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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

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

I have a strong desire to see Shutter Island again. I’m hoping, in desperation, that something will be there to validate this film. I’m going to resist this urge to prevent further disappointment. If Martin Scorsese did not direct this film than this desire would not exist; I’d have written the film off as trivial fun and moved on with my day. Yet there are some directors we hold dear to our heart, and want every new film they make to be important. We desperately try to inflate meaning into what is ultimately amusing, second-tier work. This fondness I hold for one of America’s greatest directors has elsewhere translated into adoration or derision. Those who like the film are over praising it precisely because it is Scorsese, and those who don’t care for the film are severely panning it, which often happens when a great filmmaker does not make a great film (see Spielberg).

Unfortunately the film is pointless. (To continue with this review I need to decide whether or not to reveal specific surprises in the plot that could be considered tantamount to twists. Revelation of plot is irrelevant in a work of serious intent. This begs the question: is this a work of serious intent? I certainly hope not. I’ll split the difference and speak in revealing ambiguity.) The film takes place at a mental institute and its principal theme deals with psychosis. U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is looking for a missing patient. What is real in both the present and the past becomes questionable as the film progresses. This is a familiar theme for Scorsese, except he has always dealt with it more subtly and interesting, most famously in Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle is psychotic, to say the least, but he lives in the real world, in Manhattan no less. Bickle is frightening because he is alone, loose among a society that he deems more worthless than himself. In Shutter Island the psychotics are as alienated from society as possible. They are at a mental institute, under the care of doctors, on an island. Unlike Travis Bickle they pose no real threat, so we watch them with amusement instead of wonderment.

To state the extraordinary level of craft, both technical and in the performances, is a redundancy, since I have already stated that this is a film by Martin Scorsese. In Shutter Island the collaboration with cinematographer Robert Richardson doesn’t quite equal their prior work (Casino, Bringing Out the Dead, and The Aviator, which is probably Scorsese’s most stunning work in color), but they do manage to create an intriguing palette of dark tones in the present day sequences and a more lively mixture of contrasting colors in the memory/dream sequences depicting Daniels’ family and wartime experiences. These flashbacks, mostly without dialogue, are in fact more intriguing and sustaining than the principal story. Scorsese has always been a director of action and movement. The flashbacks, particularly a stunning tracking shot of the mass extinction of a group of Nazis, affords him the opportunity to exercise his talent. Most of what happens on Shutter Island is a series of plot driven conversations. Not to say that Scorsese cannot direct a conversation. His first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, has one of the most originally edited conversations, between Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune on the Staten Island ferry, which opens the film and sets the tone for the remainder of the film. And of course Raging Bull has some of the most intense, frightening conversations imaginable. Except those were conversations built upon improvisation and human naturalism, creating an energy upon which Scorsese feeds. These conversations are just an endless series of interviews concerning the missing patient and then a long revelation scene at the end. Ultimately the high level of craft and the very fine performance by DiCaprio cannot hide the fact that this is a thematically hollow genre exercise by a great filmmaker.

-Jason Bardin

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the flighty American girl Patricia reads William Faulkner’s anti-nihilist statement from The Wild Palms that, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Michel, the happy-go-lucky gangster, responds, “I will take nothing–grief is a compromise.” Lars von Trier’s latest controversial drama, Antichrist, is like a response to Michel, as if to say: grief is hardly a compromise and nothing is not even an option. In von Trier’s film grief is the subject at hand, along with pain and despair, collectively referred to as the three beggars. Von Trier has crafted a reinterpretation of the beginning of Genesis. He continues where Ingmar Bergman left off in dealing with humankind’s relations with both God and the opposite sex. While Bergman dealt with the silence of God in films like Winter Light and The Silence, von Trier suggests that in our moments of greatest pain and agony not only is God silent, but Satan is very present and joyfully active.

