I'm with Coco

So here's the thing.

I'm not quite sure why I find this whole late-night NBC situation so fascinating. I mean, it doesn't affect me at all whether Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien host the Tonight Show, or what time they air. The only late night show we get in NZ is The Late Show With David Letterman, and while I used to watch his show every night for years, I've only been an occasional viewer for the last few years. I saw a couple of episodes of Jay Leno's Tonight Show a few years ago, and wasn't impressed at all, but I have liked the little of Conan that I've seen, both on Late Night and The Tonight Show. But really, all this doesn't affect me in the least. So why am I so interested by it?

Maybe it's just because it's a fascinating story. For those of you that aren't familiar with what is going on, for the last 55+ years The Tonight Show has aired on NBC at 11.35pm. When Johnny Carson left in 1992, after 30 years hosting the show, there was a really ugly changeover - David Letterman (who had been hosting Late Night at 12.35am) had long been presumed to be the person who would take over the show (and he was well-known to be Carson's preferred heir), but Jay Leno managed to get NBC to contract with him to take over the show. In fact, the whole saga resulted in a really excellent (and sadly out-of-print) book, as well as a TV movie. After losing The Tonight Show, Letterman left for CBS in 1993, and former SNL and Simpsons writer Conan O'Brien took over as host of the 12.35am Late Night show. Conan was not an experienced performer when he started (in fact, his first couple of years were notoriously awful), but he grew into the role and eventually became a rising star in the late-night talk-show world. So, back in 2004, Conan's contract was up for renewal, and he was receiving offers from competing networks offering him an earlier timeslot. At that time, Conan discussed these offers with NBC, which was understandably concerned about losing one of their big stars. But Conan was interested in The Tonight Show, which makes sense because it is one of the iconic television institutions in the US. Like almost every comic in America, Conan grew up watching Carson on The Tonight Show and dreaming of hosting it one day. But NBC obviously couldn't give The Tonight Show to Conan, because Leno was hosting it. So NBC went to Jay Leno, who agreed to resign in five years time and let Conan take over The Tonight Show. In a press release at the time, Leno is quoted as saying "In 2009, I'll be 59 years old and will have had this dream job for 17 years. I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor and there is no one more qualified than Conan."

We come to 2009. NBC is generally and accurately reckoned to be a mess - which is disappointing because as a network it shows some of my favourite shows airing today (The Office, Chuck, Friday Night Lights, 30 Rock, etc). Meanwhile, Jay is reconsidering his decision to retire. He's committed to leaving The Tonight Show, but he doesn't want to. NBC panics that they might lose Leno to another network, and so offers him a talk show in primetime from 10pm to 11pm five nights a week - an opportunity that Leno jumps at. Meanwhile NBC is happy because it means that they don't lose Leno and they need five fewer hours of original programming a week - one whole week of Leno costs the same as one single hour-long drama series, so NBC saves a lot of money. Of course, a primetime talk show doesn't get as many viewers as the original dramas or comedies that used to air at 10pm but that doesn't matter because, even with lower viewer numbers, the reduced costs mean the 10pm hour is more profitable to NBC than previously. But reduced viewer numbers at 10pm means that there are much fewer people still watching NBC at 11pm, which is when the various NBC affiliates (that broadcast NBC shows in different regions) air their local news shows. And the 11pm news shows are huge money earners for the affiliates. Lower ratings at 10pm mean lower ratings at 11pm for the news shows. So NBC is saving a lot of money by showing Leno instead of original programming, but the affiliates are losing a lot of money and start to revolt. Meanwhile, Conan's ratings aren't great - Leno consistently beat Letterman in the ratings for the last 15 or so years, but they replace Leno with Conan and suddenly Letterman wins late-night. But that's inevitable - Conan needs time to build his audience at the earlier time, especially since his comic sensibility is so different to that of Leno. (And remember that Leno's ratings were also awful in his first couple of years - and he was already known to the Tonight Show audience, as he had guest hosted frequently, while Conan and his comedy style was entirely new to Tonight Show viewers - but Leno was given the time and opportunity to work and shape his show into something that did succeed.) Plus, if the affiliates' argument (that low ratings for Leno mean low ratings for the 11pm news) is true, logic dictates that those low ratings for news shows must also feed into low ratings for Conan. Plus, adding yet another talkshow to the mix means that the limited audience for NBC talkshows is further divided between Leno at 10pm, Conan at 11.30pm, and Jimmy Fallon at 12.30am (plus Carson Daly is there somewhere at 1.30am). In other words, Conan's low ratings are due in part to Leno's continued presence and failure in primetime. Besides, Conan was never going to start out with the same ratings on the Tonight Show as Leno was getting at the end of his run, and to expect that would have been unreasonable. Putting Conan in the show should have been about securing the future of late-night talk on NBC, and he needed to be given time to build the show into the success that it would have been, and should have been.

Unfortunately NBC panicked in the face of the affiliates' unhappiness, and so last week it announced that they are taking Leno off-air in a couple of weeks, and putting his show back to 11.35pm where it will air as a half-hour show. Conan keeps The Tonight Show, since he is contractually entitled to that, but it now airs at 12.05am, with flow-on effects for the even-later-night talk shows. Now, Conan is not happy, understandably. After all, The Tonight Show at 12.05am is actually The Tomorrow Show. So he puts out this awesome press release (which really is a must-read) in which he states that he will not host a Tonight Show that starts after midnight. He talks about the impact of this decision on the historic show, as well as the wider impact on the following late-night shows. It's a brilliant statement, and really forces NBC into a position where they need to make a decision between Leno and Conan. The whole thing turns into a complete fiasco, with pretty much every talk show host on television ripping into Leno and NBC - Letterman's discussions of the situation were tinged by his well-known hatred of Leno and NBC for taking The Tonight Show from him back in 1992, Craig Ferguson burnt all bridges with NBC by calling them "lying rat bastards", and Jimmy Kimmel proved more awesome than I ever would have imagined by performing his entire show as Jay Leno. (Two days later, when appearing on Leno's show, Kimmel hilariously ripped into Leno - in my favourite moment comparing Leno to Lucy pulling the football out from Charlie Brown - while the host just stood there plainly regretting the decision to invite Kimmel. It was awesome.) Meanwhile Conan, seemingly accepting that his time on the iconic Tonight Show is over only seven months after it started, basically went rogue, openly and angrily attacking Leno and NBC. Even just watching all this stuff in brief online clips on YouTube, as a viewer this whole fiasco has been phenomenal and resulted in some of the best television in a long time.

But how do I feel about all this? Not that it actually matters where one single unimportant person living in New Zealand thinks about this situation, but personally, I'm fully on the side of Conan. It's partly because, from the little I've seen of Conan, I think he is genuinely funny, and I don't think Leno is. Plus, Conan was involved in the completely brilliant Conan/Colbert/Stewart feud, which was the only good thing to come out of the 2007/08 Writers Strike, and which ended in a fight that was the single funniest moment of television that year. But mostly, I just think that what has happened here is wrong. Everything that I have read on this topic says that Leno chose to retire. It may have been a decision that he was asked to make by NBC, but ultimately it was Leno's choice to resign, and based on what is publicly known it seems disingenuous to suggest (as Leno has been doing lately) that NBC fired him from The Tonight Show. And Conan basically put his entire career on hold on the understanding that Leno had resigned and would be gone by the time he took over The Tonight Show. But Leno changed his mind once it was too late. Usually, that would just be tough luck, but instead, NBC kept Leno around, in an experiment that pretty much everyone that isn't an NBC executive knew was doomed to fail - as it did. But having Leno stay around also critically undermined Conan's ability to perform as expected.

