DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Quentin Tarantino has been talking about making a World War II movie for a good ten years now. If you know anything about the director, you know that amounts to a lot of talking. And I hope, for his sake, that it’s good; after multiple scripts, claims that it’s some of the best writing he’s ever done, and his own opinion that it’s his best since Pulp Fiction, he’s not exactly downplaying expectations. And Harvey Weinstein better hope things go well at the box office too, since he was recently quoted as saying that if he doesn’t get a hit out of somebody soon, he’ll be chauffeuring or making burgers for a living. I’ve got bad news for Harvey: Inglourious Basterds looks like a hell of a lot of fun, but I’m not sure how much of a market there is for a violent R-rated 2.5 hour period piece about Jewish soldiers scalping Nazis. Maybe if the soldiers were exacting revenge for the Nazi position in the health care debate. That seems to bring people out in droves.
Still, I’ll be there Friday night, if only because no one classes up trashy subject matter quite like Tarantino. His take on exploitation cinema has begun to take on a nearly operatic scope, and at this point his work is more than just a pastiche of endless homage. Even if he does claim that Basterds is his own attempt to graft gritty 1960s & ’70s war movies to bloody spaghetti westerns, his output shows that as much as his works can be stitched together, like Frankenstein’s monsters, they have a personality and a consciousness all their own. Basterds looks like no exception, but even if it isn’t, watching Brad Pitt ham it up as the cocky, bloodthirsty hick in charge of this unit looks like a pretty good time.
View the trailer.
Opens throughout the area tomorrow.
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When they weren’t subjecting their population to the evils of universal health care, the Nazis also liked to fund films, and not just masterpieces of propaganda. Münchausen was designed to show the world that Germany could compete with the most opulent cinema, but the producers managed to hire a staunchly anti-fascist writer, Erich Kästner, to pen the screenplay. The result was a richly colorful fantasy on the imagined life of the famous Baron, who had already once been tackled in film by none other than moving picture pioneer Georges Méliès, and much later (and closer to the memory of most reading this) by Terry Gilliam. Kästner’s version, while not overtly political, manages to take subtle swipes at the Third Reich, which is no small achievement for a movie produced by Joseph Goebbels.
View a clip from the movie.
Wednesday at 6:30 p.m .at the Goethe-Institut. $6.
