Some Fringe benefits, but...

I was so looking forward to watching Fringe after reading about it in the glossies that for the first 10 minutes I didn’t notice the Mistake Number 1 that was trying to catch my attention. Alas, not for long. But it was such a great opening scene: An airliner hits turbulence, a man injects himself with either insulin or anti-anxiety meds and as he makes his way to the bathroom with an airhostess trying to rush at him, telling him to get back to his seat, he turns and screams rend the air. His face seems to be melting, a horror that catches up with every other passenger as the camera moves backward. Then, it pulls away and all we hear is silence 40,000 feet in the air. This is the X-Files delightfully updated, Joshua Jackson and new face Anna Torv providing the eye candy. It should be a great show, paced, interesting characters and a running darkness of plot that keeps you coming back for more. The paranormal is the point of entry here, with FBI Agent Olivia Dunham bringing a fresh-faced optimism to the hard-edged world of human experimentation and other oddities. Well, that’s the problem, you see, Anna Torv as Olivia. She is effortlessly gorgeous and oddly annoying, not because of but despite this. She must speak in a monotone and an accent that cannot be placed, ending with a pursing of the mouth no matter what mood she is trying to convey. The accent seems eastern European until Google tells you she’s Aussie (with Estonian blood, ahh...). As for the moue, maybe someone should just tell her that it’s not sexy? It’s difficult to watch the show now, but one must try because there is a saving grace: John Noble as Dr Walter Bishop who has been sprung from a mental institution and whose verbal meanderings are hilarious; he keeps you on your toes as he is liable to spew viciously when you least expect it. Joshua Jackson (best known, unfortunately, for Dawson’s Creek and as Diane Kruger’s BF) plays his son Peter Bishop, not consistently. Jackson has his good days (you believe him) and his bad (he seems to think he’s in a play where he has to throw his voice to the back rows). The token black actor comes in the form of the highly expendable Lance Reddick as bossman Agent Phillip Broyles. There is one other point of interest: Mark Valley (from Boston Legal) who plays rogue agent John Scott, (dead rogue agent whom I suspect will not be dead for very long) and who plays it well. He has also upped and married Anna Torv and little things like that always raises my interest level.

Another Tarantino classic

Quentin Tarantino understood early that movieland was the only kind of life he wanted. In that sense, he’s like a lot of us who know that this world is not quite up to the mark, so we need to escape it the best way we know how. Tarantino is the best way we know how. He’s manic and clever and gives his audience just what they need. You don’t watch Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill or Grindhouse or Inglourious Basterds without thinking about it for days, months, years after. If that isn’t the mark of genius, I don’t know what is.
Inglourious Basterds’s opening scene is an instant classic. There is a bucolic image of the verdant French countryside where a man is seen in honest labour, chopping logs and a young girl is hanging up the washing. A car comes up the winding drive, inside are three men in uniform. As the car comes to a halt, you see the men are in German uniform, are in fact Nazis, and the watcher’s adrenalin notches up. This is the beginning of an agonizingly slow build-up of terror that ends, as expected, badly.
The sole survivor of the Jewish extermination in microcosm, Soshanna, goes on to work in a cinema house in France. The mark of the beast is seen on her face, devoid as it is of feeling. But when she learns that Hitler and his crew will attend a premiere at her theatre, she comes back to life and plans murder with relish. In this she has unknowingly become part of a parallel plot, one spearheaded by the Basterds, men who hunt Nazis for sport. The opening scene is invested with so much human emotion that you would think everything else will be an anti-climax. Not in Tarantino’s hands. It is, instead, the start of an almost 3-hour extravaganza that fulfills all our secret desires. When it comes to making a great film, it’s all about the director - look at the debacle of Twilight. Here, Tarantino has got the most compelling performance from every one of his players. Diane Kruger makes up for Troy with a mean, tough spy persona whose death is as terrible as the times; Brad Pitt continues his comedic streak after the marvelous Burn After Reading (his white jacket scene before the climax is hysterical) and Christoph Waltz as the SS maniac Max Landa (the Who? you’re asking in your mind you never will again after Waltz wins the Oscar next year) mingles hilarity, horror and self-seeking to the point that mad though he is, you miss him when he’s not onscreen. Rod Taylor’s few minutes of screen time as Winston Churchill is invested with all the power the WW2 hero embodied and Melanie Laurent (who apparently screamed on the streets after being told she was in the movie) as Soshanna is vulnerable, steel-cored and unforgettable.
There’s been a lot of talk about the title of this movie. A slurring of reality, sometimes a spoof, sometimes a comic strip, that’s what’s in a name. When QT misspells the title, we need to figure out why; this is what the director wants us to do when he says it’s just his way of spelling it, or that it’s his homage to Basquiat.
The script is vintage Tarantino, long dialogues that keep you straining so as not to miss a nuance, that allow the characters to luxuriate in their skins. It’s no surprise that Inglourious Basterds has made four times what it cost.