If you look at the “Pages” box on the right, you’ll see I’ve added a new page – Photography.

I plan to go through the thousands of photos I’ve got and create various albums for display on this page.

Actually, I’m not at all thrilled with the way this plug-in displays stuff, but it will do for now.  Anyone using different plugins for displaying photos or slideshows on their own blogs or websites, please let me know your recommendations.

UPDATED: Massive changes made to the page, it’s now more along the lines of what I had in mind.

Thanks for visiting!

SPOILERS AHEAD – you’ve been warned!

I finally caught up with Inglourious Basterds yesterday.   Being a Quentin Tarantino fanboy, I’d wanted to see it during its theatrical run.  But thanks to a dull trailer, even the presence of Brad Pitt couldn’t get my gf interested in it.   And the trailer really put me off as well.  Yet a lot of people I know were saying this was the best picture of the year.  And over at Rotten Tomatoes, the film scores 88%, or 74% with “top critics.”

I’m one of those people who think that Tarantino’s first three films were grand slam home runs but that after the commercial failure of Jackie Brown, he has been frittering away his talent in silly little genre exercises.  And Basterds strikes me as more of the same.  It’s got some of his great trademark dialogue (never mind the fact that all of the characters talk in the same excessive love of words manner – if I can accept stylization from Mamet I can certainly take it from Tarantino).  But over-all, the film seems disjointed, poorly paced and despite running for more than 2-1/2 hours, comes to an absurdly abrupt halt.  (In the pull quote from the review by the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr, he says, “it represents 153 minutes of bravura stalling, after which its creator loses interest and walks away.”  And I felt that way too.  My gf looked up at me as the end credits started to roll and said, “That’s it?”)

So on the one hand, you get a film from someone who really knows how to direct the hell out of scene.  “The film’s opening sequence, much of which takes place inside the restricted confines of a farmhouse room, is a marvel of choreographed camera movement and tightly coordinated performances,” says Manohla Dargis over at the NY Times.  And I agree.

She also says, “rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes.  Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work. He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke) and seems unwilling or incapable of telling his A material from his B.”   I agree with that as well.

Aside from dividing the film into “chapters” again, another thing that bugged me was that there wasn’t enough of the titular characters, the so called Basterds.  Melanie Laurent, Christopher Waltz and Diane Kruger all have far more screen time than Brad Pitt and his band of unmerry men, none of whom aside from Pitt are allowed to have personalities.  We see them with their captives, we never get a single battle scene that shows how they came to get those captives.  We get a Dirty Dozen-ish sequence in which Pitt explains to his recruits what they’re gonna do.  Next time we see them is quite some time later, their reputations already established, torturing some Nazis they’ve captured in a battle.

But most of all – here’s the big spoiler – we all know at least the broad strokes of history, right?  We know how WWII ended, we know how Hitler ended, and so as we watch the plan come together, we are anticipating its failure.  I don’t see the purpose in allowing it to succeed, in creating this alternate reality in which the leaders of the Third Reich are wiped out and the war comes to an end in 1943 (or is it 1944?).   To the best of my knowledge, no other film has done something like this – and for good reason.  You can’t change history.  Rambo can go back to Vietnam years later and “make up” for the past.  But even Rambo never went back in time to 1965 to kill off Ho Chi Minh and end the war ten years early.  So why does Tarantino think he can? And if he’s going to go so far as to change it, then shouldn’t he show the impact of that change, rather than just giving us a, “Hey, I’m Quentin Fucking Tarantino, I can do what I want!  I’ve ended the war a year early, suck on that muthfuckas!”

I admired the way in which he was willing to kill off characters whom you don’t expect to die.  Another spoiler – when Landa kills von Hammersmark, I was thinking to myself, “she’s an actress, she’s playing dead, once his back is turned she’ll rise up and shoot him,” but no, she’s really dead.

I’ll probably watch this again in a couple of months.  Knowing the outcome next time, perhaps I’ll react to it differently.  But for now, I consider Inglourious Basterds to be a further betrayal of Tarantino’s gifts.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear from those of you who saw the film and loved it.  What did you see that I didn’t?

Thanks for visiting!