Clueless

When I was working at Federal-Mogul (later re-named DR1V after they were aquired by Tenneco -- the reason I left the company), I worked quite a bit on all of the brand websites for things like Wagner Brakes, Fel-Pro gaskets, Champion Sparkplugs, etc. My boss, Jessica, really liked the idea of each of these brands having a "Merch(andise) Store". I didn't necessarily see the point of that for most of the brands but helped get them built out anyway. I always felt that of all of the brands under the Federal-Mogul banner, Champion was the most recognizable. This was proven out when I saw an on-set photo from Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where Brad Pitt was wearing a Champion t-shirt. I saved out the photo and sent it over to my boss as well as our social media manager.

"I don't know if they needed to get permission for this but I think it's a great opportunity for us to sell some Champion t-shirts!" I wrote to them along with details of the film and its release date. I figured they would take this information and run with it -- coming up with potential tie-ins, a social media calendar, and more. Instead, they did nothing.

I left the company shortly after that (and a few months before the July 26, 2019 release date). I kept tabs on my co-workers for a few weeks after I left (as one is wont to do). I went out to dinner with one of the guys who took over my position and I asked him for an update about the Champion Merch Store. Did they ever do anything to capitalize on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? No. Nothing. They didn't even order extras. The style of the shirt worn by Pitt "mysteriously" sold out by August, 2019 and was never re-stocked.

I don't know when the Merch Store went away but it's not on the Champion website -- which is riddled with broken links and hasn't had its copyright updated since 2022. Looks like all of my hard work wasn't appreciated despite almost literally gift-wrapping a great idea for them. More reasons that I left.

Tarantino Tales

As I mentioned way back when the Lianne Spiderbaby scandal broke, I'm the guy that people bring their Tarantino news to. I'm also the guy people bring their wild stories to.

The "take down" of men who have been accused of sexual misconduct has also brought about some incredible conspiracy theories as well. "Look at who's being accused! They're lower level nobodies, no one who's making Hollywood any significant bank these days. They're all sacrificial lambs while the real criminals carry on..."

Couple those two things and I've gotten an in-box full of Tarantino Tales that implicate him as a sexual predator -- specifically against Death Proof actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead -- and that his disavowal of Harvey Weinstein was nothing more than a smoke screen and that Sony is now protecting Tarantino from any accusations of misconduct now that he's in pre-production on his Manson film.

Let's not forget that Quentin Tarantino was dating Mira Sorvino -- playing a role in getting her in The Replacement Killers, which was right around the time Peter Jackson was in pre-production for Lord of the Rings. Some say this was an orchestrated revenge against Sorvino on Tarantino's behalf. ("Some say" is that same kind of crappy phrase Trump uses like "People are saying...").

There are also "casting couch" stories in regard to all of the movies that Tarantino has bandied about but never made: the Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill remake, the Vega Brothers movie, etc. But, again, those are rumors. Baseless accusations.

While these allegations against Tarantino have yet to come to light, they still may. However, I've also been treated to some stories about Tarantino that Alex Jones may find far-fetched.

Let it be said right now that I don't think that these hold any water. I don't think that Quentin Tarantino gave Roger Avary a spiked drink, leading to a fatal car crash nor do I think that Harvey Weinstein pushed Tarantino's long-time editor Sally Menke off a cliff while Tarantino video taped it, in order to make a snuff film to which he could masturbate later. Quentin Tarantino may be a lot of things but I don't see him as a Bond villain-level mastermind committing a string of crimes.

I don't even buy him throwing Hadrian Belove to the wolves as Cinefamily is a digital threat to the analog New Beverly; or doing the same to Harry Knowles because Knowles no longer serves a purpose. No, I see Tarantino as a guy who likes to hole up in his house and smoke too much dope.

I also don't see Harvey Weinstein as a serial killer who had both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams killed. This seems the definition of "fake news" and batshit crazy.

I'm sure not what to think about Robert Rodriguez's involvement in the Weinstein story. The casting of Rose McGowan in the notorious Grindhouse project presents some problems especially when I remember that Rodriguez cheated on his wife with McGowan before he abruptly broke up with her.

