as a product of his unique vision. Recalling his experiences watching the films of Howard Hawks, he said: "My aim is that some kid in 50 years time has the same experience with me and my films." In this dueling blog, Moviefone's Jack Mathews and I debate whether Q.T.'s films actually form a body of work or remain a work in progress.   

Jack Mathews: In an essay I wrote for the L.A. Times shortly after the opening of Q.T.'s "Pulp Fiction" in 1994 -- a movie I loved, by the way -- I cautioned critics and others to lower the volume on their hallelujahs. I wrote: "Whether the 31-year-old high-school dropout and video-store guru has the native intellect and social vision to go the distance as an auteur -- whether he has anything, after all, to say -- remains to be seen." Well, Q.T.'s now 45 with five full features behind him (I count the two "Kill Bill" volumes as one movie, as was originally intended, and "Death Proof" as a featurette, as it was intended) and while his films are definitely his, I'm still not sure he has anything important to say. 

The undignified near-death of Miramax

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:05:00 +0000

It seems to me that if I were the owner of the only independent-film distributor the general public has ever noticed or cared about, the company that brought the world "Pulp Fiction," "The Crying Game," "sex, lies, and videotape," "The English Patient," "Shakespeare in Love," "Chicago," "The Queen" and "No Country for Old Men," I might try to cash in on that brand name in perpetuity by making or selling some really good movies. Fortunately for all concerned, I am not the owner of Miramax Films, and in recent days the once-mighty indie empire founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979 has reached the end of the road, or pretty nearly so.

Is Tarantino good for the Jews?

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:15:00 +0000

Eli Roth and Brad Pitt in "Inglourious Basterds."

There are going to be plenty of discussion topics revolving around Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" in the next couple of weeks. Some of these just concern the question of whether QT's typographically impaired World War II actioner is a subversive, genre-defying masterpiece -- as some people appear to believe -- or, say, an incoherent and brainless mishmash made by a director who has forgotten that even movies about movies should have some dim and distant connection to human life, and furthermore should not be boring. (Am I tipping my hand here a little? Just a tad? Not me. Stephanie Zacharek will review next week.)

Cannes roundup: Lars von Trier and Jane Campion … they’re ba-a-ack!

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:36:00 +0000

Courtesy Cannes Film Festival

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in "Antichrist."

Ah, Cannes! After a rainy weekend, the sun came out over the Boulevard de la Croisette. Monday's temperature hit the mid 70s, and all the horrible and beautiful people in town for the film world's biggest event hit the beachfront restaurants and hotel bars.

Or so I gather. The weather report comes from the Internet, the horrible people is an educated guess, and I'm writing not from the Festival de Cannes press room, with its ocean view and its phalanx of alienated, short-shorts-clad baristas staring resentfully into the middle distance, but from central New York state, where the so-called spring feels more like late November and Monday's temperature barely cracked 50. In a season of global economic meltdown and the disintegration of journalism as a viable business model, it seemed the teensiest bit extravagant for Salon to send me to the south of France for two weeks of sleepless movie-watching and partygoing. I mean, yes, it was extravagant in the best of times. More to the point, it seemed foolish for me to try and insist on it this year.