“Inglourious Basterds”

I managed to catch this one last night without reading any advanced press and only receiving the scantest of info from friends. Of course, I’d seen the previews, and had heard rumors about the film for going on a decade, but I was relatively unprepared for what I saw.

Let me say that I was trepidatious about the film prior to seeing it. I don’t usually go for war films, and I was worried what Tarantino might do with the genre. Even the idea of a Jewish-American band of Nazi killers didn’t reassure me that he wasn’t going to slide into melodrama, either producing a film that glorifies war, or a straightforward buddy picture, or a stale romance, or something truly pathetic like “Life Is Beautiful.”

In my opinion, Tarantino doesn’t do any of those things. “Basterds” analyzes war films, film history, and military history in a deeply critical, unsentimental way that I found completely satisfying. I’m not sure if it qualifies as his masterpiece–I’d have to see it a few more times in order to judge that–but it was certainly an energizing, exciting film. During the talky parts, I feared that Tarantino was loosing his audience, a typical Saturday night popcorn movie audience in Charlottesville, but judging by the grins, applause, and general electricity in the theater after the film, I think that Tarantino and his cast have created a populist triumph. In the men’s bathroom after the film I heard audience members bandying about finer points of plot construction and character development in a way that you don’t usually associate with your typical Hollywood blockbuster. (Can you even talk seriously about such in issues in adaptations of children’s novels? Their characters, according to biological definition, don’t even have fully formed “personalities.”)

There is something slightly unsettling about a WWII film about Jewish people that doesn’t really attempt to address the horror of the Holocaust in any sort of serious way, but that is also what is most refreshing about the film. Where you stand on this issue–the film’s counterfactual history of WWII–will I think determine how you feel about the film in general. In one way, the film can certainly be read as an anecdote to the counterfactual histories posed by authors like Philip Roth and Michael Chabon over the past ten years that literary critic Walter Benn Michaels has spent so much time railing against.

Ultimately I like the film because it does not reinscribe Americanist/militarist ideology in the way that Michaels hates. It is ultimately very unsettling on the point of America’s involvement in WWII. Neither does it take a sentimental view of the Holocaust or war in general. It depicts violence unflinchingly to the point where it can be perceived as cavalier, but in doing so, it challenges the viewer to confront her own desensitization within a military-industrial complex that we all benefit from as Americans. Avoiding the casual racism that plagues so many of his films, Tarantino has at least equaled his best efforts and perhaps surpassed them.

Sunn O))), “Monoliths and Dimensions”

Just had a chance to listen to this one in its entirety for the first time. For me, what Sunn O))) does blows pretty much everything else happening out of the water music-wise. It’s so refreshing to sit down with an album that you have to listen to in its entirety to really appreciate. I’m not even sure if that can be said for bands like Radiohead anymore. Everyone seems to have given themselves over the tyranny of the mp3. This is one of the virtues of experimental metal in general and Sunn O))) in particular. They are both still invested in and successful with the full-length album form. The addition of strings, horns, and a women’s choir on “M & D” lives up to the hype and fits perfectly with Sunn O)))’s always stirring aesthetic. It doesn’t hurt that their guest vocalists on this one keep things particularly creepy. Inhuman. The last track, “Alice,” takes things in a slightly more melismatic, jazzy direction, almost like a slow, Henry Mancini-esque soundtrack cut, which may take some time to grow on me, but overall I’m happy that these guys keep plugging away at their basic existential/absurd, doom metal paradigm.

Combatting Neo-Apartheid

I totally agree with Melissa Harris-Lacewell in this clip from the Rachel Maddow show recommended to me by a friend on Facebook.

I didn’t understand the Sotomayor hearings as a pathetic last stand by the Gingrich Republicans (a la Frank Rich in the NYT and others across the internet), but rather as a failed yet still threatening use of the media and bureaucratic procedure to create the cultural conditions in which a white soon-to-be minority can maintain power in spite of demographic shifts and a popular will for social and economic change, i.e. the cultural building blocks of an American neo-apartheid. Like Lacewell, I have my eyes on the mid-term elections and think that while Obama does his best to reform Washington, we citizens need to redouble our efforts to strengthen Democratic/Independent/Green/Socialist/Communist control of the House and Senate in 2010. Pick your candidate and start working.

The Most Dangerous Woman in Amerika

I keep warning liberal friends to take Sarah Palin seriously, and Frank Rich’s NYT editorial today strengthens my resolve. Perhaps everybody knows this already, but unless the Left remains super-vigilant, I fear a shocking right-wing reaction against the Obama government that will crush all the good will he has inspired at home and abroad. It’s good to see the NYT jumping on board, but from what I can tell from talking to friends, liberals aren’t that worried about Palin yet. They think she’s a joke. To me, her continued media presence is a reminder that politics don’t end on election day. Where is the anti-fascist energy that got Obama elected? Where are the political volunteers out on the streets educating their parents and grandparents about what a disaster Palin is? Frightfully, I think that articles like this one actually fuel Palin’s fire. Any evidence of Palin’s incompetence is taken as a vicious attack, which creates a vicious circle of resentment and reaction. The only way to stem this tide is to focus on the good things happening in this country, if they ever start happening.

New Eminem Song

Is this children’s music? To whom is this song supposed to appeal? It’s misogyny is somehow simultaneously juvenile, irrational, precise, and exacting all at the same time. I imagine a focus group of 18-24 year old males being asked, “What makes you angry?” “Women.” “Which ones?”