And what role does Amber Tamblyn play in all this? She allegedly encouraged Quentin Tarantino to "come clean" about what he knew about Harvey Weinstein but it all seems overly-calculated. This is both show and business.

I don't see it as any coincidence that Bryan Singer was removed from Bohemian Rhapsody right before being sued for sexual assault.

Now I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist but I will say that not only do I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg in regard to the mechanisms of the entertainment industry but that what we've read reeks of pre-approved studio releases.

There's absolutely no journalistic integrity to this blog post so it shouldn't be considered news. Consider it a bit of "pulp fiction" as it were. If there are hard facts out there to support any of these things, it's improbable they'll ever come to light but stranger things have happened.

The Hateful Rebel

A few weeks before Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight came out, the story broke that it was, um, inspired by an episode of the TV show "The Rebel" (Season 1 Episode 25 - Fair Game). As soon as this news broke, people started asking me if I was going to do a comparison video between the two things. Not being that handy with video software -- at least not nearly as handy as a lot of people I see online who seem to have some strong AfterEffects skills.

To that end, I was waiting for someone else to do it -- maybe Jacob T. Swinney? -- to put something together. While I think that this could be better, Geektoid has cut together something that juxtaposes a few scenes and ideas.



If someone doesn't put together something better soon, I'm going to have to dive headfirst back into Sony Vegas.

Let's Do Some Math

Is The Hateful Eight really the 8th film from Quentin Tarantino? This seems suspect.

1/2 My Best Friend's Birthday
1 Reservoir Dogs
1 Pulp Fiction
1/4 Four Rooms
1 Jackie Brown
1 Kill Bill: Vol. 1
1 Kill Bill: Vol. 2
1/8 Sin City
1 Grindhouse: Death Proof
1 Inglourious Basterds
1 Django Unchained
1 Hateful Eight

It seems like the 9th full feature. Maybe the 8th if we're counting Kill Bill as one film (though I paid for two tickets). But, really, it seems like it's the 9.875 film from Quentin Tarantino.

Jealous Much?

Why is it killing me just a little inside these days that a recent (May, 2015) video by Jacob T. Swinney called Quentin Tarantino's Best Visual Film References is getting written about, tweeted, referenced and -- as the kids say -- "going viral" (as of this blog post the video has almost 300K views on YouTube) when a video that I helped create back in 1995, You're Still Not Fooling Anybody, which essentially does the same thing is hovering around 25K hits and is execrated by nearly everyone making a comment?

Quentin Tarantino's Best Visual Film References

You're Still Not Fooling Anybody

Even the Greg Cwik article, Here's the Movie That Gave Us Quentin Tarantino's Career chooses to use Swinney's piece to demonstrate Quentin Tarantino's "visual influences" rather than going with the 1994 video I helped create, Who Do You Think You're Fooling?, which really pits City on Fire against Reservoir Dogs?

Who Do You Think You're Fooling?

I have a theory why. I think it's because Swinney's video is inherently more entertaining. At three minutes long, it's far shorter than either one of my videos. It doesn't rely on contrasting audio and video: you can watch it with the sound off and get 95% of the impact. It's made more competently with modern editing software and higher quality video. It's also one video that covers all of Tarantino's current work rather than two video that concentrate on two different films. In short, it's just better.

And, to that end, I have to admit that I'm just a jealous jerk.

All Quiet on the Spiderbaby Front...

It's been two weeks now since the shitstorm of "Spidergate" swept through the Internets. Twitter, blogs, forums and facebook were abuzz for a few days and even a few mainstream periodicals picked up on the story: Gawker, The L.A. Times, The Toronto Star, The Guardian.

Intrepid investigators have scoured Lianne MacDougall's past works, going all the way back to her college papers, discovering a history of plagiarism that reaches far into her past.

Meanwhile, there's been no word from the MacDougall/Tarantino camp, from St. Martin's Press (where her book Grindhouse Girls is said to be coming out "late 2013"), or from any other media outlet.

