Terrence Malick has made five films in thirty-eight years. All of his films are recognized critically as masterpieces. Keeping with that tradition, his most recent film The Tree of Life won top honors at the Cannes film festival last month. Speaking about the film, head of the Cannes jury Robert DeNiro said, “It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize.” DeNiro’s offhand comment is invaluable to deciphering how this film has steadily risen, without much apparent consideration, to a respectable position within the pantheon of contemporary American filmmaking.

The movie is basically the story of Malick’s Texan youth in the 1950s, intercut with glossy meditations on the history of life on Earth. Sean Penn, playing the older version of the young boy we see constantly intimidated by his father (Brad Pitt), wanders awed and aimlessly through a gleaming present-day metropolis. There is a quiet voiceover, often whispered, presumably because only serious things are whispered. As with any of Malick’s films, bizarre moments are captured with a grace that makes them undeniably appealing. In one scene a band of young, directionless boys destructively wander the hinterlands of their hometown; a father intensely urges his son to hit him as the camera floats gently before their faces; children frolic in clouds of hazardous DDT.

What sets these sequences apart from the rest of the film is their total honesty. They don’t defer to clichéd images that stink of Planet Earth—they instead capture the weirdness of being young, the inanities of fatherhood, strange moments that are genuinely past. Even if these aren’t real memories, they’re still something known, something felt, something represented.

However, the elements of the film that haves garnered most praise, confusion, and appreciation are the sequences concerning the origins of life. These moments feature everything from the Big Bang to a heartwarming scene in which a CGI dinosaur spares his prey. O, glory! Yet, far from the objects of sublime, inimitable beauty these shots are intended to be, they seem hollow, generic, and clean. They have all the beauty of screensavers, commercials, stock photos.

But they’re enormous, and as such probably important (this is where DeNiro comes in). They’re set to an operatic score, yet this also seems like an overbearing way of emphasizing the gravitas of these generic yet supposedly beautiful images. When Stanley Kubrick set a classical score to shots of dancing space technology, he did it with a deft eye for irony and a comic sense that something so modern could be beautiful. Godard once claimed in an interview that Steven Spielberg had only shot Schindler’s List in black-and-white because, for Spielberg, black-and-white meant “serious.” Immediately, this comment came to mind watching Malick’s overproduced iconic imagery set to a classical score.

By the end of the film, though, I doubt many people are genuinely fooled by Malick’s sense of drama and eternity so large it becomes frequently hilarious instead of groundbreaking or awesome. For a film that supposedly grapples with humanities place in the cosmos, I came away learning little about anything, including the intention of Malick’s supposed metaphysical reflection. Rarely, though, is the American multiplex faced with a film like The Tree of Life. Yet despite being a project of unequaled ambition, it is important to note that ambition, importance, and size alone shouldn’t earn any gold stars or Palme D’ors. But in America, where bigger is better, we’ll take what we can get. Whatever you want to call it.

After a record-setting year at the box office, what can we expect in 2010? More of the same. Don’t expect Hollywood to surprise us when things are going so well. Expect more 3D, more talking CGI animals, more lame comedies/soft dramas starring Sandra Bullock.

Not that I’m cynical.

Seriously, there are some really interesting projects set to premiere in 2010. Here is what I’m most excited to see:

Green Zone (March) The Bourne Occupation. Based on the nonfiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Matt Damon searches for WMDs right before the surge of troops in Iraq. Judging from Paul Greengrass’ non-Bourne outings (United 93, Bloody Sunday), expect a meticulously-researched, taut thriller.  Not to be confused with Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, out the same week.

Iron Man 2 (May) The exception to the unfortunate-sequel rule: sequels to superhero movies are generally bigger, badder, and bolder than their originals. The principal cast and crew is back and they’ve nabbed Mickey Rourke. The biggest movie of the year, and for good reason.

