Culture

After all the rampant previews clogging up my TV, Quentin Tarantino's newest epic Inglourious Basterds arrived with a $37.6 million box office debut. This movie is way better than I expected. Even with all its messed up parts and incongruous plot-holes there is some redeeming beauty. Basterds is a cinephile's dream with obvious references to all movies great and small. Although clearly influenced by The Dirty Dozen, any Spaghetti Western and Pekinpah's Cross of Iron, Tarantino seems heavily anchored in his director chair rather than lifting from other movies (including his own). Still he adds super hero writing and chapters as a signature style but the cohesiveness enables three remarkable stories to intertwine.

When will cinema stop being obsessed by sex? Sex scenes these days are so predictably present, and so predictable, they may as well start slotting in audience toilet breaks – just to keep it real. Do filmmakers still collectively think we have no clue what happens when naked people rub up against each other? On-screen relationships were much more interesting when actors had to keep one foot on the bedroom floor.
Humpday is a film obsessed by sex like a toddler is obsessed with presenting what they've done in their potty. To its credit, Humpday came out of the Sundance Film Festival, and hardly any DV-made, Sundance films actually make it to theatres. Film critics tend to believe people will see Transformers despite the reviews, but a small, independent film can be helped greatly by a good quote for the posters. Sad to say no such quote will be provided in these prudish paragraphs.

District 9 is much more than a sci-fi thriller. It's an engaging mockumentary infused with black humor, a scathing satire on 24-hour news, commentary on xenophobia, corporate greed and apartheid, and it's all wrapped up in a full-blown action movie.
So much work went into this movie that it's hard to believe it was made for only $30 million. At least 10 minutes of credits are given to post production special effects teams and yet the beauty of D-9 is that its high-tech soul comes across as low-tech believability.
The plot is a straightforward Stranger in a Strange Land. An alien spacecraft is marooned over Johannesburg, South Africa. After the starving aliens are rescued, a shantytown of corrugated metal shacks is constructed to house them, and over the next 28 years their population expands to 1.8 million. Segregation and cultural differences lead to increasing prejudice and violence between humans and aliens. The Predator-like creatures with spiny torsos and protruding mandibles are derogatorily referred to as “prawns” and treated as an underclass.

Julie & Julia is split in half to tell the true stories of the chef and author of Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Julia Child, and aspiring writer Julie Powell, who wrote a popular blog about cooking all the recipes in that book over one year. But the problem is – only Child's half proves worthwhile. The portion of the film following Julia Child through her first French food experience and her life in Paris is colorful and energetic, given buoyancy by Meryl Streep's pitch-perfect performance and some beautiful backdrops. The half of the film detailing the period of Julie Powell's life in which she began chronicling her duck boning and sauce-stirring adventures is uninspiring and weighed down by a whiny, obnoxious characterization of the New York blogger that Amy Adams limps through lifelessly.
Meryl Streep does a very loveable, joyous turn as the eccentric chef that many remember most well from her 1970s and 1980s television series Julie Child & Company and Dinner At Julia's. With brilliant comic timing, she makes even her most over-the-top moments endearing. It's so good a performance that some of Streep's best lines are those muttered at the edge of scenes, suggesting when the cameras stopped rolling she just carried on in character. In all honesty, Child had the sort of personality that could have been a disaster when magnified on the big screen – shrill, grating – but Streep brings an undercurrent of genuine emotion to her wild gesticulations. Julia's marriage to Paul Child, played by Stanley Tucci, is convincing, with his adoring love for her helping along our own fondness.