I could be deluded (and usually am) but I feel that the Spiderbaby "scandal" extends past the boundaries of "genre journalism" and speaks to a larger problem of the value (or lack thereof) placed on the pixels that so many people have been pushing around the internet. By writing something for online consumption, is it's value inherently less than that of something on paper? And why should one writer get paid for using the exact same words that another writer has used rather than paying the original author? Is there more value in the "image" of the author than the actual output?

This ordeal has opened up a lot of great conversations that I would encourage people to check out including (but not limited to):

• Lianne Spiderbaby plagiarized my review of Turn Me On, Dammit!
• Lianne Spiderbaby Didn’t Plagiarise Me, But I'm Angry Anyway
• Lianne Spiderbaby & Journalistic Integrity (or lack thereof)
• On Plagiarism, “Lianne Spiderbaby,” Tarantino, and when “borrowing” is theft
• Spiderbaby and why plagiarism is as pointless as it is depressing
• What Defines the Value of a Word
• Plagiarism is Not a Style of Writing

Did I miss anything? Let me know.

And, in the meantime, don't hold your breath for anyone else to pick up this story and run with it. It seems that things have run out of steam.

Who Does Your Girlfriend Think She's Fooling?

It's come to my attention that Lianne Spiderbaby (AKA Lianne MacDougall), a writer for online and offline publications like Fangoria, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Video Watchdog, FEARnet -- well, she used to be on FEARnet... Oddly enough, she's also the current squeeze of our old pal Quentin Tarantino has something more in common than just a love of film with her beau. She's also a big fan of Tarantino's "collage style" of art.

Lianna, host of the Rondo-award winning "horror multimedia" site Fright Bytes, has been taking whole swaths of other peoples' writing and passing it off as her own without any kind of acknowledgement. She's posted numerous articles on FEARnet as a column called "Spiderbaby's Terror Tapes," that have been largely based on other peoples' work.

First Example
The July 9, 2013 piece, "'Suspiria' with Barbara Magnolfi," pieced together sections of original writing along with chunks from Critical-Film.com, HighDefDigest.com, and EmpireOnline.com. Here's a visual example of the introduction to Lianne's interview (which is not plagiarized):

Without a doubt, Suspiria is Dario Argento’s best film (some of you may not feel the same, but I stand behind my choice), and one of the most atmospheric and artistic films ever made in the horror genre. It is the first in Argento’s “The Three Mothers” trilogy, which also includes Inferno and The Mother Of Tears. Argento was at the top of his proverbial game when directing both Suspiria and Inferno as they defy everything you've come to expect from horror films. Not only are they brimming with suspense and incredibly stylized violence, they are absolutely beautifully filmed.

Suspiria defines the horror film as a work of visual art. Scenes are lit with bright reds, greens, and blues making them look more like moving paintings than film. It's a masterpiece of visual filmmaking. Suspiria also includes one of the most memorable soundtracks of all time. Goblin, who would score numerous other films for Argento, provide a haunting score and one that uses strange human vocals, the sounds of whispers and gasps to compliment the music. It's an artistic choice that lends itself well to the film. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Suspiria without Goblin’s soundtrack. The 1977 giallo classic is an experiment with lighting, mise-en-scène and sound.

Rightly considered the pièce de résistance of Dario Argento's filmmaking career, the movie is sparse and plain as it follows a young American dancer named Suzy (Jessica Harper) through the stressful demands of a prestigious ballet academy. Over the course of the film, Suzy slowly discovers that the ballet studio is run by a nasty coven of witches.

But it’s the beginning sequence that sets Suspiria apart from all the rest – it starts out late in the night during a raging storm. A young woman runs screaming from the exclusive Frieberg ballet school. We see her hurtling, screaming through the woods, illuminated by lightning. After she arrives at a friend's apartment she peers through a window into the tumult, only for an arm to smash through one window pane and, in a loving, extended shot, suffocate her against the other. While her friend drums hysterically against the locked door the gloved hand repeatedly stabs the girl. In the next shot the stabbing continues, this time in full close up as the fiend winds a rope around the shrieking victims legs. Then, we cut to the friend running into the lobby of the apartment building for help. As she looks up towards a stained glass ceiling, the victim's head crashes through it in a hail of glass shards followed by her body. We cut to the blood-drenched corpse, suspended by the rope dripping blood onto the floor. Finally Argento pans the camera to reveal his next horror: the falling glass has impaled the friend to the ground, crucifix-like, the largest sliver having split her face in half. This is horror beauty at it’s finest!