This is the sort of culture that I think can only be explained by capital’s will to profit off of humanity’s basest impulses.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Despite some negative reviews, I was still looking forward to this latest from Kevin Smith. His last film, Clerks 2, was his best since Chasing Amy, and maybe since the original Clerks, and the film’s title had the same ring of why-didn’t-I-think-0f-that comedy gold as The 40-Year Old Virgin. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations.

I figure there are two ways Smith could have gone with this premise. He either could have “taken it more seriously,” or gone totally over-the-top and perhaps risked a NC-17 or X rating. By “taking the premise more seriously,” I don’t mean that he should have turned the film into a drama. I simply mean that he should have cleaved more accurately towards what it might really be like to make amateur porn. Nowadays, if someone is going to make amateur porn, they’re probably going to post it on the internet before they market it to video, and they certainly wouldn’t have the cinematic pretensions that Zack and Miri have in this movie. Of course, some will retort that their cinematic pretensions are what paint them as innocents and make the movie charming, but this is where I wish the movie had gone over-the-top.  Besides more nudity, more crudeness, and hopefully, more laughs and weird charm, the film also could have indulged in more romance, and morphed into something more unique and more compelling within the rom-com genre. Instead, the movie tries for the best of both worlds — charming rom-com and social commentary — and largely fails on both counts.

Besides all this, the film is laden with Smith’s typical homophobia and sexism. I thought that he’d kind of turned the corner on this with the ending of Clerks II, which was actually mildly compelling in its working through of the homophobic anxieties that are so common in white, suburban, working-class men, but in Zack and Miri he’s back to his typically sophomoric standard with the characters Bobby Long and Brandon St. Randy. Disappointing. As well, it’s curious to note how even when presenting otherwise loving portrayals of women, like Miri, the latest cycle of gross-out comedies (i.e. anything in the Judd Apatow universe) also seems morbidly compelled to include the most offensive female stereotypes (the other porn actresses in this film).

For me, Kevin Smith movies are always funny, always a nostalgia trip, but he continues to leave me at a loss when explaining his nasty side.

Same Shit, Different Day

This Thomas Freidman editorial is the #1 most popular piece at NYT.com today.

Heidegger said the same shit in 1954, Marx in 1848. Motherfuckers need to wake up. Mother Nature has been dead for the past hundred years (at least). And who cares about Mother Nature when people are suffering? It’s incredibly weird that Freidman’s editorial laments ecological disaster as though it’s a novel phenomenon whilst barely shedding a tear for the billions of global poor suffering right now at the hands of capital. Freidman and the ecologists have their heart in the right place, but generally, their sociology is incredibly weak.

The most important philosophy book of the next ten years will square Heideggerian ecology with a Marxist theory of social change.

Lil Wayne’s “Prom Queen”

I actually think that this song is going to be a huge hit. With the release of a music video yesterday, it’s obvious that the original version that we heard on the Hottest N** Under the Sun mixtape and various internet leaks was somehow incomplete, either a demo version or unmastered. (I think if you listen hard enough you can actually hear a click track.) Listening to the music video version, with a much tighter drum track, boosted guitars, and (I think) a tweaked vocal, I can easily see kids dancing to this song at frat parties and high school dances. For those who prefer the Lil Wayne of “Georgia . . . Bush” and “A Milli,” the song may be pretty lame, but we aren’t necessarily the people who have made Wayne a star. As a point of comparison, when the The Carter III came out last year, I remember a lot of reviews dissing “Get Money” as the worst track on the album, and I pretty much agreed with them, but now, after the mainstream audience made the song a big hit, I recognize its original brilliance as one of the most fun songs of the album, if not necessarily the best.

I may be the only person in America looking forward to Rebirth.

The New Springsteen Album: Track by Track

Critical opinion on the new Springsteen seems mixed, and many tracks are simply baffling reviewers. So Grundrisse is gonna sort it out for us, track by track. We start with track 1, “Outlaw Pete,” which Variety named the weakest album opener of Springsteen’s career. I don’t know Human Touch or Lucky Town very well, so I can’t be unequivocal on this, but “Outlaw Pete” definitely sucks, and it’s definitely a weird song to put at the beginning of an album. Last night, my friend Jason informed me that the song may have been inspired by a bedtime story that Springsteen’s mother used to tell him before he went to bed. Every night she would make up a new episode. If this is true, it makes the song somewhat more intelligible and at least aesthetically interesting. Translating his mother’s tongue into pop song seems of a piece with Springsteen’s recent collaborations and encomia to Pete Seeger, and intersects with his traditional thematic interests in memory and authenticity, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be skipping the song when I play this disc.

It also bears a pathetic resemblance to Kiss’s “I Was Made for Lovin’ You.” Weird.

Bacon

I know that everyone loves bacon. Always have, always will. But it also seems to me like there’s something of a bacon craze going on these days. The other day I mentioned bacon in my facebook status, and immediately got an enthusiastic response. That guy Hosea on Top Chef is always wearing bacon shirts. I know of at least one friend with a bacon-themed blog. And then there was this in today’s New York Times. I’ve also seen it circulating on facebook.

Culturalist that I am, I can’t read this bacon craze as some innocent taste phenomenon. Taste is never innocent or simple, and bacon as a food connotes far more than simple good taste. Yet  I also don’t want to read the hip embrace of bacon as simple bourgeois posturing about a food that connotes lower class foodways and bad health. Instead, for me, the recent bacon craze is sympomatic of hipster/yuppie bad conscience about the new American exceptionalism. Yes we did. But do we deserve it? Well, if not, we can kill ourselves slowly with bacon. Does anyone have a cigarette?