Sigh. Do I find it dispiriting that Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basturds (yes, that's my own idiosyncratic spelling, but it's drawn from an error-ridden title card in a lost print of G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box) should be enjoying a huge, widely-promoted release right now, with its Cannes award for best actor touted in all the publicity, while Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (above), which actually won top prize at Cannes, is nowhere on the local film horizon (it's not even coming to New York until Christmas)?
Well, yes, but I find it no more dispiriting than, say, Sarah Palin's career. Come to think of it, there's some deep correspondence between Tarantino and Palin, it seems to me. Then again, everyone and everything I hate strikes me as having a deep correspondence with Sarah Palin.
At any rate, to you few Haneke fans out there, the trailer for Ribbon emerged last week, and you can see it (in German) here. And ponder "a world in which the serious art film is more marginalized than it ever was" (to parody the trailers at the Kendall Square) - despite the rise of the "arthouse," and DVDs, and Netflix, and what-have-you - all while Tarantino's brand of perv-y popcorn (this time even on the same subject as the real thing, i.e., Nazi Germany) is sold in its place. (Meanwhile, if you want to see a "real" movie about a "real" war we're currently in, there's still time to catch The Hurt Locker).
In other news, "I told you so" division, word reaches us that Isaac Butler of the blog Parabasis, who has insisted that he is not, in effect, a "journalist," is now doing his "first ever" review for Time Out New York. So he is a journalist after all. That didn't take long. I eagerly await Isaac's convoluted justification for this - as well as his posting a video of his new employer on his site; no doubt he'll be able to make his motives sound as pure as Mother Teresa's. Meanwhile, maybe Matthew Freeman and 99 seats will begin, at last, to smell the coffee . . . or whatever it is Butler's serving . . .
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