I saw Black Swan on Christmas night. If ever there was a film tailor made for me this is it. It touched on all my issues—body horror, eating disorders, dangerous sexuality (both hetero and lesbian), stifling mother relationships, mental illness, art-- very well done but very disturbing. Visions of Natalie Portman’s ribcage are going to haunt my nightmares for a long time to come.

The following night I watched Howl, which is inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same title. Howl includes the full text of the poem, read by an actor (James Franco) playing Ginsberg and also interpreted by animation, as well as reenactments of episodes from Ginsberg’s biography and the obscenity trail Howl's publication sparked. While I didn’t care for the animation (which I found overly literal but not very attractive) overall it was a fascinating film raising issues of how the merit of art is judged and who has the right to express themselves and on what terms. It also reminded me how much I love Ginsberg and the Beats.

I watched Kick Ass the other night and it sort of, well, kicked ass. Forget the title character; I’m talking about Hit Girl, an 11-year old in a mask and purple wig who is the most efficient action heroine since Uma Thurman as the Bride in Kill Bill.

While on a logical, responsible level I know it’s wrong that a small child should be trained to be a vigilante killing machine on a strictly primeval, first-thought-best-thought, immediate, irresponsible impression level I found Hit Girl awe inspiring. It probably helps here that I’m not a parent. Someone with kids might think of her as their children and be disturbed. Since I don’t have kids, I could look at her as that unfettered, pre-socialized little girl inside me given free rein, taking out thugs to a Joan Jett song.

I’ve spent most of my free time over the past couple days messing about with my new computer’s DVD burner. I’ve never had one before but since I dislike watching video on my computer I’m never happy to have it. Now I can burn copies of things that I download and watch them on my television whilst reclining on the sofa instead of sitting in my stiff computer chair. Quite happy about that.

It’s funny, I only consider myself a casual viewer but most of the video files I have downloaded to my computer seem to be Dr. Who related—the first 8 episodes of season 5 with Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, adaptations of Phillip Pullman’s A Ruby In the Smoke and A Shadow in the North starring Matt Smith and Billie Piper (aka the Doctor’s companion Rose) and mini-series BlackpoolZ starring David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor).

I’m really looking forward to watching Dr. Who Season. On Saturday might I saw a little fragment of one of the episodes on BBC America and I was really fascinated by Matt Smith. There was just something very strange and not quite human about the way he looked that seemed very appropriate for a 900 year old alien.

I think one of the things that really appeals to me about Dr. Who is that he consistently manages to kick ass and save the universe without using guns or beating people up. I (finally) watched the 2009 Sherlock Holmes last night and one of the things that didn’t appeal to me was how much physical violence Holmes, who I see as the most cerebral of heroes, resorted to. Not that I would expect anything less in a Guy Ritchie film. Beyond this one disappointing aspect the film had quite a bit to recommend it including a satanic Mark Strong, a very slashable Watson/Holmes relationship and a cute bulldog.

The past couple of days have been busy.

Tuesday 01/19/10 was my 38th Birthday.

Because I had quite a few dollars in Barnes and Noble gift cards from “Good-bye to Chicago” and Christmas gifts my Pa-Daddy took me to the nearest Barnes and Noble (an hour and fifteen minutes away in Utica).

While he looked at the antique books and I got a whole bunch of stuff including—

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds DVD (not Blueray-- I'm still dealing with the conversion from video tape to DVD thank you, I don't need yet another format to deal with).

2 biographical novels about Katherine Parr, both titled The Sixth Wife. The first two volumes of the manga Saiyuki which is highly recommended by my friend Cheryl…

The dark fantasy/horror novel The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan which comes highly recommended by my friend Geoff….

Just Kids, my idol Patti Smith’s memoir of her life during the late 60’s/early 70’s especially involving her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which has fascinated me for years. Mapplethorpe is best known for chronicling the gay, S&M scene and yet it seems that one of his really formative relationships was with a woman which really messes with notions of hetro and homosexuality……

Inglourious Basterds comes out on DVD today. Here's the review I've been fussing about with since August when I saw it in the theater--

Back in July I watched the film The Boy In the Striped Pajamas about the young son of a Nazi official who befriends a boy his own age interned at the concentration camp his father is in charge of. Reading over reviews of this movie, I found a recurrent complaint—that the Nazi’s were basically British. That is British actors, speaking English accented English. Not long after, looking up reviews of Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie I ran across similar criticism—that German characters were being played by English and American actors speaking in their native accents.

Reading these reviews I remember wondering what level of authenticity would be satisfactory. Was it enough to give German characters German accents? Realistically shouldn’t they speak German with subtitles? Wouldn’t that alienate English speaking audiences?