Inception (July) How do you follow up after making one of the most successful blockbusters–financially and critically–in history (The Dark Knight)? Use the new, expanded resources the studios are now willing to give you to return to your roots. This sci-fi, potentially time-travelling story (the press and trailers are vague) suggest Memento for Imax. Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page (!) star.

The Green Hornet (December) Michel Gondry, Seth Rogen superhero adaptation, just in time for Christmas, written by the scribes of Superbad and Pineapple Express. Could be all wrong, or just right. I’ll bank on the latter.

The Tree of Life (TBA) Terrence Malick makes films every half decade, if that. This generational epic, originally titled Q, has been in the works for 30 years. Brad Pitt and Sean Penn star. Expect something interesting, if not magnificent, with a pervertedly long running time.

The Beaver (TBA) A year ago, the script of “The Beaver” was number one on an “official” list of best unproduced screenplays. This quirky portrait of a CEO who suffers a mental breakdown and, following, can only communicate through use of a beaver puppet, originally had Steve Carrell attached but now has (gulp) Mel Gibson. I couldn’t think of a more fitting comeback.

The First Gun (TBA) The director of Hero and House of Flying Daggers remakes the Coen Bros’ Blood Simple for the Mandarin-speaking crowd. Hey, we do it all the time to them. Here is some sweet vengeance.

Black Swan (TBA) Darren Aronofsky’s psychological ballet thriller. Yeah, I know. I can’t wait either.

Life During Wartime (TBA) Todd Solondz’s sequel to 1998′s great dark comedy Happiness has already made the festival circuit to generally positive reviews. Apparently, it’s more talk-heavy and politically overt than his previous films. Suitably, it’s named after a Talking Heads song.

Rabbit Hole (TBA) John Cameron Mitchell has proven he’s capable of stage-to-screen adaptations. In this one, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart star as a couple dealing with the death of their 4-year-old. Decidedly less wacky than Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

“Facts can be so misleading,” says the S.S. colonel Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz as a truly devilish take on Claude Rains, towards the beginning of Quentin Tarantino’s new film. He prefers to stick to rumors, in a sense, to dreams: the collective dreams and whispers that form rumor, eventually codified into some kind of historical record, to be proven or proved apocryphal. By the end of the film, as the colonel discusses the terms of his heroic surrender over the radio, he makes sure to emphasize that when the history of Operation Kino is written, he will be recorded to have been a crucial member from the beginning (Operation Kino is the name given to a successful plot to kill the German high command). Before Tarantino, Ronald Reagan was the last person to exhibit such a preference for the Hollywood version of history.


It’s this kind of history that let’s us watch Hitler die – and we’re supposed to rally around it, it’s gladiatorial and makes me nauseous. It’s too easy to write it off as spectacle, as boyhood fantasy – these things have qualities to them, and the spectacle itself – not only the spectacle of Hitler’s fictional death – has consuming, controlling, coma-inducing tendencies that dull our judgments and fold the audience into “the audience.” Boyhood fantasy – let’s stop beating around the bush – becomes nothing more than rape and murder.
Watching Hitler die isn’t fulfilling, it isn’t cathartic – it’s fascist.

Landa himself is the most unique character in the film, embodying the terrifying urbanity of Nazism. Tarantino chooses not to mine the disconnect between Nazi civilization and Nazi cruelty, and instead uses Landa as an unwitting expression of the Nazi mind. Landa prides himself on his ability to think like a Jew – and, when he cuts a deal at the end of the film, we realize it is Landa who is, in fact, the rat. Landa himself equates Jews with rats, which is nothing new – to do so was a standby of the German propaganda machine. The world remains divided into the very categories the Nazi’s organized for the purposes of control: the shoe is simply on the other foot. This kind of adolescent reversal is the whole premise of Tarantino’s film.