In the film, this theme of suffering is expressed through the only two characters: a man (Willem Defoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg); they are nameless in the film, but appropriately referred to as He and She in the credits. In the beginning, they are having sex, which brings about their son, as this act often does. They are still fornicating passionately well after he is born. They do this in super slow motion, black and white, where the cascading droplets in the shower are indistinguishable from the falling snow outside. While the lovers swoon, their son Nic, a toddler, falls out of the window, crashing, along with his teddy bear, to an immediate death. The parents will grieve, the mother in particular, who has a mental collapse at the funeral, blaming herself for her son’s death. But perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Nic sees his parents in coitus; the same two people, performing the same action that led to his own birth and life, and perhaps actively decides to leave this world. He climbs a table, knocking down statues of the three beggars as if to pronounce his escape from a world run by cruelty and misery where even an act of creation seems unnecessarily violent, and triumphantly takes his life, escaping the pain of misfortune that will soon overcome his lusty parents.

He is a therapist and at odds with his wife’s medical doctor’s insistence on pills to cure her depression. Instead he asks her to reveal what she fears the most, and she says the forest where they have a cottage. In his least wise decision, he forces her to return to the cottage. The forest is named Eden and it is here where Satan rules, where the trees produce not fruit but hailing acorns. Von Trier begins to distort reality almost immediately upon their arrival. Standard, well-balanced, medium shots are intercut with distant, shaky, hand held shots as if to suggest they are being watched. The frame distorts from time to time, suggesting a hallucinatory state; depression has taken over and paranoia has been firmly established. In the biblical Eden, God gives to man and woman dominance over the animals and plants. In von Trier’s Eden those animals and plants retaliate against their lords. The ground burns her feet and she fears the tall grass and a stream. While he is trying to sooth her at the hospital, the camera looms slowly over a plant in a water vase, which seems to encapsulate a world of terror and madness, foreshadowing everything to come. He has surreal interactions with animals; they seem to be both in cahoots and at war with each other. In one shot an army of militant ants devour a dead bird, yet in another it is revealed that a talking fox, a deer carrying a half delivered still born, and a violent raven all seem to be working together against the man, standing by each other staring menacingly at him. This talking fox says precisely two words: “Chaos reigns.” It’s not unusual in parabolic fiction for a fox to talk. Foxes appear throughout Aesop’s Fables and later in Medieval literature, most notable in the tales of Reynard the fox, who makes his most famous appearance as a character in Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, refers Reynard as a dialectician, in his discussion on Socrates. It is therefore appropriate that a fox should pronounce the mantra of life’s pain.

Most critics have casually dismissed Antichrist. They call the talking fox ridiculous and the sexual violence of the movie unpleasant and unnecessary. It seems that once a year the major critics band together to take down one challenging, prestigious film. This mode of action seems to be a way of proving to the general public that they have a common bond, that they too don’t like artsy films like Antichrist, which are about the meaning of life, and instead sell the public on easily digestible, but vapid and manipulating films like Slumdog Millionaire or this year’s Precious. Last year they cruelly took down Charlie Kaufman’s magnum opus Synecdoche, New York. This year they have their targets set on von Trier. A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, “The scandal of ‘Antichrist’ is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.” Dull? Appreciate the film or despise it, it is anything but dull. Here we have a film that deals with the problem of biblical interpretations of woman, violent sexual mutilation, wild passionate sex, all of which are playing off themes concerning life in depression, in grief, in a state of nothing, where life has no meaning. Scott is using a common ploy. By calling a film that one does not like as thin and dull is an attempt to strip it of its power. This can often be embarrassing. In his review for the release of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov that, “If God does not exist everything would be possible,” which is proven by the mass circulation of A.O. Scott’s premature review. However, von Trier objects to Dostoevsky’s theory and instead marks that in the absence of God there is depression, desperation, and insanity, and without a guiding force outside that of the knowledge of men, of a therapist’s Freudian logic, there is not nothing; we are left to grieve.

-Jason Bardin

To adapt a work of classical literature is just about the most unnecessary burden to which writers and directors force themselves to succumb. One can only wonder what John Huston was thinking when he tackled Moby-Dick. In his decision to simply ignore the encyclopedic chapters concerning the anatomy of the whale, he focused solely on the bare structure of the novel, which obscured Melville’s themes and vision. It became a story about a bunch of lunatics on a boat. Poets, in general, have been absolved from this bastardization. Every once in a while Homer receives a disservice or a director throws a poem up on the screen as an epitaph, but overall the works of the great poets are safe from the murky waters of film adaptation. So when Jane Campion became attracted to doomed Romantic poet John Keats, her only choice was to tell the story of his life. Unfortunately, Bright Star is not about Keats (Ben Whishaw), but instead focus on his love interest, Fanny Brawne.

