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For over a quarter century Joel and Ethan Coen have quietly become one of the most dependable forces in American cinema. Their last four films came out less than a year apart, and each is within in its own right a sprawling odyssey, completely dissimilar from anything else in the Coen brother’s already considerable body of work. True Grit fits comfortably into this pattern.

True Grit follows the story of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a young girl dealing with the aftermath of her father’s murder. She doggedly recruits Deputy U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to pursue her father’s killer into Choctaw territory. They are soon joined by Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon) and the merry trio sets off on a finely tuned adventure.

Mattie carries herself with an exaggerated maturity, and the Coen’s screenplay develops her with an effortless mix of desperate determination and comic seriousness. Bridges plays Cogburn with an exaggerated loutishness, and the Coens harness this energy to great effect. Whereas it would have been easy to fall back on writing a simple “badass with a heart of gold” character, this iteration of Cogburn is completely sincere in his sociopathic boorishness. However when Cogburn does show compassion, it is not a departure from the character as much as a manifestation of morality through a vehicle still riddled with tragic character flaws.

Rather than approaching True Grit as a remake of the 1969 original, the Coen brothers have combined elements from the original film, the original novel and many of their own inventions. The result beckons no comparison to the original, it is a re-imagining, and merely tells a similar story in a distinctively Coen manner.

-Paul Brinnel

A timid ballerina grows into an artist. Regardless of how complicated Black Swan tries to be, that is the essential struggle it depicts. The arguable issues with the film come in the distorting themes layered upon this otherwise familiar tragedy.

Much in line with his previous film, The Wrestler, director Darren Aronofsky has set out to traumatize his audience with a visceral and violent depiction of a traditionally sterile art-form. Drawing much from Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes, Arronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique have turned Swan Lake into a sensuous Danse Macabre.

The two main characters, Nina and Lily (Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis) are constructed as foils to the point of a classical fable. One precise, one passionate; one paranoid, one carefree; one virginal, one wanton; one wears white, one wears black. The theme of explicit opposites is displayed so prominently that at many points it begins to grow a bit desensitizing.

As Nina grows less and less stable, her perceptions morph into those of a paranoid schizophrenic. Unfortunately, Aronofsky chooses to portray her unwinding with the tact of a typical slasher film. Suspenseful music and horror movie tricks dominate the last act of the film, making it less about representing our heroine’s tragic demise and more about depicting a series of abstract climaxes. It might have been more effective for Aronofsky to take a note from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, and realize that a paranoid descent into madness is most terrifying when it’s implicitly felt rather than scared into the viewer.

Grievances aside, Aronofsky has endeavored to make a complex film that doesn’t spoon feed the audience its exposition. There are many issues, but none of them are due to a lack of ambition.

-Paul Brinnel

Film pioneer Dziga Vertov once said: “I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see;” writer-director Gaspar Noé has taken Vertov’s concept of “Kino-Glaz” (Cine-Eye) to it’s logical culmination. Enter the Void takes place entirely from the perspective of its main character, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown). Between Noé and cinematographer Benoît Debie, the camera becomes a transient spectre, drifting untethered around, over, and through the skyline of contemporary Tokyo. The viewer isn’t just made to see what Oscar sees; incredibly, anyone watching is forced to feel all of the natural and synthetic highs that distort Oscar’s perceptions. It’s impossible to convey the level of trance that watching this film induces. Each visual distortion, each optic trick, draws in and arrests the viewer to a level I’d previously imagined impossible.

Its visual mastery alone makes Enter the Void a great film. This said, the actual narrative story does have some serious flaws- Oscar is a drug dealer and his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) is a stripper; an abundance of flashbacks make it quite clear that both have led very tragic lives. Linda’s codependence issues are romanticized rather than confronted and neither character has any clear purpose or ambition in any of their actions. Each character seems completely numb to their surroundings and none aim to find any purpose amid their existence. While the interactions between the characters are very dramatic, there’s a very apparent lack of complexity. Even in private the characters refuse to exude any sort of personality. As they meander around Tokyo, these traumatized drugged-out patsies react to many things, but seldom act when not provoked to do so.

