SCENE IN INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS REMINDS RODRIGUEZ OF DE PALMA
Miami Herald movie critic Rene Rodriguez interviewed Quentin Tarantino this past weekend for a piece that will run this Sunday. Rodriguez offers a preview in his blog, in which he asks Tarantino about his use of David Bowie's theme from Paul Schrader's Cat People remake, mentioning to the director that the scene in which the song is used reminded him of Brian De Palma: Q: You once said that when you use a pop song in a movie, you want to use it in a way that will always remind people of your film whenever they hear it, so no other filmmaker can ever use it. In this movie, though, you use David Bowie's Cat People (Putting Out Fire), which was written for the 1982 Cat People remake.
A: I've always loved that song and I was always disappointed by how Paul Schrader used it in the movie. He didn't really use it; he threw it in over the closing credits. I remember working at the Video Archives at the time and thinking "If I had a song like that for my movie, I'd build a 20-minute scene around it!" So I guess I did.
Q: There's a really cool sense of dislocation when that song comes on, which still sounds so modern, yet we're in World War II France. It's one of my favorite sequences in the film. It reminded me of Brian De Palma, back when he was still good.
A: When I got the idea to use it, one of the things I liked is that the song was once removed and you already knew it from something else, as opposed to something that was written for the movie. You're listening to the lyrics of the song and you're watching Shoshanna [a character in the film played by Melanie Laurent] doing all this stuff, and you sit there thinking "Wow, this song was written for Cat People, but it's totally appropriate for Shoshanna's story!" It plays like an interior monologue for her.
A comment on the blog post from mrbluelouboyle reminds readers that Tarantino had courted the idea of casting Cat People's Natasha Kinski in Inglourious Basterds, which makes the choice of song seem less random than Rodriguez had originally considered.
WELLS: TARANTINO "HAS GONE BATSHIT CRAZY"Meanwhile, Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells does not hold back in describing his contempt for Inglourious Basterds, stating, "I realize it's a Quentin movie that's basically about Quentin's bullshit, but -- I'm trying not to sound like a rabbi here -- Inglourious Basterds reeks of arrogance and sadism and indifference to the value of human life." Wells believes Tarantino has buried himself too deep inside own creative genius hype. Wells writes:
Inglourious Basterds is proof that QT has gone batshit crazy in the sense that he cares about nothing except his own backyard toys. He's gone creatively nuts in the same way that James Joyce, in the view of some critics, crawled too far into his own anus and headspace when he wrote Finnegan's Wake. All I know is that this is a truly empty and diseased film about absolutely nothing except the tip of that digit.
Updated: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 1:49 AM CDT
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