And now it looks like Leno is going to be rewarded for all this. Current reports sound like Leno is getting The Tonight Show back at 11.35pm, and Conan is out of NBC, probably with a huge payout and the freedom to go to another broadcaster to make a new show. I hope this is incorrect, I really hope that Conan does get to keep The Tonight Show, but it really does look like Conan will be out of NBC in the next week or two. And if so, that result is wrong. Just wrong. And I feel this very strongly. The man who spoke so strongly on air back in 2004 about the show being a dynasty that you have and then you pass it on, and how he wanted to avoid all the in-fighting and ugliness that accompanied his taking over the show, so here you are Conan, here's the show - this guy changed his mind, he failed in his new project, so he's now given his old job back, and the guy to whom he passed on this dynasty is thrown out. The insane thing is that I suspect this whole fiasco has badly harmed Leno. When he does come back after the Olympics with his new Tonight Show with Jay Leno, I suspect that this mess will have tainted Leno to a degree that NBC hasn't predicted. He's lost the "everyday nice guy" public appearance, instead becoming the guy who bullied the new guy out of a job, and I don't see Leno's Tonight Show ever regaining the position as the number-1-rated late night talk show. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Leno rates lower than Conan did during his run. But by then it will be too late, and NBC will be stuck with Leno while Conan establishes himself over on Fox, and hopefully does well.

But, in my view, here's what NBC needs to do. They can't just make decisions based on this week's ratings, they need to look at what will put them in the most secure position in the long term. And the best long-term decision for them would be to drop Leno (or else give him a daytime show - I hear their daytime schedule isn't that great), keep Conan on The Tonight Show, and just accept that ratings will be down for the next while. Leno's no threat, since if he does manage to get a show on another network it will be close to a year before he goes to air, and in the meantime Conan's Tonight Show will have developed its audience and Leno will have lost many of his habitual viewers. And in a few years time, when both Letterman and Leno decide to retire (this time for real), you've got a polished show and an established host in Conan who will then be in a position to rule the 11.35pm slot for the next however-many years to come. But I don't see NBC taking this approach, because it requires them to consider the long-term consequences of their actions - and if recent actions have shown us one thing, it's that NBC doesn't know how to look long-term. Instead, they'll dump Conan in favour of Leno, and in a few years time run into a real succession problem when Leno does decide to retire. Who do you get to take over this pivotal franchise, when you've lost Conan, and none of the other people currently working on late-night quite seem to fit.

So there you are, NBC, some free advice on how to resolve your late-night programming dilemma. You're welcome. And if you don't take it, don't say I didn't warn you.

All Visuals Aside, There Are Real problems

So here's the thing.

I've had a few people ask me why I had problems with Avatar, and in some ways the answer comes back to one question - "Why the wheelchair? Why exactly is the main character paralysed and in a wheelchair? What does that contribute to the story?" - that points to a larger problem with the film.

The curious thing about Avatar is that I find myself recommending the film, although I have real issues with it. I wouldn't normally recommend a bad film just because of great special effects - I'm never going to suggest people see Transformers, no matter how good the robots look. But in this case, I have to encourage people to see the film, and in 3D if at all possible. The effects work is phenomenal, and just as ground-breaking as we've heard. CGI characters have never felt this real, this convincing, so tied to an actor's performance. The design of the world of Pandora is exquisite, detailed, and the 3D perfectly accentuates the world - it's not a film that is constantly reminding you that it is in 3D, it's just a film that uses the 3D to make the world seem more real. (I've previously mentioned my appreciation of such a use of 3D.) Plus, Cameron is one of the best action directors of all times, and in Avatar he gives us some phenomenal action scenes and some indelible moments. (There's one incredible moment in particular where a character gets into a mecha suit and jumps out of the ship as it explodes around him.) And it is for those merits - the beautiful world creation, the stunning effects work, the restrained but brilliant use of 3D, and the masterful execution of action sequences - that I strongly recommend the film. Just don't expect a good film.

My problems with Avatar really come back to the story. (And it's here that I'll start discussing spoilers for the film, so if you haven't seen it, be warned.) At the core of almost any good film, you need a good story. And I don't think Avatar has one. It's a very derivative story - guy goes to alien culture, is treated with suspicion but redeems himself, eventually feels more at home in the other culture than in his own, he falls in love, and finally fights alongside his alien brothers against his own kind. Change the blue aliens into Native Americans and you've basically got Dances With Wolves (and I hated Dances With Wolves). It's a fairly typical story of guilt over the assimilation of indigenous cultures, and Cameron seems simply satisfied to have disguised the story in science-fiction trappings, never trying to do anything different with the story's direction. Since I'd seen this exact plot with these exact developments saying the exact same thing in a dozen films (most of them better-written than Avatar), I never once found myself surprised by anything the film did, and that's just not a good thing.

Adding to my frustration is the fact that, for all the imagination poured into the creation of the world, there's very little put into the the culture of the Na'vi people that populate this world. Cameron had a linguistics expert help him create the Na'vi language (I noticed him mentioned in the end credits), but that's about all. They're very "in tune with nature", in the tiresome two-dimensional way that less-technological populations are usually portrayed as whenever a filmmaker wants to preach to the audience. In fact, they're so absurdly in tune with nature that the end of their ponytails have these strands that can apparently act as a form of USB connection, allowing the Na'vi to share their thoughts with the other animals of Pandora - this means that when riding a horse or a giant bird the Na'vi can simply think "Turn left" and the creature would respond. (Incidentally, these ponytail strands also seemingly function as genitals - they're used when two Na'vi mate, and early in the film, there's even a "Don't touch that, you'll go blind" joke about the strands. This makes one uncomfortable when thinking about the relationship between the Na'vi and the other Pandoran wildlife where such connections were made, especially as (if I remember correctly) similar phrases like being "bonded for life," are used to describe both Na'vi/Na'vi mates and Na'vi/wildlife connections. Let's not even think about what is actually happening when such a connection is forced on an unwilling animal, which we see happen several times.) Anyway, back to my point, this is the sole piece of information we have about the Na'vi - they are in touch with nature - and the film doesn't seem that interested in otherwise exploring the lives of the Na'vi tribe to any great degree. This all creates a rather hollow culture on which the story rests.

But it's not just the Na'vi that are the victims of shallow characterisation. Pretty much everyone in the film, from the tough military colonel to the geeky scientist workmate, is a two-dimensional figure. Possibly the worst example is Giovanni Ribisi's role as the head of the mining corporation - a character written as such a cliche of an evil corporate guy that the very first moment we meet him he's practicing his golf putting in the middle of a busy monitoring room. Remember in Aliens how, when we first meet the Paul Reiser character, he seems like a corporate jerk, but he manages to win Ripley over and seems like he might be a nice guy, which made his eventual betrayal that much harder. No such ambiguity or uncertainty of characterisation here. Ribisi starts the film self-centred, money-oriented, and callous to the Na'vi, and through the film he continues to be self-centred, money-oriented, and callous, until the end of the film, at which point we find him self-centred, money-oriented, and callous, although mildly humbled by being on the losing side.

Fortunately some of the actors (particularly Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang) are at least able to create interesting characters out of the minimal material they're given, and Zoe Saldana's performance as the main Na'vi character Neytiri is easily the best performance of a CG character since Gollum, but most of the actors seem to struggle in making their characters seem like real people. Sam Worthington in particular falls short here. I've never seen him before, although he seems to have been appointed as the "next big thing", with main roles in Terminator Salvation, Avatar, and the upcoming Clash of the Titans. And based on this film, I'm not sure why. He just seems like a blandly-good-looking passable-tough-guy, able to play the part of the typical action-film leading hero but without the charisma and personality of an actual star. In neither the moments where we see Sam Worthington on screen, nor when we see him as interpreted by the CG-artists creating his avatars, does he seem like he has any personality at all. Perhaps he does better when he has a good script and a real character to work with, but from what I see in Avatar, I just can't see anything about him that holds the eye. Even his admitted good looks come across as pretty generic - it's significant that, while the avatars are modelled on the actors playing them and the other actors are instantly identifiable, I can see nothing obviously Sam Worthington in his avatar, even when the two are on screen at the same time to facilitate direct comparisons between the two. (Not that I'm criticising his looks - he's a hundred times better-looking than I ever will be, but then I'm not trying to be a movie star.) The fact is, based on this film, I struggle to see anything in Worthington that allows him to carry a film and a role like this.

