Archive for November, 2009

Julie & Julia

Nora Ephron’s latest film Julie & Julia – follows two separate but true stories about Julia Child rise to fame through French cuisine by surviving the McCarthy era in Paris learning Gourmet Cuisine and 50 years on, Julie Powell’s blog account of a year of cooking exquisite dishes from the famed recipe book that was Julia Child’s piece de resistance, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and how it got to be published in 1961.

Child having spent years in Paris with her diplomat husband, took up Gourmet cooking lessons and was determined to eventually introduce French cuisine to the American home.

While Ephron’s film should be treated as a comedy and a gastrononic delight it by no means rivals the brilliant Babette’s Feast or Chocolat. While films whose main subject is cuisine is always difficult to market, Ephron manages through a fairly quirky script to capture the two distinct eras that both her heroines lived in. Child and her husband had to deal with the McCarthy era, where everyone was treated with suspicion due to Communist paranoia sweeping America, not helped by their early years spent in China.

Juliet Powell and her husband Eric played by Chris Messina lead a less glamorous life across the pond, in Queens, New York where Powell sets herself a blogging and cooking deadline of a year to cook every recipe in Child’s bible on French cuisine as a way of distracting her from a call centre job dealing with the families and relatives of 9/11 in 2002.

While there was 50 years apart in their lives, both women were trying not to deal with the realities of a world that did not make sense.  And who could blame them? Post 9/11 New York and Post World War II Paris are vastly different, yet with some delicious recipes to lose themselves in, Julie and Julia proved that like any man, a woman can be just as determined, passionate and steadfast in their goals especially in achieving success, whether it be domestic or literary.

Julia Child’s original kitchen

Obliquely the film, also comments subtly on the rise of celebrity cult status and how historical references shape a characters lives so distinctly. Most notable are the wonderful shots of Paris and the diplomatic parties that Julia Child attends and eventually cooks for contrasting with a replica of her Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen built especially for the tall woman she was, so elegantly displayed at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, where Julie eventually, like a worshiper at a sacred site, leaves a pound of butter as a fitting tribute to her gastronomic inspiration.

Julie & Julia is by far means not a brilliant film, but it will evoke an appetite for some superb, tangy and tantalizing gourmet dishes and give the audience a new appreciation of de-boning a duck, whilst wearing pearls in the kitchen and appearing relatively calm.

See it and enjoy the meals, yet its far from a cinematic feast, flawed with shoddy editing and uneven directing, whilst saved by a eclectic score by Alexandre Desplat who excelled in The Queen and of course by the ever versatile and brilliant Meryl Streep.

Inglourious Basterds

She is watching us… the Voyeur as Killer

A Revisionist look at World War 2 with all the German angst, French charm and American parody…

Sooner or later Tarantino was bound to approach the territory of the 2^nd World War. While there has been a plethora of World War movies since the mid 1940s onwards, many have tackled the War from a purely Euro-American perspective focusing on the Nazi’s simply as the enemy. From Great battle films, like Saving Private Ryan to the more personal and heart-rendering stories of Sophie’s Choice and Schnindlers List and more recently Atonement.

The Rot started from within…

Valkyrie arrived, Tom Cruise’s fascinating yet doomed project about a plot to kill Hitler from within the highest rankest of the Nazi inner circle in 1944. Defiance followed, a superb story of Polish Jewish resistance set in the forests outside Krakow.  There was entertainment rumblings from Tarantino that after the Kill Bill films, he was planning a revisionist and slightly parodying version of World War 2…

Cannes Film Festival 2009

Cannes Film Festival 2009 and Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s long awaited film featuring a band of Jewish American Nazi scalp-hunters who take revenge on the Nazi’s  in German-occupied France in the early 1940s is premiered much to every cineaste’s delight. Basterds is far more than a revenge cult film against Nazi’s, it’s a statement about Cinema being used as propaganda. The references are rife, for as in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s best trait is revealed, a rambling but significant knack for quirky dialogue. Except in this film, authenticity dictates –so naturally the French spoke French, the Nazi’s spoke German and the Americans spoke a range of regional accents from Brooklyn to Tennessee slang. Tarantino assembles some fantastic European stars of contemporary cinema, from Til Schwieger to Diane Kruger and Melanie Laurent.

Cinema as Propaganda

Tarantino makes comparisons between Joseph Goebbels – Nazi Minister for Propoganda and the then founder of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, both as masters of cinema and naturally propaganda. More specific are the references to Leni Riefenstahl, who rose to fame in the 1930s as a significant German film-maker churning out the Nazi blueprint for propaganda – Triumph of the Will.

Truimph of the Will

Riefenstahl, was later vilified once the war was over and went onto to become a documentary filmmaker in East Africa. There are also a sprinkling of humorous discussions about the American black athlete Jesse Owens who sparkled at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games much to Hitler’s dismay.  Watch out for a spoof on the British military featuring a contemplative Winston Churchill and a wonderful cameo by Mike Myers whose line, “we will have all the rotten eggs in one basket” is delivered with affected panache.

A French Spaghetti Western Tarantino Style

Basterds opening shots are reminiscent of the early spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone – with a scene straight out of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, except its not a dusty Mexican outback with outlaws escaping bounty hunters, it’s a pastoral scene of a French Farming countryside. This time there is no Sun-Burnt Clint Eastwood in a poncho. Enter Christoph Waltz, the urbane, elegant and lethal multi-lingual Nazi Jewish hunter. Waltz has some of the best dialogue in the film and effortlessly switches from German to French to English in order to ascertain his victims whereabouts. Yet Tarantino presents him as a man simply sent to do an unpleasant task, and one should not judge, but Waltz’s role is crucial to the films wonderful and intricate plot revolving around a cinema outside Paris and a German Film Premiere, where all plans go awry.

Christoph Waltz won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor following in the psychopathic tradition of Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men (2008) and Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2009). Tarantino’s find of this Austrian acting talent has Hollywood virtual blogs a buzzing.

Inglourious Basterds is long, brilliant, bloody and sophisticated with that right dose of European sensibility accurately shredded by an American’s tainted perspective on World War II and more subtly a comment on the Death of original Cinema and more about Film as a nation’s propaganda tool. If you are expecting an action-packed, traditional war film with a clear division of hero and villain, well then you are simply in the wrong movie. Tarantino tantalizes, shrills and insures that any audience seeing the Basterds will feel claustrophobic and trapped in a cinema from Hell.