Sunday 13 January 2013

Decline and Fall


Two years after it was released, I finally got around to watching Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which was shown on TV a few nights ago.  A cursory scan of its initial reviews had failed to pique my interest but even my worst expectations hadn’t prepared me for how awful it turned out to be and now, in retrospect, I am baffled that it wasn’t universally panned.

Leaving aside questions of taste and propriety, this utterly incoherent film doesn’t even deliver on the things that Tarantino is supposed to be good at:  tone-deaf dialogue; interminable ‘suspense’; unfunny ‘humour’; clunking movie-buff references to UFA.  The situation comedy ‘Allo, ‘Allo fired harder and faster on all cylinders and provided greater insight into the moral complexities of occupied France. 

I was, I admit it, an early Tarantino fan-boy.  Twenty years ago, back in the pre-internet paper-age, having read a review of Reservoir Dogs, probably in the NME, I rushed to see its one-night showing at a Scarborough cinema.  There were 10 other people in the audience.  One of them was my girlfriend, who I had made go, and another was a chap I knew, who we bumped into on the street on the way, and I said to him “You *have* to come and see this.”  And I was right.  It was an event.  It was, for us, like nothing else that we had seen before, so smart, with its non-linear plot, so self-assured, so amorally, humorously, violent, so NOW.

We cheered along to True Romance in the damp and decaying Opera House, which closed forever within weeks.  There was no heat in there, we had to huddle in our coats, and the staff didn’t give a damn that we had brought our own food and bottles of wine and plastic cups.  Again, there were next to no other people in the audience.  The Tarantino wave had not, as yet broke, big. 

Happening to be in London over the weekend that it was released, I caught Pulp Fiction at Leicester Square and I have rarely experienced such a buzz in a cinema audience as the title sequence began. It was more of the same, packed with cultural references, wisecracking and ultra-violent and, once more, non-linear and we lapped it up.

By the time I saw Jackie Brown the critical faculties were beginning to harden and I was somewhat inured to yet another bout of gangster tosh.   But the film, which remains his very best, was redeemed by the warmth of the relationship that was portrayed between Robert Forster and Pam Grier and it felt to me, without particularly noting that this was an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel rather than an original screenplay, as if Tarantino was maturing. 

But I was wrong.  Immaturing would have been closer to the mark. 

The evidence of the last fifteen years – the vampire schlock of Dusk Till Dawn; the martial-arts schlock of Kill Bill (Pts 1 and 2); the loathsome Inglourious Basterds; and the trailers for the recent (and, seemingly, astonishingly misguided) Django Unchained – suggest a director bereft of any real inspiration, surrounded by wide-eyed disciples assuring him that he is the filmic genius of all time who can do no wrong, fixatedly dry-spunking his way through an interminable, mechanically relentless, joyless masturbation. 

He should get out more.

Sunday 6 January 2013

Orwell Spotting in Hampstead

Following on from Orwell Spotting in Barcelona, here are some photographs taken in Hampstead in pre-blog 2010.

The plaque outside the, former, Booklover's Corner bookshop, where George Orwell worked 1934-35 and lived in the flat above while writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying.  A recent story in the Daily Telegraph reported that the plaque had been sadly, and literally, defaced.

The former bookshop is now occupied by a branch of an up-market cafe chain.  One cannot help but wonder how Orwell would have reacted to the price of the 'simple, elegant boulangerie fare made with organic ingredients.'


Below, is a photograph of 77 Parliament Hill, where Orwell moved to in 1935.