But I'm getting off-track from my main problem with Avatar, which is with the core storytelling in the film. I come back to the question at the start of this post - why did Cameron decide to put Sully in a wheelchair? In the first couple of minutes of the film we are presented with two core pieces of information. Firstly, our hero Sully is a Marine who was paralysed in conflict - this I knew about in advance. The second piece of information surprised me - it seems that his twin brother was actually working on the avatar program, but he was mugged and killed shortly before the film starts. Fortunately since Jake Sully is a genetic match for his identical twin, he is therefore compatible with his avatar, and therefore the company hires him to fill the space and ensure the expensive avatar made for his brother does not go to waste.

Now, when I first discovered that the main character was paralysed, I thought that could be quite a good idea. What would it be like, having not walked in years, to find yourself able to walk again, but in an alien body and not your own? That seemed like an area that could be interesting to explore. But I don't think the film ever actually goes there. Now, there is one moment when some people say the film does go there - this would be Sully's first scene in the avatar, where he gets excited and starts running and jumping - but to be honest I don't see it, for one very simple reason: if I, as an able-bodied person, was to suddenly find myself in a 12-foot-tall alien body, the first thing I would do would be to run around, jump, exclaim how great and how cool this was, and generally test the body out. I can see nothing in the scene that actually shows that this is what it is like for Sully as a person with a disability walking for the first time in years, as opposed to an able-bodied person just trying out this cool new experience. Now, ordinarily, I would give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt, in fact probably credit the filmmaker for being subtle in making such a point. Except that the Cameron that made this film is not a subtle filmmaker. Pretty much every point he tries to make in the film is clumsily stated outright - if you're lucky, you'll at least get the point made in actual dialogue, but too often he resorts to either an ever-present voiceover or one of Sully's videologs to hammer home his point. (For example, in one moment, Sully's avatar is flying his banshee, and the camera pans up to show this huge dragon creature flying above. A good filmmaker would leave it there, but Cameron needed to include a voiceover spelling out the obvious point that "there's always a bigger hunter." And there are many more examples of excessive and unnecessary explanation throughout the film.) The simple fact is that the Cameron that made this film would at least have had Sully record a videolog to talk about how strange it was to be walking again after living for so long with a disability, and the absence of that scene doesn't point to Cameron's subtlety as a filmmaker, but rather suggests he failed as a screenwriter to make use of one of the defining characteristics of his main character.

Speaking of Cameron's failings as a screenwriter, don't forget the complicated backstory that can only get Sully into the avatar program by inventing a deceased identical twin brother. Introducing an identical twin brother is rarely a good sign of a well-developed plot, especially when the brother is so unimportant that we never even get to meet him (except as a corpse being cremated). And why is this backstory necessary? What does it achieve? It gets a military-trained person on the avatar program, and it ensures he has no prior training on the Na'vi culture, thus making him a blank slate that the Na'vi can work with. But if that's all that you are trying to achieve, then there are other ways you could achieve that without going to the complications of creating an elaborate backstory that involves an identical twin brother that is never referred to after ten minutes. It's almost as though Cameron invented the rules for how the avatar program, and then realised he needed a complicated backstory to achieve what he wanted within the constraints of those rules, rather than just modifying the imaginary rules for the imaginary avatar program to better facilitate the story he was telling.

Plus, this backstory means that Sully arrives in the programme with an explicitly stated and restated lack of training - which makes his initial avatar experience somewhat difficult to accept. Remember that the avatar program involves a person entering the body of a twelve-foot-tall alien. That has got to be disorienting - so disorienting that even his experienced co-workers must ease into using their bodies, conducting tedious finger-to-thumb-touch exercises each time they use their avatar. But Sully? Literally two minutes after entering his avatar body, a body so new to him that he's surprised by his tail, Sully is running and jumping across a courtyard. Are there any consequences for him? Does he eventually stumble over his unaccustomed long limbs? Does he push his new body to its limits because he doesn't know better? Of course not. Let's put this in context. I once bought a pair of shoes, and didn't notice until afterwards that the soles of these shoes were thicker than I was used to. It was a subtle difference - it added maybe a couple of millimetres to my height - but I could definitely feel it, and for a day or two actually had to focus on my walking to avoid stumbling. All because of a couple of extra millimetres of height. This guy Sully instantly adjusts to a body twice as tall as his normal body. And don't forget, he hasn't walked at all in however many years. Now, imagine that they repaired Sully's paralysis and somehow magically removed all the substantial muscle wastage in his legs, so that he was in the exact same condition as prior to the injury. He would still require months of work just to learn to walk again in his own body. But he has no problem at all walking, running, jumping, in an alien body twice as tall as the average human. Does this seem unbelievable to anyone?

Which brings me back to Sully's paralysis: if (as I believe) the film doesn't explore how the avatar experience affects Sully as a paralysed person, does his paralysis come into play in any other ways? No, not really. Sure, Col. Quaritch promises to give Sully his legs back if Sully helps him, but there's a whole heap of other things Quaritch could offer a non-paralysed Sully that would achieve the exact same end. The simple fact is, you could amend maybe a half-dozen lines in the film and in so doing pretty much remove Sully's paralysis from the film without anyone noticing, because nothing in the film ever relies on his paralysis. And that's a sure sign of an unnecessary plot element.

There is one other moment where Sully's injury does get referenced, and it brings me to possibly the most dramatically significant moment in the film, and one that Cameron flubs spectacularly - the moment of "the choice". This is the moment where Sully has to choose between his own interests and those of the Na'vi people. Cameron rather strangely manages to both have that moment too early and as a result doesn't have that moment at all. Here's what I mean. Quaritch comes to Sully at one point, says "You've done well, I've arranged for you to have that operation, you'll be out of that wheelchair in no time." Now, at that moment, Sully says, with seemingly genuine sincerity, "Thank you. I just want to go through one last ceremony, then I'll be a member of the tribe and convince them to leave their home like you want. Then I'll come back and get the operation." In other words, when he's offered a chance to get his paralysis fixed, there's never any doubt that he's siding with the humans. By the time he does side with the Na'vi, he's not put in a moment of conflict where he has to decide whether to betray the Na'vi in order to benefit himself and get his injury repaired, or betray the humans and spend the rest of his life as a paralysed human living vicariously through his avatar. Instead, his decision to side with the Na'vi comes in an instant, he responds instinctively to the situation, at least partly because there's a bloody great big tank about to run him over. By the next time he meets up with the humans and Quaritch, he's already burnt his bridges - getting his legs back is no longer a possibility. As a result, we never actually get a moment where Sully considers the personal consequences of siding with the Na'vi and chooses to do so anyway. From a dramatic viewpoint, that's a major problem.

There's also a scene that gets replayed several times through the film, where one character disconnects someone else from the system while they are in their avatar body. Several times we are told "You can't disconnect someone while they're in their avatar, it's dangerous." Just how and why it's dangerous is never clear, because it happens several times with no obvious ill-effects to anyone. (Compare that to The Matrix, where we actually see people die when they are disconnected while in the matrix.) Once again, it seems like Cameron came up with the rules - it's dangerous to unplug someone - but then it was never convenient in his story to show just why it was dangerous, so he didn't and just left these vague undefined references hanging there because those are the rules of this world. As a result, unplugging someone from their avatar ends up seeming like pulling out a USB drive without going through the "safely remove" process - you know you probably shouldn't do it, but nothing ever happens if you do do it. Whenever you unexpectedly rip someone out of one body and force them into another body when they are not prepared for it, there should be consequences, the audience should feel as though there is some risk to such a procedure. And the fact that by the end of the film there is no sense of danger when someone is once again disconnected is another pointer to the half-hearted poorly-developed nature of Cameron's writing of this story.

So I've gone a long way to make my main point: James Cameron seems to have become so caught up in imagining every detail of Pandora, down to the characteristics of the rocks, and so caught up in trying to achieve (admittedly impressive) advances in the creation of CG-characters, that he's forgotten to really work on the script, which feels very much like a first draft. The characters are never alive, there are interesting ideas set up but then either abandoned or just never used to their dramatic potential, and if you strip away the effects, you're left with an underdeveloped film that just failed to hold my interest.