-Paul Brinnel

9 years and 1,048 minutes of cinema later we’ve finally reached the penultimate installment of the Harry Potter film saga. Pity it’s unbearably boring. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is little more than a chain of nauseatingly confusing climaxes broken up by the occasional joke or somber hug. This is especially disappointing considering the last installment in the series (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) was such a genuinely fun movie.

By pandering to the Michael Bay crowd, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 discards all sense of coherent structure. Whereas Half Blood Prince had it’s best moments when depicting the microcosm of schoolboy crushes and perceived popularity that is Hogwarts, Deathly Hallows: Part 1 wastes every other moment reminding you just how epic Harry’s ongoing tribulations are. The plot of the film is more like a video game than that of a fantasy film. On top of that, the only actors that get any sustained dramatic screen time are Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rubert Grint). None of these three are strong enough actors to maintain any sort of apparent chemistry, and most of their extended dramatic scenes are downright painful to watch. In one particularly disappointing scene Harry coaxes Hermione into dancing in order to help distract her from the painful reality that everyone they know is being murdered. This scene is meant to serve as a key dramatic turning point- one where we are reminded that the real strength of Harry’s character isn’t his mastery of magic but his compassion. Unfortunately though, a quick montage of smirking and waltzing doesn’t accomplish any of that. Instead it offers only a brief boring respite between two prolonged and desensitizing battles between Harry and the forces of evil.

-Paul Brinnel

Director Charles Ferguson has possibly made the scariest film of the year. It has no monsters, no twists, an incredibly linear narrative and a PG-13 rating. This withstanding, Ferguson’s new documentary, Inside Job, is truly terrifying. Its simple tagline tries to prepare its viewers: “The global economic crisis of 2008 cost tens of millions of people their savings, their jobs, and their homes. This is how it happened.” The film itself fulfills its promises, offering an unabashed and often absurd account of how systematic incompetency has hurt such a vast number of human beings. That said, this is not a Michael Moore approach to muckraking. Ferguson is clear that his film isn’t about pitying victims; it is an exposé focusing solely on the perpetrators of this unprecedented villainy.

The film opens, oddly enough, with a sort of case study: Iceland’s recent experiment with the privatization and deregulation of their financial sector are highlighted. Ferguson has chosen to start his film with an inarguable case of cause and effect; one where a series of familiar poor choices has led to directly observable problems. This eases viewer into understanding specific policy problems, and establishes a base-line before Ferguson breaks out the real nitty-gritty; it’s this kind of prowess in translation where Inside Job really shines. Essentially, it’s no more than a two-hour seminar on applied macroeconomics, but because of its effective presentation, any layman can fully understand and absorb everything as it is presented.

Over the course of the film Ferguson interviews financial executives, academics, journalists, courtesans, and many key consultants to private banks and the federal reserve. Each interview starts with a friendly tone, Ferguson probing for objective explanations to complex problems. As the film progresses, there are several moments where Ferguson surprises his subjects by forcing them to account for their own moral lapses. Some scramble to end the interview, others gape at the camera grasping for words. It’s easy to get the sense that those most responsible feel that they (just like all of us) are ultimately “just along for the ride.” It is truly terrifying when the architects of our most powerful international financial institutions begin sounding like Adolf Eichmann.

Of course Inside Job is not without its lulls. Smartly though, Ferguson embraces them; there’s never a sense that the director has omitted anything important simply because it isn’t guaranteed to excite viewers. The most exciting points in the film are when Ferguson occasionally jumps from playing the interviewer to the interrogator. His questions hit hard and often leave established experts choosing between admitting to gross incompetence and unbridled corruption.

Inside Job isn’t necessarily a great film, but it has the power to be an important one. Chronicling decades we can only see in hindsight as tumultuous, it instills in its viewers a certain incredulousness necessary for mankind’s continued well-being. In a soft-spoken manner, Ferguson quietly presents revelation to his viewers- without constant supervision the greedy will sell our future just like they’ve sold our present (for cocaine and prostitutes).