Brawne (Abby Cornish) is an early nineteenth century socialite. She dances with all the men and makes her own clothes, which are of a colorful, if not flattering, austerity. In talking about Brawne, the word ‘bright’ can only be used to refer to luminosity, not intelligence. She can’t even properly lie about her literary pursuits. When talking to Keats’s boorish friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Brawne claims to have read all of The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and Paradise Lost over the previous week. Falling in love with a Romantic poet is perhaps her most ill conceived notion of all. The lifespan of the Romantic poet was considerably short and they are not the most desired lovers. On one end of the spectrum you have Lord Byron, whose principle character, Don Juan, parallels his own lecherous sexual conquests. On the other end is John Keats, who is alluded to as a possible virgin. Keats confides to Brawne that women, including his mother, confuse him. By the time of his death at twenty-five, despite being engaged to Brawne, their relationship never progresses past a kiss. But what a kiss! The first kiss between Brawne and Keats is a moment of high erotic tension and power. They’re lying on the grass, Brawne is elevated above Keats, and their lips just connect. While not quite matching the moment in Campion’s The Piano when Harvey Kietel fingers a hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking, this bit of eroticism in Bright Star is still enough to shame most other films in their gratuitous, un-erotic use of nudity, which desensitizes our perception and appreciation for true pleasure and beauty.

The film succeeds the most during the limited portion of when the two are happily in love. Campion provides her boldest images in this sequence. Keats lying on top of a tree bathing in sunlight; a room full of butterflies that creates a poetic sense of elation. However, most of the film deals with Brawne in despair and Keats dying. Individual moments of story evaporate and the second half of the film becomes an exercise in tone, creating an indistinguishable narrative of utter despondency. The film, which promises to be an authentic recreation of love, becomes one of dread and loss, which is fine, and in doing so more or less succeeds, but it sacrifices narrative. Nothing notable happens in the second half of the film outside of some minor character development of Charles Brown. Keats is absent from the second half too, so we’re stuck with Cornish, who’s emotional range is limited to sad eyes and hysterics. Cornish needs Whishaw’s Keats to stabilize the film. Whishaw plays Keats not as any person or individual, but as the human embodiment of Keats’s poetry. He longingly looks into the sky, fails to express himself in simple emotions, and has the countenance of a dying puppy. In one scene, Keats, because of his lack of funds and resources, explains to Brawne that they cannot marry. Cornish’s crying reaches levels of histrionics, but the scene works because of the amount of thought behind Whishaw’s heartbroken eyes. Later, after Keats dies off-screen and Brawne is informed of her lover’s demise, she screams, and King Kong is nowhere to be found.

-Jason Bardin

Gaze up at a bright moon, and then follow a line of moonbeams down from the sky, away from the horizon, across a lake, and into the enraptured blue eyes of Sérephine (Yolande Moreau), who is digging up muck with her bare hands. From this first shot of the film it’s hard to tell whether the plump middle-aged woman has found something or is still looking, if she’s in agony or in ecstasy.  Next, watch the red and orange glistening sunrise on the Gothic cathedral that in the summer of 1914 still towers over the French town of Senlis, but has lost its spiritual power over the citizens—except for Sérephine, who quietly and joyously sings a hymn and burns an offering.  It has been less than two minutes, and you already have peered into Sérephine’s soul.

Sérephine (based on painter Sérephine Louis) keeps a careful guard over her inner life so that she can work as a maid in a boarding house without calling attention to herself.  Her biggest complaint about her job isn’t that it’s strenuous and demeaning, but that it takes up so much of her time.  She wants more time to climb trees, pick flowers, and most of all, to paint frantically late into the night. Wilhelm Ulde (Ulrich Tukur, also based on a real person), who stays in the boarding house, also tries to keep a low profile so that he can have some peace.  Parisian socialites fawn over him because he’s the art dealer who discovered Rousseau and Picasso.  Less sophisticated folks taunt him because he’s German.  Germans won’t accept him for being gay.