Ultimately, my main problem is that I feel like I've been to see Oz the Great and Powerful, but behind the smoke and booming voice there's just a pathetic man hiding behind a curtain. And I'm deeply disappointed that this is my reaction to the film, because I wanted it to be great. I had been keeping an eye on the film for the last decade, and was thrilled when filming finally started. I had a friend who was working on the effects for the film, and it took everything I had not to ask about it every time I saw him. On Avatar Day a few months ago, I got up early to download the trailer and watched it several times before work, then took an early and extended lunch break and queued for an hour to get tickets for the free 20-minute preview of the film. And that preview really had me buzzing about the film, convinced that it would be as incredible as I had been hoping. But that preview had just been short snippets of the film, mostly action sequences - Sully's avatar being chased through the forest by a large creature, or taming the banshee - that didn't really give much sense of the story itself. Seen in context of the whole film, those moments are still as brilliant and thrilling as they were in the previews, but the film surrounding them is sadly flawed.

It's frustrating to look at the box-office results at the moment, and see that such a difficult film is on track to finish as the second-highest grossing film of all time, (behind another problematic James Cameron film, Titanic.) It's frustrating because as much as I like Cameron (and I really do), he's not such a great a filmmaker that he deserves those spots, and especially not with these two films (which are probably his two weakest). I just get the sense that, while there is a small core of people like me that feel disappointed and frustrated by the film, most people are just so wowed by the spectacle that they are blind to its failings as a film. One of the most shocking things about Avatar is just how often I've heard people compare it to Star Wars. I just don't see it. The simple fact is, for pretty much every effect-heavy film, the effects will eventually look bad, and then you're left with every other aspect of the filmmaking to determine the place of that film in cinematic history.* We still watch Star Wars because the characters are great, the story is gripping, the dialogue has a few clunkers but is generally well-written, and the action scenes are phenomenal. Only one of these factors is true for Avatar, and I don't think great action scenes are enough to overcome the film's many other flaws. It's not that it's a bad film, necessarily, but it is a deeply deeply flawed film. And this is why Avatar was easily the most disappointing film of 2009 for me.

* (There is one exception to this rule. I don't know how they did it, but forty years after it was made, the effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey are still incredble and convincing. Fortunately, the film itself is still great as well.)

Nothing is permanent, not even death

So here's the thing.

I love Terry Gilliam films, have done ever since I caught the wonderful Adventures of Baron Munchausen when it aired on television in the early 90s and was astonished by the brilliance and imagination on the screen. At university, I quickly absorbed every film he had made (Brazil is now my second-favourite film), and these days eagerly await every new release from the filmmaker. (Although I confess I haven't yet seen Tideland - I want to, but I keep putting it off since I'm a little bit afraid to watch it). There's something particularly exciting about seeing a new Gilliam film - it's not just "Yay, another film from a director I like", there's a real sense that it's a miracle every time he manages to complete a movie. Gilliam is easily one of the most notoriously embattled film directors, needing to struggle to produce every minute of film. (He recently walked around Hollywood wearing a sandwich board only half-jokingly reading "Studioless filmmaker will direct for food", and his production difficulties have even been the subject of a very funny article in The Onion.) Gilliam famously fought with Universal to protect Brazil from being released in the US in a severely re-edited and drastically changed cut (a fight that was later detailed in the brilliant book The Battle For Brazil). Baron Munchausen went well over budget and was at the time one of the largest film flops ever. His film of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote collapsed after only two weeks of unsuccessful filming in a mess of NATO jets, flash floods, and health problems. (A decade later, Gilliam is finally resuming production on Don Quixote.) One of the big problems that I think leads to Gilliam's troubles is that his films are usually not exactly commercial films, they're very personal, almost art films. At the same time, his distinctive visuals and wild imagination mean that his films demand a much higher budget - still low budget when compared to most major Hollywood blockbusters, but still higher budget than your typical arthouse movie - and with higher budgets come higher requirements for box-office returns and greater difficulty raising money for a filmmaker whose box-office potential can vary wildly.

So, (and I hate to be callous, but) I think it is understandable that when Heath Ledger died, while I had all the expected reactions to his death (surprise and shock, sorrow for his family, and sadness at the loss of an actor that I rather liked), one of the first things that occured to me was "What about Doctor Parnassus?" I knew that Heath Ledger had a major role in the new Gilliam film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - indeed, I knew that Ledger's presence in the film was a pivotal element in securing funding for the budget. (The film's other stars - Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Verne Troyer - aren't exactly box-office names, but Heath Ledger's attachment encouraged investment in the film in the hope that his name might attract audiences.) I also knew they had completed a substantial amount of filming, but it was by no means complete. So I had resigned myself to the knowledge that Parnassus was another Gilliam film that would never be.

Then, one day, it was announed that production on Doctor Parnassus was resuming, and that Gilliam had managed to get Johnny Depp (who worked with Gilliam on the aborted Don Quixote, as well as on Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas), as well as Jude Law and Colin Farrell, to complete Heath Ledger's role. It seemed that much of the film took place in the real world, but there were a number of significant sequences that took place in a fantasy world. Filming had finished on the real-world scenes, and the only scenes remaining were those set in the fantasy world. With a couple of minor changes to the script, we now had a film in which Heath Ledger's character Tony changes his appearance in the fantasy world. It was undeniably a cheat intended to work around an unavoidable problem, but for me it was exciting news, since it meant that we would still get to see the film.

And then I saw the film. And I loved the film. But what surprised me was the fact that the actor changes don't seem like a cheat at all - in fact, it seemed as though it was always intended. There are three major scenes where Tony goes through the mirror into the world beyond (hence the three actors playing the role), but the first two times, Tony enters the mirror while wearing a mask that covers the top half of his face, but not his distinctive facial hair. (And bear in mind, that was how it was scripted and filmed with Ledger on set.) This means, for the first few minutes inside the mirror, the audience isn't thinking "who is that?", they're just following Tony wearing a mask. Once the mask is removed to reveal the new actor, there's a brief "Hello, I've changed face" moment, but the scenes proceed on very quickly. (The final time Tony enters the mirror, he's not wearing a mask, but by then we've grown accustomed to the changing face of Tony, so there's no confusion for the audience about who Colin Farrell is supposed to be.) Add to that that there are certain reasons why it is understandable that this particular character more than any other would change so dramatically every time he enters this other world - indeed, it highlights significant aspects of the person that Tony is. And it's not like Tony is the only character to change their appearance in the mirror world - some of the others we see in this world do grow older or younger, even if the change is not quite as dramatic as Tony's. (Although this could be a post-death change intended to pave the way for Tony's more obvious change.) So I was pleased to find that the actor replacement, which could have been disruptive for the audience, instead works seamlessly, and may in fact have actually improved the film.

But, moving on from the replacement of one of the film's most important characters, what is Doctor Parnassus like as a film? It revolves around a thousand-year-old monk who (through a complicated backstory) gained immortality following a bet with the devil, but now owes the devilish Mr Nick his nearly-16-year-old daughter. So the good doctor (who travels around modern-day London with his anachronistic horse-drawn sideshow allowing people to enter an alternate world through a magic mirror) makes one final bet with the devil in an effort to save his daughter. As you've probably picked up from that description, it's a very curious film - in the Gilliam oeuvre, it probably feels closest to a Baron Munchausen in tone. And as a Gilliam fan who is frankly amazed to even get to see this film finished at all, I'm hardly unbiased in my assessment, but I really did love this film.

The acting in the film is excellent, not just from Heath Ledger and the other Tonys, but also from Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits. As Parnassus, Plummer gives the role a haunted weariness, a knowledge of the curse that immortality would be, and a growing desperation as he faces the possibility of losing his daughter. Meanwhile Tom Waits plays Mr Nick perfectly - the character never fully loses his menace, we're always aware of exactly who he is and exactly what the consequences are of his winning the bet, both for Parnassus' daughter and for those people at the centre of the bet. Yet there's a mischievious element to his playing of the game that is quite delightful, and the character clearly genuinely likes competing against his long-time opponent. These excellent performances are supported by the remaining cast, with particular attention needing to be paid to the performance of Lily Cole as Parnassus's daughter Valentina. I've never seen Cole before - she's apparently best known as a model - but she manages to present a strong worldly sexuality while still retaining the curious naivety of someone who has never had a normal life or really lived in the real world. It's quite a compelling performance that I really enjoyed.

