I Think This Just Might Be My Masterpiece

Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is quite possibly the best film Tarantino has ever directed, even when considering his masterpiece Pulp Fiction (1994), which is one of my favorite films of all time, and the absolutely brilliant Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill Volume One and Two (2003, 2004). After catching the 11:30 AM screening with my girlfriend Anne and her brother Jamie, I tried to pinpoint the last time I felt such unadulterated joy and cinematic delight while watching a movie.

The excitement of watching The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) for the first time comes to mind, but I don't think I've really seen something with the same raw energy and gleeful excitement found in Inglorious Basterds since Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006). I saw The Departed five times in theaters alone; something tells me I'll be going back to see Inglorious Basterds again.

Christoph Waltz, who plays the despicable yet oddly fascinating Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, has his name written on this year's Best Supporting Actor Academy Award (after winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year for his incredible performance). Tarantino's labyrinth screenplay, which introduces and employs dozens of memorable characters, is only partially devoted to the tale of the Basterds, the Jewish-American rogue soldiers on a mission to kill and scalp every Nazi they can find in France. Instead of filming a traditional revenge movie, Tarantino has made a distinctly European picture full of fascinating, three-dimensional characters who are the unsuspecting stars of a spaghetti-western-turned-war picture.

Tarantino holds back on the relentless violence his younger audiences will certainly crave, in favor of a terrificly-written series of events in which characters meet each other, discuss film and play games, and are eventually subject to very brief outbreaks of violence. It's not that different from the structure of Pulp Fiction (although Inglorious Basterds is told in chronological order).

Brad Pitt has impressed me once again as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the head of the Jewish Basterds, with a thick Southern accent and a serious problem with the Nazi Party. Pitt's performance is both wildly comical and seriously frightening; it's worth noting that Pitt has given brilliant performances in uniformly superb movies for the past few years, including Babel (2006, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik), Burn After Reading (2008, Joel and Ethan Coen) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, David Fincher). Bravo to actors like Pitt and George Clooney who use their star power to make bold and daring films.

Costars Melanie Laurent, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Til Schweiger and even Mike Myers deliver excellent performances in the scenes which ultimately lead to the inevitably blood-soaked finale, in which the Jewish people get their revenge against the Nazi Party at the film premiere of a German propaganda movie.

Aside from writing and directing one of the most entertaining and joyous odes to cinema ever put onscreen, Tarantino has also crafted a film that is a rumination on the wonderful power of cinema to destroy evil forces and change the course of history. If there's a better message to be found in a motion picture this year, I'd like to hear about it.

With apologies to Public Enemies (Michael Mann) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), Inglorious Basterds is the best film I've seen this year. To hell with the fact that Tarantino has rewritten history - I think this just might be his masterpiece.

Tomorrow I will write about my extreme disgust regarding Paramount Pictures' decision to move the release date of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island from October 2nd to next February. Martin Scorsese is my man, and I don't appreciate this release date change (unless, of course, Scorsese himself requested the change). The absence of Shutter Island in this year's fall movie calendar leaves me without much investment in any of the other new releases this fall (other than Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, and Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man). Perhaps Inglorious Basterds will remain as my #1 film of the year, after all.

Happy Birthday to Gretchen Kyser

I want to wish a very happy birthday to my loving mother, Gretchen Kyser. She is celebrating her fifty-sixth birthday today, only nine days after my late father would have been celebrating his fifty-sixth birthday. To the right, she and I stand near a telephone booth in London, England in the late 1990s. After working a long day at work, she and I had a very pleasant dinner, and then my girlfriend Anne and I treated her to a birthday movie. We decided to see In the Loop (2009, Armando Iannucci), a very funny British political satire starring the brilliantly foul-mouthed Peter Capaldi and a quick-witted James Gandolfini. The film, which owes a lot to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), is very deserving of all of the critical accolades the film has received.

Before watching In the Loop at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar, I came across a brilliantly designed poster for Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Inglorious Basterds, which had just screened at the Alamo Drafthouse a few evenings prior with Tarantino and Eli Roth in attendance.

I asked the manager of Mondo Tees, a terrific t-shirt store that operates inside the Alamo Drafthouse, how much one of these superbly-crafted posters cost. As it turns out, the poster is the work of Tyler Stout, who regularly produces original artwork for Tarantino's films. This 24" by 36" 6 color screenprint poster was hand numbered with an edition size of 450.

According to their website, "Tyler Stout is to posters what Quentin Tarantino is to directing. Translation: These guys are the best at what they do and when they team up, you get works of art like this!"

Every one of the super limited posters have now been sold online for extremely high prices, as I understand. However, the Drafthouse gift-wrapped special copies of the poster for each of the celebrities attending the Inglorious Basterds screening. Fortunately, star Eli Roth never came to pick up his poster after the screening - and so the manager offered me the poster for $35.00. I would've been a fool not to accept his offer, as the other two remaining posters for celebrity attendees were soon to be put on Ebay to be sold for a few hundred dollars each.

Therefore, not only did I buy one of 450 circulating original prints of this incredibly awesome poster for about a fifth of the selling price, but I now also have a pre-packaged poster in my room with Eli Roth's name on it. How about that?

The celebration of my mother's birthday marks the conclusion of the family birthdays in August. The proud Leos in my immediate and extended family are listed below.

August 3rd: Anne Goode

August 5th: Jack Kyser

August 10th: John Michael Kyser and Kate Goode

August 14th: Lucille Kyser and Carol Knox

August 17th: Robert De Niro and Sean Penn

August 19th: Gretchen Kyser

My journey through the NYU Essential Screening List continues, as I recently viewed Night and Fog (1955, Alain Resnais), a harrowing Holocaust documentary film which I briefly wrote about yesterday. Resnais' film explores the remains of a concentration camp some ten years after the Holocaust ended, while also providing truly disturbing images and actual footage of what occurred inside the concentration camps. Even after having seen Steven Spielberg's devastating Schindler's List (1993) many times, I was still horrified and disturbed by the images in the film. I can't imagine how audiences reacted to this film upon it's initial release in the 1950s - Resnais certainly does not shy away from the darkness.

I most recently watched The Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein), an extremely influential silent film from the USSR, and Dog Star Man (1962-1964, Stan Brakhage), an experimental and poetic film that would serve as an excellent albeit disturbing screensaver on a computer. But as a film? Yes, I am certain the movie has significant artistic merit, but I won't pretend to understand Brakhage's style of filmmaking. I don't mean to speak poorly of a film with such ambition, but Dog Star Man is an endurance test. I look forward to learning about the film's meaning and importance at NYU.

As the August birthdays come to an end, and I have only ten days remaining in Austin, I shall leave with one simple message from my dearly departed father: Go Red Sox!