Inglourious Basterds (2009) - Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino

(Though Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" made it clear Tarintino was a master, I wasn’t so excited to see “Inglourious Basterds.” Somehow the advertisements for it seemed like they were trying to trick me into thinking that women were in the movie, and that I would be interested in it. After the high art of "Kill Bill", I thought that this would be more like one of his earlier movies - a break or something. Also, the main premise “violence done to the Nazis who deserve it” seemed like an easy and dumb premise for violence. But I went to see it with my artist friends Amy C Lam and Seth Scriver and my boyfriend Misha Glouberman at Toronto's Rainbow Cinemas on one of the last few days it was playing in the city. The Rainbow Cinemas are special, they are underground and cheap. The screening rooms are like private screening rooms you would find in the Hollywood Hills, but after the 3rd great depression - and maintained with love. Seth brought a giant bag of homemade popcorn. We sat together in a narrow row - the closet people to the screen.)

The whole of any movie is made up of many parts: the music choices, the budget, the reason for making the movie in the first place, the audience, the approach, etc. I always think of cynicism in people's work as an easy dismissal or a contempt for one or more of these parts - a lack of faith that all of these parts are valuable and interconnected (however mysterious or seemingly insignificant they may seem.) Even if some of the reasons behind their choices elude the movie-makers, the less cynical directors can speak to this, and not just offer rote or dishonest reasons for their choices.

So with this definition in mind, Tarantino has arrived at the tops of the uncynical director's platform. I believe he could give you all the reasons for his movie-making choices - even if some of those reasons are "because it was beautiful" or "because I could." His choices and his reasons seem at their ecstatic best here, and the movie is remarkable for it. "Inglourious Basterds" seems to come from a place of *crazy wisdom*. Someone who uses crazy wisdom (as defined by Wikipedia) is "someone who is adept at employing esoteric and seemingly unspiritual methods to awaken an aspirant's consciousness."

At a time when contemporary reality has become more fun to play with than fiction, Tarintino has used his crazy wisdom to make a thoroughly fictitious movie by effortlessly rearranging the reality of history.

And with his crazy wisdom, he even thought of us, the audience - this movie gets as close to participatory culture as Hollywood has ever gotten. At one point while my friends and I were sitting inside Rainbow Cinemas, we watched on the screen a small Parisian cinema filled with all of the highest ranking Nazis officers of the Third Reich laughing as they watched a propaganda film of a Nazi shooting Jews randomly from a bell tower. As they watched, they laughed, as they laughed, the cinema started to burn. As the cinema started to burn, we started to laugh from our Rainbow Cinemas. In Paris, in the burning cinema run by a young Jewish woman, the doors were locked and the highest ranking Nazis of the Third Reich tried to get out.

The beauty with cartoon violence is that you still get to use your logical brain while you are experiencing it. While we at the Rainbow Cinemas laughed, we knew we didn't want to be laughing - laughing exactly like the Nazis laughed at their film - but we knew that we were. We also knew that without us, this surreal loop of disgust and indifference for the death of others would not be completed. We were not being tricked, this was just the specific ride we were on. There is a difference between manipulating an audience and creating a game where the audience gets to play a role. What was happening never escaped us, and it was not meant to.

Plus, there are women in the movie.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans - directed by Werner Herzog

(I watched this at my favourite movie house in Toronto, the Royal on College St. It's a big cinema that is always pretty near empty. Sometimes you see the directors standing outside smoking and once I saw the main actor - in the movie I had just watched - sitting at the back with her friends. The conversations before this movie started were hilarious. People explaining to their companions who Werner Herzog was. People explaining to their companions who Nicolas Cage was. It sounded like no one had seen the first Bad Lieutenant movie – the one where Harvey Keitel was acting. I hadn’t either. The movie was out of focus for the first 10 minutes, but then the projectionist fixed it.)

If life is art for you and you are living your life and in your life you want to watch a Hollywood cop movie that’s about America, you go see this movie, cause it’s like you’re dreaming a cop movie about America in public with other people around you. And for you, maybe most of life is art – but sometimes it is more so.

Sometimes the movie comes into focus as a real cop flick complete with a banquet ceremony and a happily pregnant ex-prostitute and then it goes back out again to the place where you’ve been dancing to the beat for a million years in an unconscious stupor.

I like best Werner Herzog's documentaries. They always seem more bizarre than a straight fiction is often capable of being and his strange voice-overs are a big part of this. It's actually kind of generous to suddenly tell the audience, with a dead serious and floating voice, what metaphor we are to go with while we watch a bear coming towards the camera. It’s a hard thing to do because a German-accented voice-over is pretty near some people's definition of pretentious. But when Herzog does it, it is the opposite. It’s accessible. He is not ever being mysterious or windy, he is shooting down metaphors with a pellet gun and saying – wow, look at this one. We are all coming from different places – it’s helpful and interesting to know where the director is coming from and where he is going. Telling the audience straight-up is one way to go about it.

No voice-overs in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans" cause it's not that kind of movie. But a similar need/ instinct to lock down the metaphors comes out. The most beautiful and hilarious one happens immediately after an intense crack-smoking session when there is a shoot-out between a group of 3 men on one side of a room and a group of 4 men (this group including Nicolas Cage) on the other. The 3 men fall to their deaths, the group of 4 remain standing in the silence of the gun-smoke filled room.

Nicolas Cage is the only man without a gun. He suddenly yells “Shoot him again!” One of the other 4 men says “They’re all dead, man.” Cage says, “Shoot that one again - his soul is still dancing!” Because of Cage’s intense drug use and constant hallucinations throughout the movie, we assume that he is literally seeing a soul dancing. We have also witnessed him talking to others, without too much concern for being considered crazy, about things he sees that are clearly not being seen by others. So as he says "his soul is still dancing!" we see a straight double, of one of the men lying and dying on the floor, upright and dancing a crazy jig – then we watch the slow fall as one last bullet goes through his body. We know that what we are seeing is a representation of another man's hallucination and not only a suggestive metaphor. For Herzog, it’s always this kind of heavy and simple poetry – patiently tying anything ethereal to the ground so that it can't get away, and so that we can remember where it came from.

It made me think that the seed of this project was Herzog thinking - I wonder what a soul looks like when it is dying and fighting and dancing all at the same time.