I was watching the (excellent) Monty Python: Almost The Truth documentary last night, and seeing footage of the young Gilliam directing Holy Grail, set against interview footage of Gilliam these days, it really hits home that he's getting on a bit. (He turned 69 just last month.) And it's surprising how obvious Gilliam's age is in the film - this is the film of someone who has realised he doesn't have as much time on the earth as he once did. Death pervades the film - our first meeting on Tony follows a failed attempt to kill the man, the central character sought immortality to avoid death but now regrets that choice, and various other character look for ways to ward off death just for the moment, although that threat remains everpresent in the film.

(One of the film's most uncomfortable scenes comes when Johnny Depp fills the role of Tony. He accompanies a woman inside the mirror, until they find a stream where little barges float down carrying pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly, Princess Diana, James Dean. When the woman points out that all these people are dead, Tony replies: "To be reborn, first you must die. All of them have achieved a kind of immortality. And we love them all the more for it. They won't get old or fat. They wont get sick or feeble. They are beyond fear. They are forever young. They are gods. And you can join them." It's a line of dialogue that sits uncomfortably in the film, feeling like a too-on-the-nose reference to Ledger's death, and yet that line was in a version of the script written eight months before he died. It's just another indication of the tragic irony that Ledger's last film was one so focused on death.)

If the film has a weakness, it's in its script. The film is very well-written, has an intriguing and enjoyable story, but I couldn't help feeling like the backstory of Parnassus' relationship with the devil wasn't quite as developed as I would have liked. As I mentioned earlier, it was a complicated backstory - perhaps too complicated - and while I have no doubt that Gilliam and Charles McKeown (as screenwriters) are perfectly clear on the backstory, I'm not sure they quite succeeded in making that information sufficiently clear to the viewer.

But that's a minor quibble compared to what the film does right. And what it really does well is give Gilliam an opportunity to exercise his imagination. Right from the film's early moments, where an incongruous horse-drawn carriage pulling a carnival sideshow sets up outside a modern-day London pub, there is little doubt that this is Gilliam's imagination given full flight, and the various journeys into the many different fantasy worlds offer an incredibly rich visual treat. Gilliam is a director whose works cry out for high-definition and Blu-Ray, where the audience can just explore the depth of his imagined world, and Parnassus is no exception. It truly is a wonderful cinematic experience.

The Schizoid Man

So here's the thing.

"Where am I?"
"In the Village."
"What do you want?"
"Information."
"Whose side are you on?"
"That would be telling.... We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"
"You won't get it."
"By hook or by crook, we will."
"Who are you?"
"The new Number 2."
"Who is Number 1?"
"You are Number 6."
"I am not a number - I am a free man!"

The main point of this post is just because I wanted to share this Basic Instructions comic strip, which was posted yesterday, and which I think is quite hilarious.


I love The Prisoner. I first saw it about eight or so years ago, and have revisited it three or four times since then. It's a brilliant inventive compelling show (and if you've never seen it then you should), but it's also a show that if you just sit down and look at it, it does seem absurd. If you've never seen the show, believe me, everything in this strip is accurate. We really don't know who the main character, Number Six, actually is. We don't know where the Village is, nor which side is holding him, and there are as many theories about what the show actually means as there are people that have actually watched the show. And there really was a (very good) episode where Number Six was hypnotized to believe he was left-handed. I'm a bit bothered by the description of an episode as being about Number Six running for president of the prison - any fan of the show would refer to it as "the Village" never "the prison", and he was actually running for the position of "Number Two" rather than president, but otherwise it's an accurate description of another excellent episode. I've always realised that the final episode was weird (and it undeniably was - Patrick McGoohan famously went on holiday after it aired to escape from angry people demanding to know what exactly happened), but one of the things I love about this strip is that it reminds me that the show as a whole was always pretty weird, and the finale just pushed the weirdness to its (logical?) conclusion.

The remake of the show referred to in the strip actually airs this coming week on an American cable channel, AMC (the same channel that makes the great Mad Men and Breaking Bad), and I'm looking forward to seeing it. I'm not bothered either way about the new Number Six, Jim Caviezel, but having Ian McKellan as Number Two is great casting, as he has that friendly jocular menacing tone perfected. And from what I've seen the new Village does look visually striking and distinctive, although it doesn't come close to the original's. (One of the great things about shooting the original series at Portmerion was that it meant the Village never looked like it was just a set constructed for the show - it was much too big and spectacular for that - yet it still seemed unlike anything we'd seen before.) So I'm excited to see what the remake actually ends up like. I doubt it will come close to the original, but I am hopeful for a few nights of entertaining and fascinating television.

Be seeing you.

Make love, not war

So here's the thing.

I once watched an episode of the British comedy series The Thick Of It. I wasn't too impressed with it, and never bothered watching any more episodes. But in the years since I saw that episode, I've heard so many people talk about how great the show was that I began to wonder whether I was wrong in my assessment. So, with the festival showing the film version of the series, called In The Loop (see the trailer here), I decided to give it another look.

Upon reflection, I wonder whether my problem was that I came to the TV series with wrong expectations. I first watched the show because I'd heard it compared to the classic TV comedy series Yes, Minister, a show I've loved since I first saw it at the age of 11. One of the things I really enjoyed about that show was the dialogue, the masterful way the writers played with the English language to obfuscate the message being communicated. Here's an example line of dialogue, in which Sir Humphrey confesses to having made a mistake:

"The identity of the official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun."

How can you not love any show that has a character delivering dialogue like that. There's a beauty to that sentence, there's no point where the line is actually difficult to understand, it's just that the sentence goes on and on, building up until the listener gets lost in a torrent of words. Wonderful.

In The Loop. like its parent show, also makes distinctive use of dialogue. Here's a sample line of dialogue from the film, coming after someone says that something falls within their "purview".

"Where do you think you are, some fucking Regency costume drama? This is a Government department, not some fucking Jane fucking Austen novel! Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your shitter with a lubricated horse cock!"

And here, you see, I think we have the answer to the question of why, exactly, I initially disliked The Thick Of It. It's not that I'm offended by swearing in movies and television, I'm not. But when you sit down to watch something expecting to see Sir Humphrey Appleby, you're not actually prepared for Malcolm Tucker. Coming to the film with more realistic expectations, I realised that, as a cutting political satire, comparisons to the earlier classic series really are deserved.

The film is basically a comedy about how the Iraq invasion happened. Not explicitly - it's a fictional film with fictional characters, and the name of the country being invaded is never once mentioned - but despite being so non-specific, it's difficult to not interpret as an exploration of how a situation like the Iraq war would have arisen. The British Minister for International Development, Simon Foster, is against the war, but accidentally breaks the Government's line of remaining neutral on the prospect of the invasion when he describes the war as being "unforeseeable". An attempt to backtrack on this entirely non-neutral word choice results in another quote being seen as a pro-war statement. It's not long before Simon and his assistant Toby find themselves in the United States, being pushed and pulled to support or oppose the war. And meanwhile, on both sides of the Atlantic, political machinations move both countries steadily towards war. The film culminates at the United Nations, where votes to authorise the invasion are held based on the evidence of dubious intelligence provided by people with silly codenames, and no-one seems to quite know how to stop the war from happening. If they even want to.

The acting in the film is uniformly great. Most of the core UK characters are filled by the stars of the TV series (although only a couple of people are actually playing their TV character), and they all give very good performances. Among the UK cast, Tom Hollander is the main actor that's new to this world, and he manages to make Simon Foster pathetic, indecisive, and impotent, all without losing audience sympathy.

I initially found Peter Capaldi's performance as Malcolm Tucker a bit disorienting, as just that week I had watched him playing a weak-willed bureaucrat in the Torchwood: Children of Earth miniseries, and it was somewhat startling to be confronted by him as a force of nature. As in the TV series (which I have since sought out and watched in its entirety), Malcolm Tucker is just a supporting character, but his appearances are so completely overwhelming that he feels everpresent. But where the series portrays Tucker almost as the boogyman, a figure whose appearances completely overwhelm and terrify the other characters, the film does a nice job in establishing his character, and then moving him to the States where his reign of terror is completely stymied. In the UK, his force comes not just from the overpowering fire of his profane verbal attacks, but the fact that he has actual power as basically the voice of the PM. But in the US, he's a nobody, tolerated as the PM's representative, but ultimately a somewhat irrelevant creature completely devoid of power to back up his bluster. And it's extremely entertaining to watch him try to get control of a situation where he is completely powerless.

