Sukiyaki Western Django

You want to hear a funny story about Takashi Miike?

Once upon a time, when I was a naive young movie snob, I had never heard of Takashi Miike. I was happy. I lived in a little house in a little town, across the street from my best friend, Dave. One Sunday, as I puttered around, looking for something to do, my friend crossed the street for a visit. "I can't stay," he said, "but I brought you something." He handed me a dvd he had burned. "Kristin and I watched it. I think it's...artistic." Then he left, and I looked down at the dvd in my hand, at the handwritten title: Audition.

When people hear this story, people who have seen Audition, they are amazed that Dave and I are still friends. They question my judgment. Sometimes they question whether I should still be friends with Kristin, since she could probably have known, and warned me.

Later that day, after I had watched the movie, Anna came to visit, and I remember her look of concern when she saw my face. "Are you okay?" she asked. Well, no, not really.

Audition might not be the scariest movie I have ever seen, but it definitely belongs on a short list of the most disturbing. Audition sneaks up on you (I can only speculate, but I suspect this would be true even if you knew its reputation beforehand), because the story is so ordinary, and then suddenly, without warning, extraordinary.

I don't really mean to talk about Audition, but the truth is that having seen a few (maybe half a dozen) of his myriad films, I still always think of Audition as the Miike yard stick, because Audition does so well what it sets out to do, which is cause anxiety.

Sukiyaki Western Django does not aim to disturb. It belongs somewhere in the family of genre-exploding films, playing on the themes of B-westerns, but very much in the Tarantino mold* (as opposed to, say, the Kurasawa mold, or the Coen bros). This sort of film (Kill Bill, Death Proof), smirkingly points out that what we are dealing with is a traditional form, and leaves it at that. After watching these movies, a person doesn't come away with the sense that something has been said about that tradition (in this case, the western). If you love westerns, it is probably entertaining enough to recognize the homages and roll with the formula, and allow the movie to make up in style what it lacks in substance.

I guess Sukiyaki Western Django does what it sets out to do. I'm just not sure that what it sets out to do is all that interesting.

*and with his participation, including a quite hard to watch recurring cameo

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As the perhaps only person on this blogspot to go see Tarantino's newest film, Inglorious Basterds, I felt a certain obligation to write something about it. I'll leave better bloggers for what will no doubt be better films (Avatar), and humbly accept my fate as the lone Tarantino fan.

My normal defense for Tarantino's output rests almost entirely on his attention to the history of popular/pulp genres, and his suggestion that there is high art in the low brow. Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, and Death Proof reevaluated the importance of seedy cop dramas, poorly dubbed kung-fu features and car-chase films in the context of the history of cinema. Vanishing Point may never make it to Criterion's ranks, but Tarantino does present a compelling argument as to why it should not be immediately disregarded.

So why then does Inglorious Basterds fall so short? At first I thought Tarantino was a director so entrenched in the film making of the 1970s, he was ill-equipped to handle a "period" piece. Though Samuel L. Jackson narrations over Shaft-esque action sequences missed the mark in this film, they were at the least mildly entertaining. Ultimately, what fails this film is what has made so many Tarantino films so good: attention to the trappings of genre. When Tarantino wants to make a film, he consumes every film that might remotely resemble the anticipated project and plucks from each one a shot or a scene that gives the genre relevance. With a genre like car-chase films, you've got 5-6 films to work with and it creates a need for attention to detail to find the diamond scenes amongst the glass. Now Tarantino has nearly 60 years of films to choose from, and as you guessed he didn't want to leave one out. The movie itself is a reference to a 1978 film released under a similar title (this might illuminate part of the problem) but the citations don't stop there. Le Corbeau, The Great Escape, A Bridge Too Far, Saving Private Ryan, and most of the Leni Riefenstahl films make an appearance. The end result is a film with the most abhorrent nazi villain (Christoph Waltz is wonderful, wunderbar, merveilleux and meraviglioso), complex issues dealing with who is an enemy and a circus of bizarre antics that just don't fit (midget painters, Mike Meyers, etc.).

As this blog post is needlessly longer than it should be (emblematic of its subject at 153 minutes), I want to close on the film's lone saving grace. Tarantino's film challenges how genres don't seem to work over time. The war films of the 1940s aren't much like the war films of the 1950s and even less so when compared with films of the 1970s. Yet they are all found in the same section of your local video store clumped together without only the war as their unifying factor. As time goes on, we get films like Inglorious Basterds, a clear descendant of the genre but with a lineage we might expect of a true bastard: related but we don't know how.