-Paul Brinnel

Conviction is the real life story of how Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) earned a law degree to get her brother, Kenny (Sam Rockwell), out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit. What could have easily been an uninteresting magazine article has been stretched out into a painfully boring feature film.

Director Tony Goldwyn had his directorial career in 1999 with the drama and box office flop, A Walk on the Moon, followed two years later with a mainstream comedy that barely broke even, Someone Like You. Since then he’s been busy directing pop TV shows. It’s no wonder Conviction feels like a painfully long episode of Law & Order, considering Goldwyn’s resume includes stints on Damages, Without a Trace and Law & Order itself.

The structure of the film breaks down pretty simply: Betty Anne Waters wants to get her brother out of prison, but there’s an obstacle, but then she meets a character introduced for the sole purpose of helping her over that particular hurdle. Each scene starts with everyone looking like they’re about to cry, then a bit of hugging, then everyone goes right back to looking like they’re about to cry.

Swank’s face is frozen throughout the movie in an unsympathetic scowl- one of a bored actor trying to inhabit a terribly conceived character trying to carry an embarrassingly ill-conceived narrative. Rockwell plays crazy well, and he’s proven that before. The issue is that his character is never given anything to do except act crazy and hug his sister.

The development of Rockwell’s character never actually makes any sense. At one point in the film we see his character take his newborn daughter into a bar, attack another man with a glass bottle, then start stripping. After events like this, the audience is meant to still sympathize for Kenny, rooting for his sister as she neglects her own children to get this psychopath out of prison. Screenwriter Pamela Gray tries to explain Betty Anne’s dedication to her brother with series of flashbacks where a young Kenny is depicted caring for his sister amid a tumultuous home life. Even if these scenes do hypothetically come across, there’s still no sense that this side of Kenny still exists within Rockwell’s segments.

Minnie Driver makes a valiant attempt with her portrayal of Abra Rice, Betty Anne’s similarly aged peer in law school. Unfortunately Gray never really treats her character seriously. Approaching Betty Anne at a point when the main plot line is at its most stagnant, Abra simply says: “We’re gonna be friends because we’re the only ones in class that’ve gone through puberty.” And with that, they are best friends. The saddest part is that this is one of the most well thought out character introductions in the movie. Betty Anne excluded, all of the characters pop in and out of scenes with no attempts at development or any interactions that aren’t purely to fuel the story of how Betty Anne got her brother out of prison (oops, I spoiled the ending).

As children wrestle in hay underscored by an unmemorable string quartet, one can faintly see the words “oscar bait” appear onscreen. At an estimated cost of over $12 million, I can only hope that most of Conviction’s budget was embezzled. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case and this 107 minute piece of shit really dropped $12 million that could have gone towards financing two or three features with less overpriced talent.

-Paul Brinnel

Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is a movie devoid of ambition.  Little happens, and anything that does is superficial and non-challenging.  The real tragedy is that the film so readily embraces this nonchalance and seems to excuse it as a statement about society.

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is house-sitting for his brother Phillip (Chris Messina), after being treated for a nervous breakdown.  Rather than pushing himself to do something worthwhile, he leads his own personal crusade against initiative.  Somehow all of his whining catches the eye of his brother’s drugged out P.A., Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig).  Roger re-unites with an old friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), and their interactions are wholly uninteresting.  As Roger and Florence bring Phillip’s dog to the vet and back, they form a bond out of their shared low standards and sexual frustration.  They fight and get back together, then the movie ends.  There are a couple of missed moments and shallow tangents, but at heart, nothing happens.

The few highlights of the movie were slight jokes that, albeit hysterical, would have been equally hysterical within any story.  One such line was used to describe an old fling: “If you worked with her in an office you’d have a crush on her, but outside of that you’d start to wonder if she really was as cute as you’d thought.” While this is a slightly insightful comment about office crushes, its inclusion in this particular movie feels rather arbitrary. The best jokes in Baumbach’s masterpiece, The Squid and the Whale, were equally rib-tickling, but actually served a purpose within the story (i.e. the left-handed desk).