Yeah, that's pretty blatant.

Rather than 'fess up to what she'd been doing, it's my guess that Lianne is going to throw her intern, Raven Cousens, under the bus. Why do I say that? Lianne announced the arrival of her "new evil henchman" in a post on her website on June 17, 2013. Now, all mentions of Raven have been removed from Lianne's site. So, don't be surprised if Raven is set up as the fall girl.

There's a small problem with the idea of Raven being the culprit in this plagiarism. It's not that Raven would have been ghost-writing (or ghost copy/pasting) pieces that were credited to Lianne. Instead, it's that the chronology doesn't add up. I say that because Lianne was lifting passages from other peoples' works before the announcement of Raven's internship.

Second Example
On May 6, 2013, Lianne (or someone being credited as Lianne Spiderbaby) posted on FEARnet's "Spiderbaby's Terror Tapes" in the article "'Popcorn' with Jill Schoelen." This time, Moria.co.nz supplied the lion's share of the content for the piece, either directly or via some loose paraphrasing. I'll just highlight the direct stuff and readers can compare the rest.

Maggie (Jill Schoelen), a student at USC film school, is plagued by recurring dreams that feature a terrifying man evoking Satan and other cultish horrors. At school, the film department’s funding has just been cut, but the department head comes up with an idea: holding a festival of old gimmick horror films in a soon-to-be-demolished theatre to raise funds. A film memorabilia expert shows them a film called The Possessor, which features occult sacrifices being conducted by Lanyard Gates, the guru of a film cult in the 1960s. Maggie is startled when the film shows things that appear in her dreams. As the festival begins, a masked madman starts killing off Maggie’s classmates and those closest to her. It also appears as though the killer wants one thing – Maggie. The story is a tad contrived – it is set up to suggest that Lanyard Gates is the killer but it turns out that the killer is someone else who fits into the contorted Lanyard Gates schema.  The script does offer a few amusing lines. One student protests that there is more social relevance in one Police Academy film than in all of Ingmar Bergman’s!

The masterminds behind Popcorn were none other than Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby, who worked together on the frighteningly fabulous Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972), Black Christmas (1974) and Dead of Night (1974).  However, they both took their names off of Popcorn because of all the controversy surrounding the making of the film.  Ormsby wrote the script and used the name Tod Hackett. Although Bob Clark was on set everyday, he decided to be uncredited.  It isn’t known why their names were removed, or why Ormsby was fired.

Mark Herrier was the replacement director, and Popcorn was his first feature. Popcorn comes with a great affection for the lost pleasure of attending a movie at the theater, and it even screens old refreshment and snack ads. Popcorn may have been more successful if it were released today – with such heightened nostalgic aspects, the film would have proven to be popular amongst the sequel-loving horror fans today.   In particular, Popcorn has affection for the old gimmick films of the 1950s. Many of the gimmicks used in the film – the mosquito harnessed to fly across the theatre; insurance policies and warnings about dying of fright; electric buzzers on the seats; and odors pumped into the theatre are all gimmicks that William Castle used in the 1950s. Popcorn also challenged its audience with self-reflective postmodern sensibilities in away that wasn’t really experimented with until Wes Craven’s Scream.

I would advise St. Martin's Press, the publisher of Lianne's upcoming book, Grindhouse Girls (with an intro penned by Tarantino), to do their due diligence to make sure everything is properly vetted and footnoted.

Lianne Discusses Editing
Want a good dose of irony? Watch this video.



Full disclosure, a lot of the research for this piece was done by several other folks (and verified by me -- you can verify it yourself via cached versions of the pages). I'd hate to be accused of 1) plagiarizing someone else's work or 2) putting my name on an article that someone else wrote. Wouldn't that just be a terrible thing to do?