In its way, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds came along and resolved these questions. Set in Nazi occupied France during the second World War, Inglourious Basterds not only portrays the different languages that are in play (German, French, English and some Italian) but shows them being wielded like Uma Thurman’s samurai sword in Kill Bill.

In many ways, Inglourious Basterds is not so much an action film as a linguistic film. Critics have called it talky, but that’s sort of the point. It’s about words, about language. The verbal interplay of the characters is as meticulously choreographed as the epic kung fu ballets of Kill Bill.

Yet ironically, the masters of the word in Inglourious Basterds are the Nazis. Christoph Waltz is absolutely stunning as Col. Hans Landa aka “The Jew Hunter”. Speaking German, French, English and Italian he dances verbal circles around all the other characters, from a French dairy farmer harboring Jews to the American commandos of the title.

Nearly as clever as Landa is Major Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl), the Nazi officer who chances upon the covert meeting being held between German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), British film critic/spy Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and the two German speaking Basterds. Although Hicox is fluent in German, Hellstrom detects something amiss with his accent and ultimately reveals him by catching him in a minute faux paus. In the meantime, Hellstrom does a bang-up job playing a twenty questions sort of guessing game. He’s quite something. Did I mention he gets his testicles blown off? And Landa, for all his smarts gets a swastika rather brutally craved into his forehead.

I think that one of the points of Inglourious Basterds, is to cut through the cerebral and linguistic mind games of the Nazis with raw bravado and brutality. Tarantino sums this up nicely with a shot of a Nazi officer’s head being lined up against a baseball bat. Swing batter swing and suddenly the supposed superiority of the Uber men isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This seems to be what Tarantino wants to do, but I’m not quite sure that it works. The Basterds don’t seem at all heroic, just vicious. They seem to wallow in mayhem for its own sake, enjoying every minute of it. They’re a juvenile fantasy, stupid, brutal and largely incompetent when required to do anything more than bust heads. If the film had just been about them, I wouldn’t have liked it at all. Luckily the film is not so much about the Basterds as it is about a storyline that runs on a collision course with that of the title characters.

So the Basterds have the balls, the Nazi’s have the brains, but the heart and guts of Tarantino’s film belong to a young Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent). The last surviving member of her family (they are in hiding and discovered by Landa) Shosanna reinvents herself as the proprietor of a Paris cinema and becomes involved with Marcel, a black Frenchman.

Shosanna is a woman warrior willing to sacrifice herself for vengeance and to end the war. An amazing, blazing character. Marcel is right beside her, stoic and supporting. They are both the heart of the film, personifications of Tarantino’s love and devotion to women and blacks. Without them there is no film.

That’s the problem with Inglourious Basterds, 90% of it is bravado and theatrics and show. Only a small portion of it seems to be about what it’s about. It’s a fierce, radical film with entirely too much clever padding. As much as I love the scene in the basement bar and Christoph Waltz and his milk and cream and Dieter Hellstrom and King Kong it’s clever, it’s padding. It’s my baby Tarantino being boy rather than a man and cutting to the chase which is Shosanna and film and fire.

Over the past month or so I’ve been getting quasi-obsessed with the television show Heroes. I watched Season 1 (very good) and Season 2 (very bad) on DVD and I’ve also been watching the current Season, 4.

( cut for spoilersCollapse )

Last night I had a dream that was backstory for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. I was a young girl in a very wealthy family and the Basterds were using our decrepit summer estate for training. My mother cautioned me very strongly against associating with the Basterds but I think I sort of had a thing for Donny (aka the Bear Jew) who I referred to as a Golem.

I’ve deeply drawn to the films of Lars Von Tier. There’s something about his worldview that validates the pessimism about human nature that I feel as a chronic depressive. Stephan Rylance’s review of Von Tier’s lastest movie, AntiChrist, really clarified this aspect of Von Tier’s work for me.

The Agonies of an Antichrist by Stephan Rylance

On the liter side is “Truly, Truly Outragous”, an article on Samantha Newark who was the speaking voice of Jem (Britta Phillips was her singing voice) on the 1980’s cartoon series Jem and the Holograms. Jem was a great show and the interview addresses it’s gay appeal and even mentions fan fiction.

Truly, Truly Outrageous by Noah Michelson

During August and September when I was still working at the supermarket I developed a daily after work ritual—I’d put on the soundtrack to Inglourios Basterds and polish off an entire bottle of wine while playing Farmville on Facebook. It’s only been a little more than a month but I already feel a combination of horror and deep nostalgia for that time in my life. The soundtrack however I have only enthusiasm for. It was recently posted on The American Nightmare, a music blog I sometimes follow and I would strongly recommend it.