We first meet Max (Max Records) as he violently roughhouses his dog.  Is he playing?  Is he always this violent?  Are we supposed to connect with this character?  The answer to all these questions is yes.  Where The Wild Things Are starts with all the momentum of a sled speeding down a massive hill.  Max plays in the snow with a joyous youthful exuberance.  He runs wild in snowy streets; he builds an igloo and provokes a fight against the friends of his older sister (Pepita Emmerichs).  There is no wasted second for Max.  He must cram in every element of play as if there is simply no time to just stop and appreciate his surroundings.  After provoking a snowball fight he is charged by adolescents.  Max smiles one last time before retreating into his igloo.  He giggles out of impish pride before being crushed alive as one of the teenagers jumps on top of his igloo.  He emerges crying.  His tormentor leaves without so much as a glimpse back.  Max nearly died.  No one cares.  As Max retreats into his home he is consumed by uncontrollable rage.  He destroys his sister’s room in a violent and vengeful frenzy.  She ignored him; she must be punished.

This is by no means a movie for children.  Max exists alone in a tumultuous world.  There are no other children.  He exists as a lonely entity without so much as a friend besides his mother (Catherine Keener).  Even she seems to grow tired of him after he attacks her while she’s sipping wine with an innocent suitor (Mark Ruffalo).  Max runs down the stairs in his ruffian monster costume, attacks his mother and bites her as she tries to pick him up.  She brings him into the kitchen, whereupon he roars, “Woman, feed me!”

Frustrated with those whom are deservingly angry with him, Max runs away.  He sails to a fantasy world, intended as an escape from the complex people of reality.  Unfortunately, the creatures that inhabit this new world become allegories for all the impenetrable people that inhabit the real world.  Max models them in his own image; unfortunately that means they are equally rage filled and bipolar.  The most important of these creatures is Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini).  He has the same wants, needs, and fears as Max.  We watch Carol pine over the loss of KW (voiced by Lauren Ambrose) with the same alternating dejection and wrath that Max has over the growing rift between him and his sister.  Max empathizes with Carol and inspires him to rediscover his own spirit of play.  As they grow closer and closer, Max grows to appreciate his natural talents more and more.  As Carol opens up to Max, the two explore their own insecurities with the general transience of childhood.  Carol is Max’s imaginary friend, created to have everything Max loves about himself.  Carol is Max’s projected feelings, and in their interactions Max gains a unique perspective on himself.

As the wild things play a game at Max’s suggestion, they begin hurling “dirt clods” at one another.  The inevitable conclusion brings to mind a common phrase heard by most children Max’s age: it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.  The game culminates in Douglas the giant bird (voiced by Chris Cooper) having his arm ripped off by Carol. In this Chaotic proliferation, Max finally embraces the consequences of unbridled mayhem.  He finally understands that he is simply too free and too angry.  He is ungrateful, and he is in essence a spoiled child.  His sudden revelations create a natural divide between him and Carol, and Carol reacts as old Max would: he gets angry.  As Max flees the horrors that are himself, he longs for his old life.  He is capable of appreciating it now.  Eventually we see these same maturations in Carol, but they are still in the style of old Max: he roars, then he cries.  There is nothing in between.

