INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - meh

So here's the thing. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is not a disaster. It's quite watchable and occasionally leavened by good performances, both comedic (Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt) and dramatic (Mélanie Laurent), not to mention beefcake (Til Schweiger). There are flashes of Tarantino craziness (in a superb basement-tavern set-piece for one) but somehow the movie never takes off - never quite convinces us that we are in a surreal alternate place. In a sense, Tarantino is too good. He does what he's never done before - he creates genuinely dramatic, emotional, credible situations of fear and tension. And then he expects us to switch back in Tarantino the Comic Fantasist mode. As a result, when Tarantino does something that really fracks with reality (e.g. the ending) it just feels wrong. Final reaction: flat. Meh. Walk out of the cinema thinking, what just happened here?

Now, down to the nuts and bolts. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is really two films. The first is a pretty serious revenge movie. Mélanie Laurent plays a young Jewish woman who has watched her family butchered by Nazis, and is now in a position, as owner of a Parisian cinema, to blow up the entire German High Command at a premiere of some Nazi propoganda. Melanie Laurent is excellent as Shosanna Dreyfuss - just watch her suppress her fear when she realises she is taking coffee with the man who butchered her family. Diane Kruger is also notably convincing as a German film-star who has to charm her way into the premiere in order to disrupt it. The tension when she is being interrogated by the same Nazi officer who terrified Shosanna is palpable. The second movie, which surrounds the first, is a more broadly drawn Tarantino comedy in which a bunch of American Nazi scalp-hunters, led by Brad Pitt, team up with Diane Kruger's German film-star and Michael Fassbinder's British soldier, to also blow-up aforementioned Nazis. The comedy comes from Brad Pitt as a sort of Dirty Dozen war hero and his interactions with the Nazi villain played by Waltz (whose performance unifies the two parts of the film). The comedy does not come from a particularly ill-judged cameo from Mike Myers.

My suspicion is that the movie won't satisfy anyone. Tarantino fans will want more Brad Pitt/Basterds craziness and tire of the Parisian drama. Not to mention the fact that, rather bravely, Tarantino has chosen to be vaguely credible in keeping most of the dialogue in French and German. Indeed, he goes further, with a great running gag about Americans not speaking foreign languages. I just wonder whether that gag will back-fire with his target demographic. The cult-fans looking for kick-ass violence and witty dialigue might also object to the fact that, ultimately, this is not really a movie about France, Nazis, the Holocaust or anything other than Tarantino's abiding love of cinema, and his childlike belief that movies really can change the world.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS played Cannes 2009, where Christoph Waltz won Best Actor, Berlin and Melbourne 2009. It is released next weekend in Belgium, France, the UK, Australia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, New Zealand, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Austria, Canada, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, the USA and the Netherlands. It is released the following weekend in Iceland, Argentina, the Czech Republic, the Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It opens in September in Finland, Romania, Israel and Spain. It opens in October in Italy, Japan, Singapore, Mexico and Brazil.

THE INTERNATIONAL - 'enslaved to debt'; betrayed by modern art

I really enjoyed THE INTERNATIONAL: it's a solid, intelligent thriller that neatly side-steps a few irritating genre conventions but also delivers a very slick, satisfying action set-piece.

The set up is simple. Clive Owen and Naomi Watts play an Interpol officer and a New York DA trying to frame a case against a shady Luxembourg based bank. Based non-too subtly on the infamous BCCI, the bank is using its capital to broker arms deals, selling cheap weapons from China to fund coups in Africa. It uses any means necessary to protect its interests. The movie is essentially a police procedural in which our two investigators track an IBBC assassin. CSI: Eurozone leads them back to New York where a quite magnificent shoot out takes place in the Guggenheim. (I acknowledge that, strictly speaking, there is no reason to have a shoot-out in an architectural marvel, but my word, it's glorious.) Thereafter, it would've been quite easy for director Tom Tykwer to have rolled into a high-octane, pat ending. Rather, he reverts to the discursive, restrained tone of the preceeding scenes. There is no simmering sexual tension between the leads; no dramatic denouement a la MICHAEL CLAYTON. We leave the film as we begin - the world is "enslaved to debt". I find this a fitting, if bleak, film for our times.

THE INTERNATIONAL played Berlin 2009 and is currently on release in Germany, the USA, Egypt, Australia, Sweden, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, South Korea, Finland, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Norway, the UK, Venezuela, Denmark and Estonia. It opens next week in Belgium and France and on March 19th in Argentina, Greece and Italy. It opens on March 27th in Russia, Poland and Romania. It opens in April in Japan, the Czech Republic, Israel, Singapore and Turkey.

PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER - bonkers but gripping

PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER is a bewildering movie: moments of psychotic genius and lush photography interspersed by clumsy voice-over, mis-casting and the plainly bonkers. I didn't enjoy all of it, and I'm not sure if I'd rightly recommend it, but I was transfixed for the entire two and a half hour run-time because the movie was so intensely bent on its own bizarre path.

PERFUME is based on the 1980s bestseller by German author, Patrick Süskind, and has finally reached the screen thanks to Tom Tykwer of LOLA RENNT fame. Written off as unfilmable by Stanley Kubrick, what we have here is a fairly long but swift-paced adaptation that sticks fairly closely to the novel (which I read some time ago) in all but one major aspect: perhaps in a sop to the box office, the movie makes the protagonist physically and morally more attractive than in the book.

In the novel, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is an amoral monster from the get-go. Born into the squalor of an 18th century Parisien fishmarket, his first cry sends his murderous mother to the gallows and he is rejected by a series of wet-nurses for being over-greedy and having no scent - a particularly unnerving and unique trait and ironic considering that he has also an unparalleled olfactory sense. In the novel, he is rejected by playmates in the poor-house and fellow workers - unconsiously his lack of scent makes him inhuman and soul-less in their eyes and provokes Jean-Baptiste to become bitter and bent on preserving and thus acquiring human scent. He tries to do this by killing a girl with the perfect scent of pure innocence but is traumatised when her scent evaporates upon death. Accordingly he begins an apprenticeship with an ageing perfumer of waning powers called Baldini, but leaves for Grasse when he fails to preserve the scent of anything but flowers with Baldini's method of distillation. In Grasse, Jean-Baptiste discovers a technique that allows him to capture the scent of a human being, including the intoxicating scent of the innocent, and he begins a killing spree to fuel his "enflorage".

In the novel, Jean-Baptiste is single-minded, embittered and ruthlessly murderous and this moral sickness is reflected in his physical monstrosity - scarred and pitted by illness and poverty. By contrast, in the movie, Jean-Baptiste is pitiable: a pathetic creature cursed with an acute sense of smell and yet no smell of his own. His first murder is in fact accidental and his latter murders can be understood in terms of his lack of moral or physical education; his infantile conception of the world and the fact that his rare gift has unbalanced his mind. His physical deformities have been toned down and Ben Whishaw, who plays Jean-Baptiste, simply looks like a blundering infant trying desperately to acquire a soul, not truly understanding the cost of his actions. To be flippant, he simply wants to be loved, even if he must steal what it is that makes us love-able - our soul - from someone else.

I cannot say that I disapprove of this change. It is far more engaging and challenging for the viewer to see a somewhat sympathetic character engage in callous murders. And Ben Whishaw gives a tremendous central performance and I shall have to stop unfairly picturing him as the idiot Pingu from the cult TV show, Nathan Barley. In general, the rest of the cast is fine, especially Alan Rickman as the perceptive father of Jean-Baptiste's final scalp. The movie is also handsomely photographed and uses wonderful European locations with sumptuous costume and set designs.

Having said that, the movie seriously slips up in the first third by using a clumsy voice-over narrative by John Hurt. He has a Jackanory tone that I find vaguely condescending, but that could be because I always associate his voice-overs with DOGVILLE and MANDERLAY (a film I cordially disliked.) I just don't think the narrative is necessary - the film-makers should have had more faith in their audience. The other big slip-up in the first third of the film is casting Dustin Hoffman as Baldini: frankly, he seems out of his depth.

The movie seriously picks up in quality as Jean-Baptiste moves to Grasse and the real killing begins. The voice-over ends, the acting improves and it becomes a fantastically sinister serial-killer flick. But of course we are still left with the "problem" of the two-part ending. For readers who haven't read the novel I won't go into details. Suffice to say, that the uncharitable will call the ending bonkers and laugh out loud. I was sufficiently engrossed in the movie, and the pity of Jean-Baptiste, to go with it and see it as the still bonkers and yet extremely logical ending to a tragic tale.

PERFUME premiered in Germany in September 2006 and has since been released in Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, Portugal, Estonia, Spain, Argentina, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Israel, Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, the UK and US. PERFUME goes on release in Hungary and Sweden on January 11th, Finland and Norway on January 19th and in Australia and Iceland on February 1st. It opens in Japan on March 10th 2007.