Stay tuned for updates in this story.

Update 7/13/2013 @16:26:
It's been an interesting morning to say the least. I've gotten a lot of feedback on this post and I appreciate everyone who's had something to say, good or bad. The comments to the post are very interesting and some of them are incredibly enlightening.

The video I posted above has been made private and the post about Raven Summers has been re-instated. Lianne's website went down for a little bit but it seems to be back. Likewise, some of her tweets have been up and then down later on. I thought I saw tweets about her individually apologizing to authors for the things she's cribbed but that seems to be down (and Twitter goes through a lot of hoops to try and disable caching of their stuff.

But, here are a couple of interesting tweets that I screen grabbed (despite being now blocked from following her):

Lianne reached out to me to ask me to take down this post but I told her I wouldn't. I figured that we've all had enough of disappearing posts and that doing so would merely fuel the (f)ire.

Update 7/14/2013 @09:29:


Update 7/16/2013 @15:58:
As noted in the comments below, Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas has retracted his initial assessment of the situation and published a statement about the situation on his blog. This initial statement included assurances that the article Lianne penned for the next issue of VW was plagiarism-free. He has now updated that statement to say that it is not free of pilfered prose.

Unfortunately, new findings have forced me to retract a portion of yesterday's statement. John Charles has notified me that evidence of plagiarism has been found in Lianne Spiderbaby's coverage of EMANUELLE IN AMERICA. John is preparing a statement we will be posting later in the day.

I know of several writers who would do a much better job at writing and being honest in their craft that Tim may want to employ (or re-employ), including a few that Lianne ripped-off. Read more here.

Update 7/17/2013 @19:57:
Traces of Lianne's plagiarism keep disappearing from the web. Today all of the videos of her Rondo award-winning FrightBytes show went private, essentially removing all of the content from the YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, more writers are coming forward about being plagiarized. One of the latest is from Scared Stiff Reviews, another is from author Joe Wawrzyniak whose review of I Dismember Mama on IMDB found its way in part to FEARNet courtesy of Lianne. At some point I imagine that someone more ambitious than me will catalog all of these.

In the meantime, keep tabs on the latest events here or via the forums at Latarnia, Monster Kid Classic Horror Forum and The Mortuary.

Remixing the Remixer

Here are a couple of interesting remixes of Tarantino movies as songs:

And here's a nice montage:

From Thunder Alley to Thunder Bolt

Just found another homage that Tarantino made in Grindhouse. I'm sure Tarantino fanatics knew this one but here it is anyway.

Before the Death Proof title card comes up, the audience sees that the original title of the film was "Thunder Bolt"--a nod to the way that pictures were frequently renamed, usually in hopes of garnering new life at the box office:

The font treatment and similarity in name can be seen originally in Richard Rush's auto racing picture Thunder Alley:

Mr. Pink Don't Tip

Saw this on Cracked.com's Movie Plots Summed Up in Venn Diagrams and it made me laugh.

Everything is a Remix: Kill Bill

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Big thanks to @Zerudah.

Tarantino's Mix Tapes Get Award

From today's Hollywood Reporter:

Quentin Tarantino will be honored with the first ever Critics' Choice Music+Film Award.

The inaugraual(sic) award was created to honor a single filmmaker who inspires moviegoers with cinematic storytelling, but also heightened the impact of film through the use of source and soundtrack music.

Tarantino was cited for his mix of music and film in Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill: Vol 1 & 2, and Inglourious Basterds.

And that's all HR had to say. There was no examination of how ludicrous this news is. While I'm a big fan of the soundtracks for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino lost me when it came to Jackie Brown with the opening sequence (a visual lift from The Graduate) set to the title track of Across 110th Street. Since then he's just been absolutely shameless with his use of other films' music in his own movies.