It’s very common for something to be lost when a music video director attempts to direct a feature.  David Fincher’s first feature after directing Madonna is the incoherent mess that is Alien³.  Michel Gondry’s first feature after directing Björk was the sputtering Human Nature.  Some directors making the transition forget about character development (i.e. Tarsem Singh’s The Fall).  Others forget that they need occasional breaks in action (i.e. Michael Bay’s Bad Boys, The Rock, Armegeddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, The Island, Transformers, Transformer 2). Where The Wild Things Are feels far too much like one of Jonze’s music videos.  Although visually stunning, it doesn’t allow viewers any time to stop and appreciate the visuals.  Oddly enough, Jonze’s first two films (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.) are all-around great movies, but it’s beginning to seem that credit is entirely owed to their screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman.  In Where The Wild Things Are, Max doesn’t give so much as a second glance to any of the fantastical landscapes and structures surrounding him.  This perspective leaves the audience to also ignore them as commonplace.  Just as a music video must for lack of time adjust tone in a jarring shift, the movie approaches every emotional change with an uncomfortable abruptness.  While sudden tone shifts are certainly effective when used once or twice, their frequency in this movie give it a manic quality that virtually eliminates any emotion that isn’t as severe as it is sudden.  Both Max and his creatures cry and then roar, then fight, and then cry again.  There is never a break; there is no appreciative moment where the creatures look at each other with a subtle smile.  Each emotion is entirely explicit.  Kaufman and Eggers should know better.  Jonze’s Adaptation. emphasizes the subtle, unstated (and frustrating) love between brothers and Egger’s Away We Go shows a couple completely in love expressed entirely through casual conversation.  The wild things never stop saying, “I love you” or “I hate you.”  All the work made to create truly organic creatures is virtually destroyed by cardboard bipolar dialogue that would be more believably uttered by 6 year olds.  Hopefully Jonze will eventually adapt to the unique demands of feature films.

But maybe this is all deliberate.  When the wild rumpus starts, the audience is swept into the free wheeling style of a contemporary Smirnoff commercial.  Jonze captures the joyful cadences of roughhousing in his directing.  This is probably his best skill as a director.  He creates extreme emotions.  Thinking about how most 10 year olds appreciate the world around them, it can be absolutely solely in these extreme emotions.  They have very little patience, and little to no desire to stop and appreciate the beauty that is life.  Is it the fault of the director that he so convincingly eliminates all pauses from life?  Isn’t he really just perfectly emulating the frustrating un-appreciativeness of this particular ten-year-old child?  Yes, it is irking to watch someone act with complete abandon, but if the perspective is true to the character, then is it truly at fault?

At heart, Where The Wild Things Are is a morality tale.  It is about self-discovery and growing up.  Reread Maurice Sendak’s book and you will discover that it and Jonze’s movie center around the same themes.  By exploring these themes of family and youthful ferocity further, Jonze has created a movie that is too complicated for kids, but too juvenile in its revelations for adults.

-Paul Brinnel

Ang Lee’s latest film is a bit of a departure from his past body of work.  The director of an eclectic mix of tragedies (i.e. The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain) has opted to make a light comedy based on Elliot Tiber’s memoir, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life.  Lee’s abridged title removes “a true story of a riot, a concert and a life;” this seems appropriate considering how screenwriter James Schamus has managed to glaze over all three of these pieces to what might have potentially been a very impactful story.

The year is 1969, and Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) is trying to help his Jewish parents, Jake and Sonia (Henry Goodman & Imelda Staunton) save their dilapidated Catskill motel from being foreclosed.  Jake and Sonia clomp around their property with a disdain for the lifestyle they have chosen to lead.  They both hate their business, and there’s never any clear motivation on any character’s part as to why they didn’t sell the old place years ago and make a living doing something that they both don’t utterly despise.  Then some rather uninteresting things happen, all of which laying a path for Elliot to act as a middleman in getting the Woodstock Music Festival moved to Bethel, NY.  The festival that was supposed to have a little over a hundred thousand attendees quickly has half a million.  Throughout this, we are only privy to Elliot’s experience at the festival (after all, this is based on a memoir).  The memoir is supposed to explore the complexities of leading a double life as a Greenwich Village gay-rights advocate and a straight businessman in the conservative town of Bethel.  The movie virtually ignores this entire theme, with the exception of a minor romantic subplot that has no impact on any other events in the story.

