Top-notch acting

Movie #2: Julia (2008)
Directed by Erick Zonca; Written by Erick Zonca and Aude Py

Tilda Swinton is an actor whose face serves her well. One would think that her porcelain-pale skin, flashy red hair, sharp nose, high cheekbones, and dazzling green eyes would inhibit her from varying her roles. However, the case is just the opposite. Swinton's talent belies her unique appearance (which has been described as everything from weird to beautiful). What a viewer cannot deny is her watchability. She is in almost every scene of "Julia" in which she plays the title character, an American woman, and not once did I hear even a tinge of Swinton's Scottish accent sneak into the dialogue.

This movie is obviously a vehicle for Swinton's talent. However, "Julia" is more than a character study. It's tense, suspenseful, and at times, downright uncomfortable. Three-quarters into the movie, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, amazed that I was actually rooting for a character whose ugly predicament is caused by her own greed. Here's the scenario: Julia is an alcoholic unable to hold down a job. Swinton plays drunkenness to perfection- from the gradual descent from merely being buzzed to waking up the next morning with a severe case of paste-mouth to the strange, cautious gait she assumes after having been numbed by alcohol.

Julia grudgingly attends AA meetings at the request of her sponsor played by the fabulous Saul Rubinek. At one of the meetings, Julia meets a young Mexican woman who offers her $50,000 to help kidnap her son who has been living with his wealthy grandfather since the boy's father died of an overdose and the mother was deemed incapable of caring for the boy. But in an attempt to get even more money out of the deal, Julia decides to turn the tables on the woman and kidnap the child herself, an act that ultimately has severe consequences.

On the surface, "Julia" is a movie about greed and its consequences. But what I found most interesting are the underlying themes of the movie that you really have to want to see to truly see them. One of these themes is motherhood. Julia, unmarried and childless, has no responsibilities, and cannot even take care of herself. She is, by all standards, a screw-up. Although she has no intention of physically harming the child when she kidnaps him, it's obvious that she has done him enough mental damage to last a lifetime. As she takes him from hideout to hideout, however, she grows more attached to him even though her negligence allows the tables to be turned on her after they cross the border into Mexico, an event that I saw coming but it didn't come when I thought it did... kudos to the writers for that!

While in Mexico, there is a scene of genuine affection between Julia and the child. The scene, involving a partially naked Swinton, is slightly uncomfortable to watch. Nevertheless, I think it serves to establish a growing familiarity between her and the child. He is scared and in a foreign place, and by this point in the movie I think he realizes that Julia will not cause him harm. Because he hasn't seen his real mother in years, Julia may be the only woman with whom he can experience any motherly affection. The fact that his caretaker (shown early in the movie) is male supports this theory.

As was the case with my previously reviewed movie, this film was difficult to watch. The fact that a child's fate lay in the hands of Julia, a woman who has nothing to lose but her love of the drink, is a cruel one. With each lie she tells, she makes things worse for herself and the boy. As Julia digs her proverbial hole deeper, the viewer must wonder when she will stop running from the law, stop trying to get what she thinks she so deserves.

Julia's other major flaw is her inability to communicate with men in a non-sexual way, especially when she's intoxicated. What's curious about Julia is that she appears very tough and street-smart and able to handle herself in any situation, but when drunk and in the presence of a man, she crumbles into a complete ragdoll of a woman. Julia even admits, perhaps in a moment of weakness, that her luck with men is horrible and that her only means of getting them to pay her any attention is through sex. This flaw emerges when she's in Mexico and proves that her need to get a man's attention is just as much of an addiction as is her alcoholism.

I think I saw some good in Julia that may not have even existed. I kept hoping for a happy ending or at least some sort of redemption on her part. Julia is a desperate woman who makes a lot of bad choices, and even by the movie's end, I was not completely convinced that she was acting in the best interest of the child. The movie, gladly, is not cut and dry and allows Julia to remain flawed and conflicted. I still think Julia finds something good, but not without a heavy price.