Sérephine and Wilhelm can fool everyone but each other. When they first meet, Wilhelm takes a very brief glance at Sérephine’s ankle, almost as if he were aroused by her.  Willhelm tries to get to know Sérephine better and she also seems curious about him, but the social barriers are too strong to overcome.  He tries to make conversation, and she keeps answers as short and obedient as she can.  When he finds out that she’s an artist and sees her work, he thinks that she can become a famous artist in the “naïve” untrained style.  He somehow knows that her paintings of plants have been inspired by past misfortune.  He grows upset with her in a very master of the house kind of way, and sits her down for a lecture.  When he realizes that he is quite literally talking down to her, he bends down, looks up at her, and continuous to talk condescendingly.

Both the boarding house and the woods lack electric light, and there seems to be a clue in every corner, behind every shadow.  As she cleans Wilhelm’s room, Sérephine uncovers the books, papers, and drawings that mark him as at least an intellectual, if not an artist.  While Wilhelm doesn’t hug and sing to trees like Sérephine, he takes a stroll, and finds her bathing in a stream deep in the woods.  These silent moments of discovery, are when the relationship between Wilhelm and Sérephine is at its best.  As a side note, I hate how the word “relationship” has become so heavily associated with romantic relationships.  A romantic relationship ought to be called a “romance”—it sounds much nicer, and it frees up the word “relationship” to describe what there is between Wilhelm and Sérephine, who are very close to each other but are neither friends nor lovers.

Sérephine is a lot of what I wish I could be.  She is simple but wise.  She is a steadfast believer in the God of the Bible.  She is in touch with nature.  And most of all, she is an artistic genius.  As Wilhelm becomes her patron and moves her to Paris, part of me wants her to continue scrubbing floors in obscurity, as if the purpose of her life were to live out my bourgeois fantasy of the starving artist’s life.  This is an unfair expectation.

As A.O. Scott points out in his review, a story about an artist’s response to success runs a huge risk of not saying anything new, but this one does.  Sérephine does have her time in the spotlight, but it’s the type of short stint that makes someone hungry for more attention but only able to get it from oneself.  At first I thought that Sérephine’s newfound self-love was overemphasized.  Her quiet, charming hymns sung to herself become booming off-key oratorios that everyone in the house can hear.  Her thankfulness to God for inspiring her becomes a love of herself for being the inspired one.  She stops making her own paints.  She begins to strike poses, looking the way she thinks an artist should look.  She wants a big house, fancy things, and servants of her own.  Her transformation may seem too extreme to be believable, but this is only because she hasn’t completely lost herself.  When compared with the arrogance expressed by Wilhelm and his protégé/lover Helmut (Nico Rogner), we find that Sérephine’s arrogance lacks nuance because it’s unnatural for her.  No matter how much she changes, she can never get to the point at which she can get lost in it and start spewing nonsense like Wilhelm’s “I sell to collect.  I don’t collect to sell” or Helmut’s “I don’t care about fame—that’s for after I’m dead.”  But neither can she return to her naïveté.  I want to say that she’s been corrupted but I can’t.  Wilhelm may be a bit full of himself, but he treats her very well, providing her with whatever she needs both for her work and for her personal satisfaction.  She may not have been hurt or corrupted, but she has been put into a situation in which there’s nowhere for her to bare her soul with that ambiguous stare.

-Robert Henderson

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

After Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) loses his girlfriend Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), his buddy and coworker McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend), whose main role in life seems to be to support his friend, quotes Henry Miller, advising Tom that they way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature. The film opens with an author’s note alluding to one Jenny Beckman, who is apparently a bitch, as the one person who serves as possible inspiration for a character in 500 Days of Summer. It’s probable that director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have adapted Miller’s dictation and applied it to film, although it really doesn’t matter. That opening author’s note is a poorly executed and rather banal gimmick, surprisingly ineffective in a film that thrives off wonderful, risky, surrealistic touches: some of which are funny and others which are profoundly sad.