But it's the American cast that really make the film sing. David Rasche has created a nice career in recent years of being the best part of anything he works in, and as the person responsibe for spearheading the move to war, he gives us an entertaining performance as a character that's almost the gung-ho Sledge Hammer reinvented as a politician. James Gandolfini clearly relished a the script that delivers his anti-war general many of the film's best one-liners. (Only Capaldi gets better dialogue.) And it's a surprise to see that My Girl's Anna Chlumsky has grown to be a talented comedic actress. (Her interactions with her mortal enemy, an obnoxious and awkward aide called Chad, were a particular highlight.)

Given that it was probably the language that put me off the original show, it was surprising to realise that it is a genuine love of the use of language that ties both Yes, Minister and In The Loop together. In The Loop may not have Yes, Minister's thesaurus-based dialogue (unless you can get a profanity thesaurus), but nevertheless they both take real delight in exploring the use of language, the implications of language, and the way it can be used to obscure the truth. After all, the entire plot of In The Loop is set off by the use of a single word, "unforeseeable", there are whole scenes that explore the implications of that one word, meaningless non-committal phrases start appearing on jingoistic bumper stickers, and the war-preparation committee is deliberately disguised by the blandest name imaginable, The Future Planning Committee. Indeed, Malcolm Tucker may be referred to as the PM's "enforcer", but basically he's a spin doctor - and spin is essentially a way of disguising unpalatable facts through the most positive use of language possible. And then there's just the general dialogue, which may be profane and offensive, but is also witty and hilarious and memorable and quotable.

But the film also has a lot to say about the increasing role of ideology in shaping the modern political sphere. Those who are behind the war push have clearly decided that the attack is going to happen, and so their focus is not on examining the case for going to war, but just how to get approval for the war while trying to minimise the involvement of those that may oppose the conflict. In one of the film's many plot threads, a lowly aide prepares a paper arguing that the war is not justified, which ends up being the focus of political attention. ("It's like a Harry Potter book, if Harry Potter made people really, really angry.") Over the course of the film, we follow the paper as it is read, edited, leaked, and ultimately even manipulated to provide the very evidence and justification for the war it's arguing against. And yet at no point does anyone really even examine the argument the paper makes, all because ideology has already fixed their position on the conflict.

It's difficult to know what else to say. It's a sharp satire of behind-the-scenes international politics, while remaining accessible to an audience that may not be aware of political intricacies and nuances. It's filled with a great cast of characters, all of whom are to some degree self-serving and behave appallingly, but are great fun to watch. It's fast, witty, and an utterly enjoyable experience.

As I said, since seeing the film, I've seen the complete run of The Thick Of It. And I'm glad to discover how wrong I was about the TV series, it's a brilliant show, I strongly recommend it, and I'm excited to learn that they're making another series, but I definitely prefer the film. There's something essentially insular and small-scale about the series, with people trying to hide from the type of political storms that are forgotten a week later. But In The Loop is a much bigger film, examining complicated and long-lasting international issues, and it's made more interesting and urgent for the importance of the issues at the core of the film. Which is not to say the film is about "issues" - that's just incidental to the film's main focus, which is on being as entertainingly and exhaustingly funny as possible. And it succeeds admirably, proving to be one of the best comedies of the year.

Putting out fier with gasoleen

So here's the thing.

Going into the new Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds, I had a very clear understanding about the general and critical reaction to the film. I knew a lot of people really loved the film, a lot of people thought it was painfully awful, and there seemed to be no middle-ground. (Looking at it now, I discover it's not quite as even as I thought - Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 88% rating, while the more accurate Metacritic gives it a lower but still positive score of 69.) But at the time, I understood that opinion was pretty evenly divided. So I went to the film, partly because I was glad to finally see Tarantino has finally made the WWII-film-by-way-of-spaghetti-western he's talked about for the last ten years, but partly because I was curious about how I would feel about the film. Given the perceived even division on the film, which side would I fall on - would I love it or hate it?

I should establish what my position on Tarantino was prior to seeing the film. I feel that he's an interesting director, and someone whose work I always try to keep an eye on, but I'm not a big fan. I certainly don't quite get all the praise of his skills in writing dialogue, which I always found somewhat overwritten and intrusively reliant on pop-culture references. I haaated Reservoir Dogs, although that may have been because I was completely put off by the ear scene (I was much more squeamish back then, and I wonder how I would respond to the film these days). I've enjoyed Pulp Fiction the couple of times I've seen it, but it's not a film I really think about. I remember enjoying Jackie Brown in cinemas, but haven't felt a need to revisit it since then. I thought Vol 1 of Kill Bill was good but had some issues - however, watching both Vol 1 and Vol 2 in a double-screening resolved my issues, and I really like the film as a whole. In fact, Kill Bill as a whole is the first Tarantino film I actually like. And I thought Death Proof was pretty awful right until the climax of the film. Most of the film is dull and tedious, and feels like Tarantino is relying far too much on his dialogue (which as I said I've never been impressed by), but once Zoe gets on the car bonnet, the film became an intense and brilliant experience.

As for Inglourious Basterds? I thought it was genuinely great. I walked out of the film thinking it was a really fast 2-hour film, and it was a shock to look at my watch to discover the film was a full 30 minutes longer than I had realised. And, having sat through a 2½ hour film, my only real criticism was that I wanted the film to be longer. I've watched it twice now, absolutely enthralled each time, and the more I think about it, the more I read about it, the more amazed I am by the film. It's rich, beautiful, intelligent, powerful, incredible and truly is the most perfect example of what I hope for every time I go to the movies. And every day, as I look through the paper and see it appearing in the cinema listings, I start planning to skip work for a few hours and catch the next screening.*

* (To CP: Not really. To everyone else: Yes, really.)

The film adopts a unusual pace, much slower than most modern films (it apparently features only 16 significant scenes in the entire film - your average film these days will have between 40 and 60 different scenes), but Tarantino manages the film's pace expertly, building the tensions in each scene, raising the pressure, until the inevitable occurs. Just look at the opening scene, which revolves around a Nazi officer (nicknamed "the Jewhunter") talking to a French dairy farmer about a Jewish family that has gone missing. The scene runs close to 20 minutes long, and while as a viewer it's noticeably a long scene by today's standards, it's so suspenseful and intense that it simply does not feel like 20 minutes. And for pretty much the entire scene it's just two people talking, the Nazi friendly, charming, joking, the farmer on edge, nervous, tense. And it's brilliant. For the first time in his career, I was really impressed by Tarantino's dialogue - it felt natural, as though these were real people having real conversations, rather than just being mouthpieces for the director. And even in a simple dialogue scene, Tarantino manages to surprise, throwing in twist developments that startle the audience while still remaining true to the scene and the characters. The scene also plays with the viewer's expectations - it starts off in subtitled French, but after a few minutes the characters decide to start speaking in English. At that point, it seemed like a device in any other film where characters start speaking their own language and then transition to English to avoid forcing the viewer to read subtitles for the entire film. Fortunately not only does it prove not to be such a device (indeed, most of the film is in subtitled French, German, or Italian), but the change in language actually proves to be an essential element in allowing the scene to develop as it does. It's an exceptional scene, and in any other film would be a high point. But the great thing is, in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has better to come.

Tarantino plays out similar scenes throughout the film, intense scenes of dialogue where he seems almost to be experimenting with how long he can stretch out the suspense, and he never falters in his sense of how far he can push the scene. The scenes work because they don't just revolve around the uncertainty of what will happen, but the tension of when it will happen. (Another incredible scene, a meeting in a tavern with a table of drunken German soldiers playing the card-on-forehead identity-guessing game, lasts nearly half-an-hour. By the time the scene reaches its climax, it's all the better for taking that length of time to build the tension.) One of the things that makes these scenes work so well is the fact that because Tarantino knows he has the time to let things build up to a boil, he doesn't need to force the tension by artificially going big. When interrogating the farmer, Landa doesn't yell or rant Travolta-style, he barely speaks above a whisper, just talking and unnerving the person opposite, subtly pushing the discussion towards the result he wants. Characters get no relief from the need to be guarded and careful in everything they say and do because anything, even the smallest most common gestures, can give you away. It's a nice change in pace from the way most films are made, and when the scenes come to their (often explosive) conclusion, there's almost a sense that this is the inevitable unavoidable conclusion to the scene's set-up and development, rather than just being "how the writer wrote it".

