People always give me tons of shit for being a snob. Not snob like they love me at the , but snob like I’ll call you an animal when you’ve got more than 2 tbs. of ketchup on the sidelines of your dinner plate. Meanwhile, I’ve got like “The Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East” on my book shelf and a sincere affection for Garfield. Some snob. An authentic snob is the type who will tell you that they’ve simply never “cared for” a Tarantino picture.
The point is, I saw two popcorn movies this past weekend. Big end-of-summer jams, District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. The ham fist of that excruciatingly inept alien allegory knocked me into some hard existential mourning. I walked out around 20 minutes in, waited for my family in the lobby. It failed not only because it was obviously written by a mediocre mind, but it had an agenda. It had the pretense of an “indie” production when it was no such thing at all. It wanted to make some point, except the only point I could see was that the capacity for human cruelty is so heartbreaking and endemic, bring on the exterminators. That’s cute, the whole apartheid/xenophobia angle, but the fact remains that no aliens have yet come, and it is just us, mostly without grace, blindly righteous and blithely ruthless. What a bummer.
I prefer the universes Tarantino creates. His characters are not without brutality, but they have grace. And I do mean that in the theological sense. I think maybe the opening and final soliloquies delivered by Miss Alabama Whirley do a fine job of showing you what I mean. I could not count how many times I’ve watched this film. When I think of being in love, of beauty in the world in spite of…, I think of this right here:
Great Blog!……There’s always something here to make me laugh…Keep doing what ya do