eric brochu

I’m never really sure what to say here about widely-seen and discussed movies. You’re a mouse-click away from more professionally-written articles than you could ever want to read about both these films. And while they’re both terrific films, I don’t really need to tell you to see them. I’d rather tell you to go see The Hurt Locker or (should your tastes go that way) Blood Freak. But here are some thoughts.

1. The fact that both films are turning out to be very successful financially is, I think, a satisfying rejoinder to the arrogant, elitist view that mainstream audiences are too unsophisticated to want anything challenging in their summer movies. You have here an apartheid-themed movie set entirely in South Africa and a long, talky movie where most of the dialogue is in German and French. Neither will do Transformers 2 box office, but these movies are both going to make a lot of people a lot of money, and entertain people, to boot. And unlike Transformers, people are going to be talking about these movies ten years from now. The lesson is that with the right marketing, you can get away with all that as long as you aren’t boring.
2. Inglourious Basterds is the work of a master at the peak of his abilities, and District 9, the work of an emerging talent, but both have a scrappy sureness and a mix of the cerebral and the visceral that I really enjoy. Though maybe it’s more accurate to say neither Tarantino or Blomkamp have any interest in distinguishing between the head and the gut in their filmmaking.
3. Nazis and South African racists both make excellent villains, and both films give us a kind of alternate, fantasy take on events where historical evil can actually be appropriately punished. I’m not at all a bloodthirsty person, but I’ve been reading a lot of World War II history the past few years, and I could watch the climactic theatre scene of Basterds ten times in a row. The more I read about history the less sympathy I feel for the people who willingly stepped onto the wrong side of it.
4. That said, Landa the Jew Hunter may be the single greatest character to ever appear in a Tarantino movie.
5. Itajubá SPOILERS. I had been looking forward to both movies for a while, and trying not to learn too many details going in. This worked better for Basterds than District 9. I was actually a bit disappointed that the latter turned into such a typical action movie — maybe if I’d known, I’d have kept my expectations more modest. But Basterds continually went in new and unexpected directions. Tarantino has gone from a talented stylist and dialogue writer to the master of letting scenes unfold at their own pace, and without his crutch of pop-culture references (or the English language), you can see what a great storyteller he has become. I’ve not decided yet where Basterds fits into the Tarantino pantheon, but I look forward to watching it several more times to try to decide. District 9 mostly makes me eager to see what Neill Blomkamp does next.

On the surface, Thirst, the latest film from Park Chan-Wook (who did the brilliant Oldboy, the pretty great Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and the okay Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), is the story of a Korean priest who becomes a vampire. But what it’s really about is Park’s ongoing analysis of the corrosive effect sin has on the soul. Initially a bottomless well of compassion and morality in a world that needs it, the infected priest is soon drinking the blood of a bitter fellow priest and having hot vampire sex with an unhappily married woman. This leads to a cycle of increasingly immoral behaviour, with each step coming faster, steeper and easier.

As a thesis, that’s pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the movie jumps from idea to idea until it’s tonally all over the place. And while some of those tones are clear and sharp, a lot of them are pretty fucking leaden, with plot points added and abandoned and characters undergoing sudden unexplained personality changes.

So far this year, a lot of my most anticipated films have been a little underwhelming. I liked Coraline, Watchmen, Public Enemies, Star Trek and Bruno to various degrees, but I didn’t fall in film-geek love with any of them. I did have an intense fling with Crank 2 — and oh, man, it was awesome — but it was purely physical. But in the past week, I’ve seen the two best movies I’ve seen so far this year.

Funny People is a bloated, beautiful mess of a film by your hero and mine, Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up). It’s about a dying Adam Sandler — woah, let me finish, that’s not even the best part! — who takes on struggling young stand-up comic Seth Rogan as a personal assistant, in an impulsive attempt to both avoid and embrace his loneliness and self-loathing. Hilarious, I know, but trust me, this is a very, very funny movie. It’s mostly set in the world of competitive, ambitious young comedians who consider nothing off-limits in their mission to entertain and out-funny each other, and the dialogue is brilliant. Characters make cutting comments, just grazing a buried truth, and then undermining it with a punchline. Sandler is actually really solid — Punch-Drunk Love solid — and I know we were all getting tired of Seth Rogan doing his Seth Rogan thing, but he manages to give a performance more nuanced and heartfelt than anything I’ve seen form him before. Not to mention a (mostly) great supporting cast of comedians, rivals, girlfriends, girlfriend-comedians and comedian-rivals. The only problem is, Apatow seems to love these characters so much, he wanted to make about three movies with them. And then he did. And then he edited them all into this one. And one of those movies, the one which takes over the last 40 minutes, is actually not a very good movie. But I’ll take a lopsided, ambitious mess over safe and predictable any day.

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn “Point Break” Bigelow’s film about bomb-disposal experts in Iraq, is basically the complete opposite of Funny People: tightly focused, visual rather than verbal, and humourless. It’s also wired as tight as a spring about to snap. The Iraq of this movie is a place where any discarded plastic bag could contain an IED, and any cell phone could be a detonator. Also, another difference: Judd Apatow is going from great flick to great flick. If you had told me last year that the washed-up action director who would make the first great Iraq War movie would be Kathryn Bigelow, I would never have believed you. But great it is. I was shocked when the credits rolled — I couldn’t believe 131 minutes could go by so fast. It could have been another hour long and I wouldn’t have minded.

Actually, though, there is something the two films have is common — they are both about process. In Funny People we see how comedians work, trying material, bouncing it off each other, refining it. In The Hurt Locker, we see how someone goes about disabling hundreds of bombs in a one-year tour, how the insurgents and occupation forces constantly learn and adapt to each other’s technique and style. Of course, in one movie, bombing has a very different meaning than the other.