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inglourious basterds

Jan 15 2010
Love0

2009 Wellington Cinema Year in Review

By Cinema

Welcome to the 2010 “cut out and keep” guide to video rent­ing (or down­load­ing or how­ever you con­sume your home enter­tain­ment these days). I sug­gest you clip this art­icle, fold it up, stick it in your wal­let or purse and refer to it whenev­er you are at the video shop, look­ing for some­thing to while away the long winter even­ings of 2010.

First up, the ones to buy – the Keepers. These are the films that (if you share my psy­cho­logy and some of my patho­lo­gies) you will cher­ish until you are old and the tech­no­logy to play them no longer exists. Best film of the year remains Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Mashing togeth­er sev­er­al archetyp­al stor­ies with a vivid visu­al style and a per­cuss­ive energy, Slumdog may not rep­res­ent India as it actu­ally is but instead suc­cess­fully evoked what India feels like, which is argu­ably more import­ant. After Slumdog everything I saw seemed, you know, old-fashioned and noth­ing has been any­where nearly as thrill­ing since. There are films you respect, films you admire and films you love. Slumdog is a film you adore. “Who wants to be a … miy­on­aire?” indeed.

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Oct 04 2009
Love0

Review: Inglourious Basterds, The Age of Stupid and Departures

By Cinema, Reviews

Inglourious Basterds posterPlaying like the fever-dream of an obsess­ive teen­ager fallen asleep after read­ing a stack of Commando com­ics late at night, pos­sibly after too much cheese, Inglourious Basterds is anoth­er con­tender for most enter­tain­ing film of the year. In a 17 year career that includes only six actu­al fea­ture films (if you count Kill Bill as one), Quentin Jerome Tarantino has ded­ic­ated him­self to prov­ing that fol­low­ing the rules is a path made for fools and sis­sies. If only more film­makers were listening.

QT him­self has described Inglourious Basterds as a spa­ghetti west­ern med­it­a­tion on the war film and that’s as good a descrip­tion as any, I sup­pose. In Chapter One we meet wicked Nazi “Jew hunter” Hans Lander (Christoph Waltz – a rev­el­a­tion) as he forces a nervous French dairy farm­er to reveal the hid­ing place of a loc­al Jewish fam­ily. It’s a great set-piece open­ing, tense but leavened with moments of absurdity and it gets you in the mood for the thrill­ing non­sense that is to come.

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