Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds is a masterpiece of cathartic brutality and exquisite, old Hollywood tension and menace. It's riveting and exhausting and Tarantino. Wonderful. Christoph Waltz is the star of the film, not Brad Pitt. As SS Col. Hans Landa, Waltz is chillingly unforgettable. It is his face, not Hitler's or Goebbels', that is seared in mind as the face of Nazism, albeit an opportunistic kind of Nazism. The set piece that opens the film could serve as a master class in studied control. His performance throughout the film is outstanding.

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August Wilson's Century Cycle -- Gem of the Ocean

  August Wilson seems to have had a lot on his mind when he wrote Gem of the Ocean -- history, religion, folkways, maybe even politics, but ...