The Graduate

Plus

Across 110th Street

Equals

Jackie Brown

Or

When Jackie Met Benjamin

You can call Tarantino one of the most environmentally-friendly filmmakers of our age due to his visual and audible recycling. You can say that it's wonderful he's throwing a spotlight on older films via his "sampling" of soundtrack music from older films. Or, you can say that he's a lazy filmmaker who doesn't employ a composer to score his film but just leaves the "temp track" on his movies. The real shame is that there are people I've talked to -- people who claim that they're film fans -- that have no idea that "that great song in Inglourious Basterds" was from another film.

The Big Gundown

Even the tune most-associated with Kill Bill, Tomoyasu Hotei's "Battle Without Honor Or Humanity" was the theme to, you guessed it, Battle without Honor or Humanity.

Battle without Honor or Humanity

Kill Bill Trailer

So, I'm a little taken aback by Tarantino getting acknowledged for his inspiring use of soundtrack music. If anything, it seems a little uninspired.

Twisted Nerve

Kill Bill

Now, now... I know I shouldn't get so bent out of shape. I mean, Quentin Tarantino does so much to give back to the film community. After he rifles through all of these films, biting his favorite bits, including songs, he does a great job of getting them put out on deluxe DVDs via his illustrious company Rolling Thunder, right? I mean, look at that lovingly restored version of The Grand Duel, the controversial The Losers disc, and that deluxe box set for Twisted Nerve and, of course, the movie his company was named for -- Rolling Thunder -- has been flying off the shelves since it had the huge DVD and revival house screenings it enjoyed... Oh, wait....

Rolling Thunder released just a handful of films before it closed up shop. It never released Rolling Thunder, its namesake, nor did it release (m)any of the films that, eh-hem, inspired Tarantino. Instead, it became just another ill-conceived vanity project that lived for a while in the VHS age and never translated to DVD.

And, what's worse, he continues to get lauded for his so-called contributions to the movie and music world. Critics' Choice is even making up an award for him, the Music+Film Award. Let's not talk about how music's been used through the ages -- even repurposed -- to work with film.

Kubrick
And what about Stanley Kubrick and his use of classical music for films like A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey? In the case of 2001, Kubrick had a full score done for his film with the intention of utilizing several classical pieces regardless. While these pieces may have been used in the past (I won't make any claims to knowing in "The Blue Danube" had never made an appearance in a movie before 1968), Kubrick's visuals and the content of his story recontextualized these songs to give them additional meaning. Though some may think that Elvis is about to go on stage when they hear "Also Sprach Zarathustra", the piece was given this new life as Elvis's theme music due to 2001.

The same can be said about A Clockwork Orange with the additional facet that the music here was given a new life via the machinations of composer Wendy Carlos Williams. "Ode to Joy" and other classical pieces are given new life via Williams's use of electronic music to reinterpret the classic pieces into a dystopian future. And, let's not forget Alex (Malcolm McDowell) recasting "Singing in the Rain" as his song of happiness as he commits atrocious acts. If Tarantino had made A Clockwork Orange he'd have set the action against Motown recordings and had Alex sing "Tears of a Clown".

Scorsese
There are so many songs that I can't hear without picturing the images that went with them in various films; when I hear "Layla" by Eric Clapton I can only think of the montage from Goodfellas. Or, to continue with Goodfellas, whenever I hear "Sunshine Of Your Love" by Cream I think of the slow push in on Robert DeNiro as contemplates his situation. All of the acting going on in his face while that music just brings out the darkness in his heart.

Goodfellas

Now, I'll completely agree with the way that Tarantino worked with '70s songs in Reservoir Dogs (I can't hear Stealers Wheel without picturing Mr. Blond doing a little boogie to it before he goes to work on Marvin Nash with a razor blade. Or hear "Little Green Bag" without picturing the cast walking in slow-mo during the opening credits. (Reservoir Dogs wasn't mentioned in the above Hollywood Reporter quote). And his use of surf music as "modern day spaghetti western music" worked wonderfully in Pulp Fiction. But, since then, it's been downhill with his pilfering of other films' soundtracks for his own. And, for that, he gets lauded and an award from his peers. Shameful.

Special bonus track:

The Punchline

Who says Tarantino isn't original?

Stop the Presses!!!