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Movie #1: "Inglorious Basterds" Written & Directed by Quentin Tarantino
*** Warning: There are spoilers in this review. ***

Maybe I'm going out on a limb when I say that Quentin Tarantino is a movie buff who happens to make movies. It's not the worst thing to be. I haven't even seen all of his movies, so my opinion could very well be flawed. Nevertheless, it's become common knowledge among movie critics that Tarantino's movies are all about paying homage to directors of the past. Tarantino is the ultimate movie geek. He knows movies. He knows styles of cinematography and dialogue. He knows color schemes and angle shots. It's obvious in his product that he adores film. Yet does his movie knowledge work to his detriment in the sense that his movies are so full of homage that they have no identity of their own? Nevertheless, Tarantino has created a niche for himself, and he has a knack for stirring up visceral audience reaction.

When asked by Tarantino at the Cannes Film Festival in May how he felt about "Inglorious Basterds", the king of all film critics (in my opinion) Roger Ebert responded that it is either the best or worst film of the year. After a subsequent viewing, Ebert concluded it was the best. In some ways I agree with Ebert, but for reasons that probably differ from those of the typical Tarantino fan. The reason is this: the movie is a master class in meta-criticism. Framed around a group of Jewish-American soldiers (the "inglorious basterds") charged with hunting down, killing and scalping Nazi soldiers, the film puts the audience in a quite uncomfortable position: one of deciding whether or not to cheer on these soldiers as they kill, maim, and even carve German soldiers.

I felt dirty more than once while watching the film, wondering if it was more appropriate to smile or grimace while Hitler's face was shot numerous times into a bloody pulp. And I've come to the conclusion that this reaction is exactly what Tarantino intended. A friend with whom I saw the film pointed out one of the most telling scenes in the movie: a movie theatre full of Nazis watching a movie about a German solider taking out countless American soldiers from a watchtower. The camera scans the audience as they smile and laugh uproariously at the tragedy unfolding before them. Throughout the movie, as I sat listening to the laughter and sensing the smiles of those around me as the "basterds" slaughtered one German solider after another, I realized that we, the audience, were being parodied in the movie. Our collective conscience was being confronted and challenged. Of course things would have been different (better) if Hitler had actually been murdered - I'm not questioning that - but does that mean as a society we have a free pass to judge every single German soldier (or any soldier involved in a war we may not agree with) in the same way we judge a sadistic or corrupt leader? Or are they equally guilty for "simply following orders"? That's not a question I can answer, but the movie places the questions directly in front of us whether we choose to see them or not.

Perhaps my questions run too deep considering that Tarantino has always romanticized violence. He overdramatizes and fantacizes violence in a way that is both shocking and reassuring, because while it is gory and unsettling, the violence is also fantastical and voyeurstic. It's comic-book on celluloid.

Yet I believe that Tarantino has succeeded in creating quite a powerful allegory through this movie, raising questions of good and evil, revenge, integrity and cowardice. No character gets off easy in this film, and none deserve to.

What the film does not do is create human relationships that we care about. The movie is about superlatives- exagerrated characters who find themselves in exagerrated circumstances. Of course WWII and the Holocaust are all too real, but the framework of this film is not set up to look history in the eye but rather to look at ourselves through a lens of heightened satire and farce. One can even say that Tarantino trivializes WWII and the Holocaust, but for every person who says such a thing, there will be someone who says "Shut up! You're thinking about this way too much. It's ****ing Tarantino, for cripe's sake."

The movie is visually-pleasing. The image of Shoshanna- the young woman who four years earlier escapes being murdered by the evil Nazi Col. Landa- as she prepares to seek vengeance is a beautiful one. Dressed in a long, red dress, she sits in front of a vanity, applying red lipstick and placing a hat on her head, a small veil covering her eyes. The scene is art in motion.

For all the distance created between audience and characters in Tarantino films, for some reason, it's hard to stop thinking about this movie and what Tarantino wants us to think.