Inglorious Basterds Soundtrack at The American Nightmare

On Friday I went to an exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum called “American’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City 1800-1900 that spotlighted the Roman themed work of 19^th century American Artists. The exhibit included many painting of ruins and the commentary on these featured a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun that I really liked:

“(America is) a land where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight… Romance and poetry need Ruin to make them grow.”

Reading this I couldn’t help but add horror to Hawthorne’s list of ideas that require Ruin to thrive. Horror often mines ancient evils. Hawthorne himself looked back to his puritan ancestors in House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Later H. P. Lovecraft would create a dark New England of sinister in-bred ghouls and otherworldly terrors. Stephan King’s characters stir up paranormal discord by unearthing Indian burial grounds. America then does have its picturesque and gloomy wrongs, either uncovered or created, but I can see the appeal of European settings, of the “old world” and its imagery. Though it’s been tarnished by war, murder, injustice, evil and insanity America remains comparatively shiny and new.

In Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell there’s an amazing chapter where William Gull gives a tour of London spanning from druid times to the present day, revealing layer upon layer of history and mystery. It’s simply not possible to give such a tour of an American city. Because Native American culture and lore was essentially erased even the oldest parts of the country only go back a few centuries. The idea of a thousand or even two thousand years of documented, known, decaying history fascinates me.

It doesn’t surprise me that many of Edger Allen Poe’s most popular short stories are set in a mythical Europe and draw on centuries old imagery of the inquisition, skeleton filled catacombs and ancient family lineages. I thought of stories like The Pit and the Pendulum, Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher when I read Hawthorne’s quote.

I also thought of Hostel, a film I watched a couple of weeks ago for the first time. An extremely violent tale of American’s abroad who are lured to a hostel that provides victims for those willing to pay to murder and torture, Hostel was widely criticized when it was released for exploiting post-9/11 xenophobia and paranoia. Meditating on the quote by Hawthorne however I feel like it belongs in an older, gothic tradition where the American consciousness is mesmerized and frightened by the mystery and gloomy wrongs of an older world.

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is one of those books that I’ve loved as both a little girl and a grown woman. Visually it appeals to me enormously, the illustrations are gorgeous, but beyond that I’ve always been fascinated by the story (simple and epic all at once), by Sendak’s sly sense of humor, by the sense of joy and the edge of darkness the book contains. In a lot of ways Where the Wild Things Are has always struck me as a story that works on a primeval, Jungian level charting the child’s process of identity building in a mythic fable. Growing up is like Max’s journey. You over step boundaries, you reject authority, you play with other roles and unacceptable behavior, you run amok but then hopefully you return your parents, your home, to love and safety and order.

I felt like Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are film did a really good job with the difficult task of adapting Sendak’s book. The movie is visually striking in its own right and doesn’t slight either the playfulness or the sometimes menacing edginess of the original.

Screenwriters Jonze and David Eggers stay true to the narrative outlines sketched by Sendak while fleshing out the story. We see a bit more of Max’s home life than the book shows. Nine year old Max (Max Records) is an extremely creative little boy with a rambunctious streak. His older sister can’t be bothered with him and his divorced, working mother loves and encourages him, but sometimes she kind of wants a life of her own. At school his science teacher talks about the sun dying. Wanting attention, confused, angry, sad and frightened all at once Max lashes out. First he trashes his sister’s room after her friends wreck the igloo he’s built. Then he behaves badly indeed when his mother has a (male) friend over for dinner, eventually biting her before he flees.

Max arrives in the world of the Wild Things to find one of them, Carol, in the process of breaking things. Max immediately identifies, as well he should. The Wild Things, especially Carol, are like giant, motherless children. Theirs is an id level world of joyful rough and tumble anarchy on one hand and frightening destructive violence on the other. Initially they consider eating Max but when he assures them he can do away with sadness and loneliness and make it so they’re happy all the time they make him their king. They all have wonderful, raucous fun together and Max sets them to work building the ultimate fort but the family of the Wild Things is no without it’s conflict and Max isn’t able to make them go away. Carol ultimately becomes as frustrated with Max as Max became with his mother and like Max lashes out.

The themes of the fallibility of authority figures and the currents of destructiveness that exist even in loving families are new to the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. There was a certain gleeful amorality to Sendak’s version but in the film it’s spelled out more clearly the ways Max grows through his experiences among the Wild Things—he returns because his time as king has taught him empathy for his mother.