Rotten Tomatoes has just blown my mind! Can you believe that they've dug up some obscure Chinese movie and said that Quentin Tarantino may have recycled ideas from it for his film Reservoir Dogs? This is impressive journalism!

Okay, okay, I'm being completely sarcastic. Believe it or not but it's almost the twentieth anniversary of Who Do You Think You're Fooling! Maybe in 2003 I'll ask George Lucas to remaster it and add a retarded rabbit to it.

Inglourious Basterds: Movie Review

A new Quentin Tarantino movie brings along a flood of questions in my inbox. Typically, "What'd you think of it?" "Where's your review?" "What'd it rip off?" I wrote a review of the script for Inglourious Basterds (sic) back in July, 2008. Like most Tarantino screenplays, little changes between final draft and finished film. Additionally, Tarantino always does a good job of painting a clear picture in the mind of the reader, leaving one feeling as if they've seen the film with their mind's eye. Thus, much of my review of the screenplay goes for my review of the film.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

A group of Jewish soldiers goes after Nazis with a vengeance during WWII. Lead by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), his “Basterds” strike fear in the hearts of German soldiers due to their merciless tactics and their love of scalping victims. Sadly, there’s no “getting the team together” sequence (which makes movies like The Dirty Dozen so great) or even a montage of why these guys are “Basterds.” We only see them in action briefly, joining the team already in progress as they tear ass through enemy territory and terrorize soldiers. Like Mickey and Mallory Knox, they always leave someone alive to tell the tale, though they’re scarred with a swastika on their forehead.

The “Basterds” aren’t at the crux of the story (a mistake), rather, they’re unwitting foils of Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), the “one who got away” from Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), The “Jew Hunter”, in the film’s opening scene. Shoshanna runs a Parisian cinema where a Nazi propaganda film makes its premiere. She utilizes the former cinema owner’s extensive nitrate film collection to take out the Third Reich’s high command including Adolf Hitler! Operation Valkyrie? Not quite. It’s Operation Kino!

Tarantino does well to not stuff Inglourious Basterds with his usual group of stars (including some has-been looking for a career transfusion). Sure, Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel make cameo voice appearances but, apart from Brad Pitt (and, to an extent, Eli Roth), lesser-known actors comprise the cast. This feels reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s Dutch Resistance film, Black Book, in which story trumps stars. Rumor has Tarantino attempting to attach many other big name actors to his work. This would have proved distracting, if not disastrous. As it was, the stunt casting of Mike Myers as a British General provides the film’s weakest point. Despite (or perhaps due to) the layers of make-up, Myers stands out like a sore thumb. Chomping on a British accent, I kept expecting him to break out an “Oh, behave” or “Shall we shag now, or shag later?” Unfortunately, Myers scene mires the film.

For as bad Myers may be, Christoph Waltz shines as Colonel Landa. The opening scene (which brings to mind the introduction of Lee Van Cleef’s character in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) sets up how suave and ruthless his character can be, going from one to another in moments. It’s important to have this duality set up as he seems to make a rather out-of-character change late in the film.

Overall, the film neither thrilled nor appalled me. My ambivalence stems from what others may find endearing; the use of quirky moments that take the viewer out of the film’s overall narrative arc. These include oddities such as a title card over the introduction of one character, some on-screen titling that point out key Nazi players, and subtitles that leave in foreign words and phrases (rather than translating everything to English). Tarantino continues to use title cards, myriad fonts, and fake titles (the end credits run twice – once as if we were seeing an older film and once in the current contractually-obligated manner). This is perhaps Tarantino’s strongest narrative and he nearly succeeds in balancing three main characters. He falters on pacing (two longer scenes could be tightened up without loss of dramatic tension) and the “Basterds” arc. The audience doesn’t get to know most of the “Basterds” and several of them disappear from one scene to another.