If I have a problem with the film, it's in the way it uses the characters of the Basterds. There's pretty much no better way to describe the Basterds than to quote Brad Pitt's introductory speech.

"My name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I need me eight soldiers. Eight Jewish-American soldiers. Now, y'all might of heard rumours about the armada happening soon. Well, we'll be leaving a little earlier. We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doing one thing and one thing only... killing Nazis. Members of the Nationalist Socialist Party conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimation, and terror. And that's exactly what we're gonna do to them. Now, I don't know about y'all, but I sure as hell didn't come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily, and then jump out of an air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin', mass murderin' maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That's why every sonuvabitch we find wearin' a Nazi uniform, they're gonna die. We will be cruel to the Germans and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us, and the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, at our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans will be sickened by us, the Germans will talk about us and the Germans will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they've done, it will be with thoughts of us that it tortures them with. Sound good?"

So they make their way through France, killing almost every Nazi they find, but sparing the odd person (after carving a swastika in their forehead) to go back and spread the word about the Basterds. Now, I don't have an issue with the Basterds themselves - it's a rather fascinating idea, and honestly it would probably have been a good thing if they had actually existed - but the way the film uses them as characters is problematic. I remember a few years ago Tarantino said his script for the film was at that point long enough for three films, and frustratingly I suspect that, in his efforts to cut it down to a more manageable length, Tarantino had to cut a lot of material about the Basterds. After all, the Basterds' actions and motivations aren't too complex, whereas those of the Jewish survivor Shosanna require much more time to establish. What this means is that the characters of the Basterds aren't as fleshed out as we really needed. We get a lot of Brad Pitt's character, completely overplayed in a performance that definitely divides the viewers, but which I personally loved. We also get a lot of Eli Roth's character, nicknamed "the Bear Jew" and famous for taking a baseball bat to the heads of captured Nazis, and a former German soldier named Hugo Stiglitz who is recruited by the Basterds after killing 13 high-ranking Nazis. But sadly, we get very little of most of the remaining Basterds. I was excited when it was announced that Samm Levine (from Freaks And Geeks) and BJ Novak (from the US version of The Office) had been cast as two of the Basterds, but really they're just there to make up numbers, never getting any distinctive or memorable individual moments. (In fact there are several Basterds that just vanish from the story without explanation. In some ways it adds believability - there was some time that passed between Chapters 2 and 4, and they probably just died in that time with no reason for anyone to discuss their deaths when the film meets up with the Basterds months later, but it still felt a bit sloppy.) Coming out of the film, my main issue with the film was that I felt it needed an extra half-an-hour, just to give it a bit more time to flesh out the titular characters.

One thing that's interesting to realise is the way that war films have changed recently. War films these days are probably best represented by a film like Saving Private Ryan, a very earnest attempt to present the "war is hell" viewpoint, the terror and horror of wartime experiences. Tarantino's film is a clear callback to a much earlier type of film, the war-as-action film, films like The Dirty Dozen or The Guns Of Navarone where the Allies are good guys and the Nazis are evil. And yet despite that underpinning element, Tarantino is surprisingly (for Tarantino) aware of the moral complexities of his story. It's not just the Jewish-revenge-p0rn film that many people perceive it to be. Yes, there are people in the film who die in particularly graphic ways (one particularly deserving character takes a volley of machine-gun fire to the face, in what proves to be a cathartic Hell Yeah! moment), but there are a number of situations where the Nazis being killed come across more sympathetically than the "good guy" Basterds. (In one memorable scene, a German soldier chooses to be beaten to death rather than reveal information that would result in the deaths of other Germans. Had that character been an Allied soldier captured by Nazis, he would be regarded as a hero, and despite his delivering a last-minute defiant insult about Jews it's still disconcerting when the "good guys" are whooping and cheering his death as being the closest they come to going to the movies.)

This leads me to the most surprising thing about the film. It's a film that to me seems acutely aware of the toll that revenge actually has on the person taking it. If we look at Kill Bill, a film that's even more explicitly about revenge, the only acknowledgement that film gives to the impact of The Bride's actions on herself comes right at the end of the film, when she collapses in the bathroom crying. Contrast this with Inglourious Basterds, which is basically a revenge film covered with the trappings of a war film. The Basterds are deeply unpleasant people, hardened by a need to seek revenge for all the evil unleashed by the Nazis against the Jewish people and the world. They barely seem human in their braying enjoyment of killing Nazis. In the end, these may have been good people once upon a time, but by the time we see them on the battlefield they're pretty bad people working to achieve a good outcome, and they come up against some brave and honourable people working for an evil end. Similarly, as we look at the laughing face of Shosanna, it's impossible to not think about the toll her need for revenge has taken on her personally. But this film is not some liberal treatise on how we're all human and why can't we all get along. The Nazis were evil, utterly evil and hateful, end of story. And Tarantino is well aware that it is basically enjoyable to watch Nazis die, because there is so little ambiguity in how evil they were. It's still a film where revenge is fun and violence is cool, especially when it's against the Nazis, it's just that Tarantino seems to acknowledge a greater degree of complexity to the issue than I think he really has before.

It's also interesting to see that Tarantino for the first time seems to recognise the disconcerting nature of film violence. The climax of the film takes place in a premiere screening of a Nazi propaganda film about a German sniper that killed 300 Allied soldiers in three days. And as you watch the Nazi audience braying and cheering every Allied death on the screen, people openly laughing with joy at the sight of American soldiers dying, it reminds the viewer both of the Basterds enjoying the death by bat of the German soldier, and of how some audience members will have responded to that scene. (It's no accident that the Basterds adopt Nazi-style levels of cruelty to those they capture.) Similarly, we get the character of Zoller, whose exploits are dramatised (and who plays himself) in that film. Tarantino never actually goes into Zoller's thought-processes watching the film (beyond a joking "that actor was terrible"), but as we see his discomfort watching his wartime experiences on the big screen, it seemed almost as though the weight of the deaths he had caused weighed heavily on Zoller, as if he was a bit repulsed by the thought of that experience being repackaged as entertainment (although, to be honest, there are a multitude of ways Zoller's reaction could be interpretted). Now, it's not uncommon for directors to seek to use their films to criticise the culture of film violence and damn the audience for enjoying it (I'm looking at you, Michael Haneke), and much of the time I feel they actually end up hypocritically endorsing the very thing they claim to be speaking against. Tarantino at least knows that he enjoys movie violence too much to be able to criticise it, so he doesn't adopt a hypocritical "you are bad for enjoying this" position. He acknowledges this is an issue, he just then says "But who cares? I'm having fun."

I've already referred to Brad Pitt's over-the-top performance in the film (which leads to the film's funniest scene, where Pitt poses as an Italian film director, speaking minimal Eye-talian in a thick Southern-hillbilly accent), but it's interesting how stylistically varying all the performances are. On the one hand, there are a lot of over-the-top exaggerated performances. Christoph Waltz's incredible performance as Hans Landa won him Best Actor in Cannes, and he is brilliant, but it's never a subtle performance. At times the character himself is openly performing for the people around him to achieve a particular effect (look at the pipe he smokes in the opening scene, for example), but most of the time that's just who he is - giddy, threatening, intelligent, scheming, eloquent, persuasive, even absurd, often at the same time. Waltz manages to present Landa almost as a comical figure while still remaining a sinister and threatening presence. Then we have similarly larger-than-life appearances from people like Eli Roth or August Diehl. (We also get an OTT Mike Myers playing an English general, in one of the film's more minor missteps. It's an okay performance from the actor, in an otherwise excellent scene, but it's so obviously Myers under lots of makeup that it's distracting. In a film largely cast with unknown actors, it would have been better had Tarantino cast someone else - especially since I just want Mike Myers' career to end, and I hate that he's received the validation that comes with being in a Tarantino film.)