500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy with a fractured time sequence. It is wisely less concerned about how Tom and Summer get together as it is with their time spent as a couple and the aftermath of their break-up. This separates it from the majority of romantic comedies, which mostly take about ninety minutes getting two people together through the most convoluted situations imaginable. Here we have a film that knows that it’s easy for two young, good looking individuals to start dating each other. Tom and Summer work together. He writes greeting cards, she’s the assistant to his boss. One night the whole office goes out to karaoke, she falls in love with him, watching him perform, the next day they kiss by the copy machines. Boom, bang, done.

The film that 500 Days of Summer is comparable to is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, another film showing the development and fall of an interesting relationship, from the point of view of a male protagonist. It too uses surrealistic touches. However, in Annie Hall those moments are used to portray Alvy Singer’s desires. He’s either romancing the queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, discovering what his former classmates have become, or pulling out Marshall McLuhan from behind a poster to prove a point to a total stranger. These moments compliment Alvy’s self-centered persona. The use of surrealism in 500 Days of Summer is to portray heightened visuals of Tom’s inner emotions. When he is feeling elated and confident, it appears as if everyone on the street is smiling at him right before they transform into Broadway showmen and break out into a choreographed dance number. When Tom is feeling anxiety over an upcoming interaction with Summer, a split screen parallels Tom’s expectations for his evening with the actual encounter. This technique simultaneously reflects his hopes and dreams while showing the façade he must present amidst tragic disappointment.

When Tom isn’t in fantasyland he’s at his job, writing greeting cards. He wears sweater-vest and tie combinations or t-shirts that promote bands like The Clash, who haven’t needed promotion since they broke up in the mid eighties. That’s the problem with Tom, who like most hipsters, is living in a time warp. Upset by modern culture, he constantly pontificates about how horrible it is that women don’t dress like they did in England in nineteen sixty-four or how he hates to live in a world where no one has heard of an alternative, indie rock band that he happens to like. This hipster mentality borders on fascism as Tom, the failed architect, confides to Summer that if he were in charge he would make people notice the beauty in Los Angeles. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom with equal amounts confidence and nervousness. We like him despite his trendy, social attires and worldviews. He’s funny and spontaneous, but fragile too. And in all fairness, when he does don a suit he looks totally out of place. After all, how bad can anybody be when their heartbroken dreams transport them into Ingmar Bergman films?

Summer is not as easy to understand. She could have used the guidance of a female writer on her side. When the often annoying narrator isn’t condescendingly telling us how we are supposed to feel about the characters, what the characters are thinking, or just blatantly stating the themes of the film, it serves a purpose in relaying Summer’s back-story. The narrator informs us that Summer has some sort of inherent knack that makes every man attracted to her, and she knows it. She’s like Christine in The Rules of the Game: every man wants her; we’re not exactly sure why. At least Christine had a famous composer father, which justified Octave’s fascination. Summer just has long, black hair, and beautiful blue eyes. Well, I guess that’s enough. Summer, too is a hipster, which explains Tom and Summer’s mutual fascination with each other. When she proclaims her favorite Beatle is Ringo, I was just surprised that it wasn’t Pete Best.

After these two get together the movie really starts cooking. Despite the jumbled chronology, the film is more or less in order. Harold Pinter would probably just call this a straight forward narrative. Anyway, the relationship between the two expresses the joy of early love. They play house in a department store; he draws the skyline on her arm. The conversations never run too deep. Their break-up comes along at the moment when they would begin to confide more to each other. After they break up, the film hits a perfect note. They’re still friends. Tom’s still madly in love with Summer, but she’s moved on. We move deeper and deeper into Tom’s head, as we share his sadness and longing in a way that we couldn’t really share his desires or happiness. He’s with Summer, but not with Summer. Their moments together become painful as they get on each other’s nerves, and gradually separate. This all leads up to a moment when they go see The Graduate together. Never has that last shot felt so sad and empty; Elaine and Ben Braddock, sitting next to each other on the bus, with their future ahead of them. But what future? How far can love take two lost souls? This open-ended ending will continue to haunt generations of alienated teens. 500 Days of Summer, should have paid a bit more attention to Mike Nichols’ film, and ditched it’s cutesy epilogue segment, which is not in tune with the rest of the film, providing closure for these characters. I don’t need or want closure, I want these characters to be suspended in space and time, immortal.

-Jason Bardin