It should be noted that this is the first time that Tarantino’s gotten close to creating a “remake” rather than just ripping off another film (or films) and calling it his own. Oddly, the similarities between this work and Enzo Castellari’s original Inglorious Bastards stop at the (English) title and WWII setting. The film seems more indebted to other Italians like Sergio Leone and Sergio Sollima. Like Kill Bill, the soundtrack brims with themes culled from other films, especially those scored by Ennio Morricone. The use of music from The Big Gundown ("La Condanna") in the opening scene may be clever but soon it feels like someone forgot to re-score Inglourious Basterds and left in a temp track by mistake.

Copyright, Shmopyright

After fifteen years someone is finally questioning the copyright of Who Do You Think You're Fooling? There's a dispute filed on YouTube over my rights over the use of footage in this work. Seems a few days late and quite a number of dollars short.

Embedding has been disabled to make folks go to YouTube to see advertisements from Lion's Gate -- they're the shitbird company saying they own rights to Who Do You Think You're Fooling? at the moment. So, I threw this up on Facebook and we can hope it lives there successfully for a good, long time.

Fooling Films Back On YouTube

I re-posted these on YouTube a few months back and haven't posted them on the blog in a while. I think I'm required by law to cross-promote these every once in a while.

Inglorious Bastards: I Hope It's Fake

Last week the internet was flooded with copies of Quentin Tarantino's script for his remake of Inglorious Bastards or, as the title page has it, "Inglourious Basterds." All I can say is, I hope that this is a bogus script.

It's happened before. The Charley and the Chocolate Factory script reviewed in Cashiers du Cinemart #15 and two of the Indiana Jones 4 scripts in CdC #9 were phony. We should be so lucky if "Inglourious Basterds" is too. Otherwise, it's time to buckle up because this film is one bumpy ride.

The script has a group of Jewish soldiers going after Nazis with a vengeance during WWII. Lead by Aldo (a nod to Aldo Ray?) "The Apache"--named such for scalping his victims--the "Basterds" (it's never spelled correctly) are feared by German soldiers. There's no "getting the team together" sequence (which makes movies like The Dirty Dozen so great) or even a montage of why these guys are "Basterds" apart from one flashback to a member who likes to pummel his victims with a baseball bat. Instead, we join the team in progress as they tear ass through enemy territory and terrorize soldiers. Like Mickey and Mallory Knox, they always leave someone alive to tell the tale, though they're scarred with a swastika on their forehead as a mark of running awry of the "Basterds."

The screenplay meanders, dipping into Sergio Leone territory quite often with scenes amalgamating The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West which introduces our villain, Colonel Landa, "The Jew Hunter." It isn't until the third of five chapters that this story really gets underway.

The "Basterds" aren't the main crux of the story (another mistake), rather, they're unwitting foils in the plan of Shoshanna Dreyfus, the "one who got away" from Colonel Landa in the opening scene. She runs a Parisian cinema where a Nazi propaganda film makes its premiere. She utilizes the former cinema owner's extensive nitrate film collection to take out the Third Reich's high command, including none other than Adolf Hitler!

What leads me to believe that this truly is Tarantino's work includes the following: Female protagonist, a foot being placed in a guy's crotch, long-winded (165 pages!), pop culture references galore (two British officers are described as being different incarnations of George Sanders), rampant misspellings, and a scrawl across the cover page that looks identical to that found on the early drafts of Kill Bill. What leads me to not believe that this is legitimate include the cover date of July 2, 2008 -- meaning that it was leaked approximately eight days after completion -- and that it's not derivative enough.

This is the first time that Tarantino's actually gone so far as to call a project a "remake" rather than just ripping off another film, or films, and calling it his own. Moreover, the similarities between this work and Enzo Castellari's original stop at the title and WWII setting, at least from what I've seen. I've only recently gotten my hands on GI Bro (as it was released on VHS) and will be watching this soon. I won't be spending the cash for the three (or single) disc DVD release when it comes out on July 29, 2008. The other thing that I find suspect is the plot to kill Hitler. That means that 2009 may see two films about roughly the same thing if the trouble Tom Cruise production of Valkyrie ever makes it to theaters. But, hey, Hollywood's given us two movies about the same subject in the same season before, right?

Quentin Tarantino Doesn't Swallow

I love this clip. It just shows so well how nucking futs Quentin Tarantino is.