What's surprising about these performances is that, despite their undeniable excesses, they nevertheless feel like real, three-dimensional humans, and they continue to convince even while appearing with actors giving much more subtle realistic performances. For me, the acting highlight of the film is Melanie Laurent as Shosanna, the sole survivor of her family's massacre. It's a performance that everyone would have been talking about had it not been overshadowed by the acclaim over Christoph Waltz. Laurent, a French actress I've never seen before, gives a subtle nuanced performance that is completely captivating. So much of her performance is carried in small gestures, in her eyes, in tiny twitches, in her breathing (just look at the way she barely suppresses her anger, her fear, and her blind panic when she first meets Landa face-to-face), that by the point where she justifiably goes over-the-top, it's made that much more terrifying for the fact that she has been so controlled up to that point. And it's impossible to mention Melanie Laurent without also pointing to Daniel Bruhl's similarly excellent performance as Zoller, playing a Nazi war hero seemingly convinced that he's in the middle of a romantic comedy with Shosanna. And there are other exceptional performances - Michael Fassbender as the British film critic turned soldier, say, or Diane Kruger as German film star Bridget von Hammersmark - that create a nice complementary contrast to the more excessive performances of Pitt or Waltz.

As I mentioned before, what's also surprising about the film is how movie-star-light the film is. Tarantino is famous for packing his films with an impressive cast of current and past stars, but in this film Brad Pitt was the only main actor recognisable to the general public. (Mike Myers is only a brief cameo, while both Harvey Keitel and Samuel L Jackson make voice-only cameos, one as a US General on the phone, the other as a narrator for a couple of sequences.) Now, this is not a reflection on the quality of the actors or the performances, almost all of whom are stellar, but it's a nice thing to see from Tarantino. Too often he seems to cast his films on the basis of "wouldn't it be cool to work with so-and-so", and writing his scripts on that basis, so it's nice to see him stretching and finding widely unseen talent to fill his film.

I'm surprised to look through my review and realise I've made it this far without making any significant comment on the climactic scene. The various plotlines converge on the premiere screening of a Nazi propaganda film in a small cinema, with both Shosanna (who runs the cinema) and the Basterds independently executing their own plans against the Nazis gathered for the movie. Crucially, we know exactly what Shosanna's plans are, but really only learn about what the Basterds were planning as they execute the plans. And really, it's clearly due to the contrivance of Tarantino the writer that the plans come together as well as they do. After all, Shosanna doesn't even know the Basterds exist let alone what they are planning, and vice versa. And yet each plan is really only effective because of how it works in conjunction with the other plan. Similarly the timing of the two plots works out too perfectly for unknowing and independent plans (what are the odds they both decide to execute their plans at the exact same time?). And yet, I can't fault Tarantino for this, because for all of the evident presence of his hand as a writer manoeuvring the various players together, it culminates in what was for me easily the most extraordinary moment in film that I have seen for a long time. It's exciting, brilliant, disturbing, violent, beautiful, haunting. Like much of Tarantino's work, it reminds me of many other films, but where Tarantino usually feels like he is just referencing / appropriating / plagiarising other work, here he may be echoing something I've seen before, but at the same time he's created something entirely new. (A lot of people trying to articulate why this feels so familiar have had to point to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Carrie for anything similar, but those films are so different from this that it really demonstrates how far the scene is from anything that Tarantino might be referencing. Tarantino has gone beyond mere visual quoting - as he does at the start of the film by mimicking The Searchers - and has started refining his inspirations down to their essence and using them to create something entirely new.) That scene at the cinema is easily the best thing Tarantino has ever done, and here it caps a truly extraordinary masterful film. Having seen it twice now, having been thinking about it a lot over the past two weeks, I feel that Tarantino has finally justified his position as one of the most essential directors working today. It really is that great.

Review in passion

So here's the thing.

I read an article the other night, one of the most impressive pieces of writing I've encountered in a while. It's called "The Letter I Would Love To Read To You In Person", and I strongly recommend you follow that link and read it. It's an article, apparently written last year, by a young Filipino film critic I'd previously never heard of named Alexis Tioseco, and it really is an extraordinary piece of writing. It's framed as a love letter, but like no other love letter I've encountered. He's not just writing about his love for a girl, a Slovenian film critic by the name of Nika Bohinc, he's also pondering his life growing up and moving as a teenager to the Philippines, he's writing a personal reflection on his connection with and passion for Filipino films, and he's writing a manifesto about what needs to change in that country's film industry. And if it seems strange that all these should be mixed in a love letter, well, as Tioseco comments, "The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious." There's a passion that pours out of the letter that's infectious - I've never heard of the films of Antoinette Jadaone, or the animations of Roxlee, but suddenly I feel like I need to learn about them, that I'm losing out by not seeing their work. Alexis's passion for Filipino cinema is so complete that it seems he feels you can't fully understand him without understanding how and why he feels about his country's film output. It's a beautiful piece of writing, and in my view an essential read.

But I'm not the only person to have been reading this piece this week. I visit a few film-related blogs, and in the past few days everyone has been writing about Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, many of them pointing to this article. And in a number of cases, the writers freely acknowledge that they've never heard of these two until this past week, but now are moved to write about them.

In the article, Tioseco mentions discussions the two have had about where they will live, commenting that Bohinc had come to terms with the idea of moving to the Philippines, and it seems that she did. Because a few days ago, Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc died when they were shot by burglars in their home in Manila. It's a strange thing to read that letter, filled with youth and vitality and passion, and to imagine that voice having been silenced. Any death in such circumstances is a tragedy, but sadly when you hear about such events, it usually almost seems distant, an abstraction, sad in concept but almost irrelevant. But in this case we can read his words and understand what a passionate, eloquent, and thoughtful person has been lost, and as I read various posts about the couple from people that knew them, it becomes clear that Nika Bohinc was no less a forceful advocate for cinema. It all drives home just how awful this event was. Rest in peace, Alexis and Nika.

But reading the letter, I found myself contemplating another issue, something that's been bothering me for the past few days. In reading Alexis Tioseco's passionate defence of the Filipino film industry, my initial thought (if I'm honest) was, "there's a Filipino film industry?" Now, of course there is, pretty much everywhere has a film industry, but I was still surprised. I like to fool myself that I'm a cultured filmgoer whose cinematic taste go beyond the ordinary multiplex, but in truth I'm not that much better than the average viewer of Transformers 2. I might go to a larger number of foreign films than most people, especially during the film festival, but even then my foreign film experience is pretty much limited to French, German, Chinese, or Hong Kong films. I stay in my cinematic box just like most other people, even if my box is marginally larger than the average. (Not that much, though - I don't think watching Jackie Chan's films with subtitles count as broadening your cinematic horizons.) Taking away film society screenings (which occasionally offer more challenging foreign films from unexpected countries that I would otherwise have never sought to see), my film viewing is still extremely limited, and largely American-centric. Even when I do see a foreign film, it's more likely to have been appointed as "worthwhile" by the American film industry, say, through an Oscar nomination for Foreign Language Film. It's easy to argue this as a consequence of availability - not even the typical arthouse cinema shows that many Filipino films, let alone an average multiplex - but that's just an excuse. Even in the film festival, which really is an opportunity to view films from everywhere, I stayed very much within my comfort zone. I mean, I enjoyed Adventureland, but did I really need to see the new film from the director of Superbad at the film festival? Couldn't I have taken the spot in my festival schedule that was occupied by that film and used it instead to sample something a bit different, something I might never have a chance to see, something outside my limits, something from the Philippines or Kazakhstan or Belarus or some country I've never heard of but that could offer me a different perspective on cinema. I could have, I didn't, and I was wrong not to do so.

Now I know that, come next year's festival, I'll be back to normal, watching the same comfortable films, limiting my foreign film consumption to films that have either received the approval of the American film industry or that come from the standard filmmaking countries. I'm not going to be adventurous, I'm not going to try anything new. I'll forget I ever wrote this post. When I come to look through the festival programme and see a film from the Philippines, I'll probably even think "Wow, I didn't know they made films in the Philippines". But right now, right at this moment, I regret my limited horizons. I just wish I would seek to break out of them.