The first half of the film exists solely to establish a range of clichés.  First there are Elliot’s decidedly Jewish parents, an old married couple virtually incapable of showing any affection for anyone.  In one not particularly memorable scene Elliot’s mom extrapolates on life after potential foreclosure with the line: “And then on goes the gas!”  It’s moments like this that complete her Seinfeld-esque transformation into the archetype Jewish parent.  Next we meet Elliot’s childhood acquaintance, Billy (Emile Hirsch), the ex-Vietnam vet who has sporadic (yet somewhat comical) flashbacks.  He spouts such indelible insights as “over in Nam I’m fuckin’ normal!”  There’s also the “variety” of Bethel townspeople, who all seem to hold the same predictable opinions, and act at all times with a terribly un-endearing mob mentality.  There’s the group of cliché hippies running the festival, and their accompanying suits who seem to do little more than carry briefcases and stand in clusters.  It would be nice if the movie went on to force these varied groups to unite and hopefully learn to appreciate one another; a pity no such thing happens.  There might be a single uniting of unlikely characters alluded to, but nothing such happens on-screen.

The main issue with this film is its floundering of purpose.  It’s a movie about Woodstock that never makes it to the festival.  It’s a film about a closeted homosexual that never quite has to deal with coming out.  It’s a movie about a family learning to trust one another for profit.  It’s nearly two hours about varied groups doing nothing with any apparent variety.  Essentially, this movie is about an incredible event, told in a painfully un-incredible way.

It’s a given that any film about the 1969 Woodstock Festival is going to take a lot from the definitive film account of the festival, Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary, Woodstock.  Where Taking Woodstock tries to be about the impact of the festival on one person and his direct acquaintances, Woodstock is a direct account of the festival itself.  Ang Lee has done homage to this nearly 40-year-old film foremost in his cinematography.  While Wadleigh used split screen as a means to emphasize the diverse experiences all happening simultaneously at the festival, Lee has opted for this “multi-ring circus” concept instead as a mean of convoluting the point of view of his lead character.  Woodstock had multiple cameramen shooting multiple actions from multiple angles, therefore split-screens make absolute sense.  Taking Woodstock is about a single person’s perspective, yet split screens persist, seemingly giving Elliot several consciousnesses, all gawking at different things simultaneously.

Lee also has stuck in a few recreations of specific events depicted by Wadleigh.  Sometimes he is just content to show a recognizable image in the background (i.e. a nun giving a piece sign to a cameraman).  These moments aren’t obtrusive, and act as fun “easter eggs” for those familiar with the 1970 film.  There are other times, however, where Lee takes a piece of Wadleigh’s imagery, and attempts to inject additional meaning into it by having a character explain its personal significance.  Before Billy slides down the famous muddy hill, he explains to Elliot how this hill has been a reoccurring object in his life.  His explanation coupled with his proclamation, “I love this hill!” seem to devalue all of the other attendees similar enjoyment of said hill.  This moment isn’t one about sharing an experience with likeminded people— it has been debased so that only Billy seems to have a reason to feel something.  These isolating moments fall one after another, culminating in Elliot’s acid trip in the back of a stranger’s van.  Elliot never bonds with his fellow trippers, or any other specific people.  He exists as a narrator that doesn’t participate in the grand point of the festival.  The emphasis of Woodstock has ceased to be one of togetherness; Lee has ignored the ultimate point of the festival and instead made a movie about vague personal growth.

-Paul Brinnel

Inglourious Basterds is without a doubt, one of the most beautifully composed films ever made.  The camera swoops unpredictably around sets, subtlety emphasizing the tone of every confrontation.  Every set is convincingly historically accurate, but complete control over color is maintained in every shot.  Tarantino demonstrates a masterful command of every aspect of filmmaking; every sight and sound presented on his screen is calculated to make the viewer feel absolute exhilaration, absolute drama, and most impressively, absolute empathy with his characters.

In essence, Inglourious Basterds is a film about persecution and revenge; each subplot follows this arc.  The first scene is a confrontation between Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet).  A perfect scene in every sense, the audience gets to witness both the civility and degeneracy of Waltz’s expertly crafted “Jew Hunter.”  Next we are introduced to Lieutenant Aldo Raine’s guerilla band of Jewish Nazi hunters.  Together, the Basterds represent an entire race’s rage, and viewers quickly identify with the ruthless avengers.  Lastly, we meet Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French theater owner seeking her own revenge on the ruling party.  The rest of the plot is simple: everyone tries to kill the Nazis before the Nazis kill them.