Full of the expected postmodern paradigms, no character in the film exists beyond their mythologies, which we can glean from our own cinematic knowledge of history. They emerge from the darkness before the film, and fade back into it. However, one thing the Basterds never mention – mentioned in practically every other World War Two movie – is women. Isn’t this how GI’s are usually characterized–missing their wives and naming their guns after their girlfriends? In one scene, Brad Pitt sticks his finger into a woman’s fresh bullet wound, as a form of torture to make sure she’s telling the truth. For all extensive purposes, he fucks her wound, with the same sadism we see, in a brief cutaway, when Joseph Goebbels is fucking his French translator. Later in the film, Landa takes his only on screen victim – the same woman – he cruelly strangles her. The handsome German private Frederic Zoller, irritated that Shoshanna Dreyfus continually rejects his advances, yells at her in the projection booth. “I’m not the kind of man you tell to go away,” he tells her. He only locks the door when he thinks she’ll finally fuck him. All the men of the film exhibit the same sadism, the same murderous joy that keeps their killing sexually charged, be they Basterd or Nazi.

Inglourious Basterds has been most associated, in the press, with “wish fulfillment.” Wish fulfillment also characterizes the way in which Tarantino expects his audience to approach the film: as a kind of frat boy revisionism, in which Jews man up, fight back, kick ass, and end the War. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly, Tarantino explained his vexation with other World War II movies: “When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?”

In a sense, Tarantino is correct: it is frustrating. But for Tarantino, there’s a point when the frustration becomes murderous. Thus his creation of the Basterds, lead by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), and comprised of Jewish psychopaths who, we’re lead to believe, traipse across occupied France and kill Nazis. The Baserds are two things – most clearly, they’re an exculpatory device, designed to rid us of our guilt. As we watch the Basterds, we can relax into our thick seats and be comforted that there is some other glittering celluloid past in which “we” got it right. Tarantino is looking to use the cinema as a powerful tool – which the cinema is – to rewrite history, the right way. It’s unsurprising that so much of the plot hinges on movie theatres, film critics, and nitrate film. But beyond these fanboy odes to the very real force of film, there’s very little more than the same male fantasies characteristic of fascism itself. Video games have been doing this for a while now, and as the logic of the film unfolds – logic that J Hoberman described as that of “an alternate universe: The Movies” – is really the logic of a video game or the Columbine massacre.

It was inevitably to Columbine that my thoughts turned when, in the film’s holocaustic finale, two of the Basterds fire blindly from the balcony of a Parisian cinema into the crowd of Nazi luminaries below. Tarantino shows us their faces, stretched taut with smiles as terrifying as the Nazi laughs that permeate the film. Bloodthirsty and righteous, the Basterds shots are meant to be our shots–the shots we should have taken, the shots that should have killed Hitler. The same thoughts must cross the mind of any killer, shooting at the formless mass (without any identity other that identity appellated by the killer) and Tarantino thinks that because they’re Nazis, it’s not only okay but necessitated. “Why would they condemn me? I was too brutal to the Nazis?” he told Jeffery Goldberg.

Yes. This is what Tarantino can’t quite wrap his head around, and it’s the reason why no discussion of the technique of Inglourious Basterds will ever account for its inexcusable moral ignorance. This isn’t about the offended bourgeoisie intellectuals versus the pedal to the metal, git ‘r done tough guys: it’s about enemies of fascism versus fascists. To eliminate the Reich, the Basterds must literally don the Nazi uniform, which affords them the cruelty of the Nazi’s themselves (beyond this, a member of the Basterds is himself a Nazi, another is an Austrian emigre to the United States). “I’m more than just a uniform,” Fredrick tells Shosanna. “Not to me,” she responds. What the film looks to

take from Nazi Germany is its very humanity, which not only requires our respect but makes them like us. It’s simple displacement. It starts with shooting Hitler and it ends with youtube videos of Saddam Hussein’s execution, with spirited defenses of waterboarding. Tarantino, unfortunately, chosen to simultaneously distance “our“ righteousness from “their” evil – ignoring how much of us is in them, how much of them is in us. It encourages us only give up our own humanity because the enemy, it seems, has already surrendered theirs. But the oppressed have a doubly hard challenge, not only to preserve their own humanity but to save the humanity of their oppressors.