Seemingly in tribute to the diversity apparent within the Basterds, Tarantino has assembled a huge variety of actors coming from a whole slew of international filmmaking backgrounds.  Each and every one of them is perfectly effective within their roles.  Every character is so believable, that even the tiniest throw away lines seem to steal the scene, and go on to compose some of the movies most memorable moments.  A particularly mundane moment that stuck with me occurred as the Basterds are disguised as Nazi officers in a French bar; a local Nazi officer sits down with them and proposes a game of twenty questions.  Quickly realizing that he only has one pen, he asks the bartender for more pens, who then proceeds to hand him several pens.  This small touch of realism amid a moment of the utmost dramatic tension serves the realism of each scene.  Even in the most unrelatable of circumstances, we still see characters acting completely human.  Fueling this incredible sense of vitality is Tarantino’s completely familiar, yet wholly unique sense of dialogue.  Gone are the days when his best developed characters were the quick talking, street smart thirty-somethings of his early works.  Each member of the incredible diverse ensemble consumes the audience.  Even Sosanna Dreyfus’ seldom seen love interest, Marcel (Jacky Ido) succeeds in carving out a residence within the viewer’s gut.  Each shot of him simply existing fuels a need to know more about his character.  Considering each of the dozens of characters was able to accomplish just as much, this movie could have been hours longer, and each minute would have still been a joy to experience.

To my knowledge, the action sequences in Inglourious Basterds are simply the best action sequences ever to grace the screen.  It’s not hard to understand why this might be, though; great directors seldom touch true “action” scenes, with few exceptions (i.e. Scorsese).  When a story they wish to tell requires moments of action in order to move along the plot, it is typically done with a concentration on the perspective of one or two characters, so their feelings and motivations can be observed throughout.  By forcing the audience to concentrate on what characters are feeling, instead of the specifics of the situation, a director can emphasize the dramatic implications of any excitement, rather than the spectacle.  This approach is partly the reason why every exciting moment in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction was so engrossing.  In Death Proof, Tarantino attempted to ignore this convention, focusing on the spectacle over all else.  In Inglourious Basterds however, Tarantino has managed to find an optimized medium between focusing on the characters versus the spectacle of an event.  The oft forgotten key is contained entirely within the minutes preceding said action.  There’s a great scene where Sergeant Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel) has been captured by the Basterds and is awaiting his execution at the hands of Sergeant Donny Donowitz, a.k.a. “the Bear Jew” (Eli Roth).  For what feels like an eternity, we experience Rachtman’s perturbation as Donowitz clanks his baseball bat against a wall off-screen, then proceeds to slowly stroll towards his victim.  In this way, when action is planned or anticipated, the audience experiences the contemplation and anxiety with the characters beforehand.  In this case, the audience connects so much with Rachtman they can begin to forget that his punishment is deserved.  Once this point is reached, whether or not the action actually follows this is inconsequential.  Conversely, when an action is a surprise to those involved, it must surprise the audience as it does the characters involved.  Only by catching both off guard, can true empathy be established and maintained.  Keeping in line with this, if those involved are confused by their surroundings, then the audience must also be confused.  The scene in the French bar contains a shootout that couldn’t last more than ten seconds, but it all happens in such real time, that no sense can be made of it until after the fact.  No gimmicks are needed at this point.  A dead body should speak for itself.  After the smoke has cleared, then there can be breath: a chance for all involved to process everything that has just happened.

Viscerally, the movie is completely engrossing.  There were long expanses of time in which it was truly impossible to blink, and eventually all I could do was shake.  By the time the credits rolled, I felt an orgiastic release as I thanked God for this piece of beauty that doth exist in the world.  To all this, only one reasonable conclusion could I reach: Quentin Tarantino has undoubtedly created a masterpiece that will seal his place as one of the greatest auters of all time.

-Paul Brinnel