Inglorious Basterds

“You know what? This might be my masterpiece,” Brad Pitt says at the end, echoing –you may bet- Tarantino’s own words priding on his latest film. Well, it isn’t, Quentin. Inglorious Basterds is definitely not your masterpiece. But, nonetheless, it’s damn good.

Once again, the director experiments with a plot that weaves different stories in the same frame. Both plots have one goal: to topple the Nazi regime in Third Reich Germany.

On the one hand, there’s Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who escaped the massacre of her family at the hand of SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and now wants to take her revenge. On the other hand, there’s a squad of ruthless Jewish-American soldiers headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who make a clean sweep of all the Nazis they encounter and plan to kill the Führer himself with the help of German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).

The meeting point of the two plots is significantly a cinema, the one owned by Shosanna, which she has planned to burn down at the premiere of a German propaganda film. Metaphor that regimes can be overthrown with the power of the arts? Metaphor that only arts can redeem a shameful past? You decide.

Tarantino has the gift, if you may call it so, of making violence entertaining. If you can put up with his obsession for scalps, bear close-ups of foreheads with carved swastikas and stomach a couple of scenes splattered with blood, then you may enjoy Inglorious Basterds as a movie that reinvents the war genre altogether. A distancing soundtrack, with the director’s typical cowboy-like strumming, dots the most ferocious of scenes – including a head beating with a baseball bat. Set within a fairytale frame with the “Once upon a time...” intro, the story unfolds with continuous unpredictable twists. The finale is Shakespearean in the tragic sense of the word.

Tarantino’s taste for the grotesque is recognizable in the characters’ performances: they are so exaggerated that they become a parody of themselves. One character stands out, though: the Austrian-born actor Christoph Waltz is impeccable as Hans Landa, a cold, sharp, slightly schizophrenic SS Colonel. His stunning performance earned him, in fact, the Best Actor award at last year’s Cannes and the award for Best Supporting Actor this year’s at the Golden Globes. His language skills are also impressive.

Linguists will appreciate Tarantino’s brushstroke of realism in maintaining the characters’ own mothertongues. The movie features German, French, English –worth of notice is Pitt’s caricatured Southern accent- and a haphazardly Italian. Italian is also the inspiration for the movie. The title, in fact, is nothing but the misspelling of Inglorious Bastards, as the English version reads, a 1978 war film by Enzo Castellari.

It may not be Tarantino’s masterpiece, but Inglorious Basterds is nevertheless an ambitious effort. Hasn’t it tried to rewrite history, after all?

Rating: ***

BLAZE – When Street Dancing Meets West End

There’s nothing of the roughness of actual street dancing in Blaze, the latest effort by Anthony van Laast, choreographer of Mamma Mia!, Sister Act and Hair. All the dancers are colourfully dressed, the moves are neat, the music runs smoothly for one and a half hours with no technical problems. Yet, the energy and passion oozing from the stage is real and pulsing, almost contagious. Blaze manages to bring the urban style into the theatre and make it appealing to the wider audience: teenagers and families fill up the rows alongside the expected black and hoodies crowd.

Different music styles, from hip-hop to house beats, and different dancing styles, from popping and locking to breaking, intertwine in a one-act performance made of singular vignettes where no story is told. The start is a bit slow, except for the showing off of sculpted abs by one of the dancers who takes off his T-shirt in the first five minutes of the show –nice move to set the girls in the cheap seats at the back of the stalls on fire. But when the notes of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean start to play for an original tip-tap rendition, the show really takes off. And then it’s a sheer ensemble of vibes and electricity.

Twelve dancers, three breakers and a well-experience MC, DJ Hazze (great robot moves despite being a bit overweight), perform in a variety of dancing styles, experimenting with new forms of body storytelling. The setting is minimal: a backdrop of luggage, a bed and a refrigerator; the props are reduced to a sofa, three big chairs and sets of headphones. The visual effects and the lights, however, become part of the choreography in more than one instance, making Blaze a real ensemble creation. The b-boys are particularly impressive. Their lack of co-ordination –breaking is in fact mainly a solo art- is made up for by the intensity and precision of their power moves: 27-year-old Machine will leave you gaping while sweeping the floor with his head. If the solos, duos and female- or male-only choreographies work fine, with a lot of role playing and acting, the routines featuring the whole crew lack incisiveness, except for the final number, which, in the best street dance fashion, lets the dancers show “what they got”.

The costumes, designed in a way that each performer maintains their personality, add to the diversity of the show, which seems to be the key to success. Choreographers include Ryan Chappell (Bounce), US-born Kenny Wormald in his first West End show, Lyle Beniga (Fame) and Mike Song (winner in 2007 of the Hip Hop International Championships with his crew, Kaba Modern), and Swedish Tommy Franzen. The performers too come from all over the world: Portugal, France, the US, the Netherlands and Britain, including Lizzie Gough, finalist in BBC1’s So you think you can dance.

Blaze might also be a polished version of the street dance culture, but it represents nevertheless its best part: the fun, the charisma, the enthusiasm.
The show, which makes its world tour debut in London, is at the Peacock Theatre from 11 to 28 March.

Rating: ***½

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JOANNE HARRIS: THE WRITER WHO HIDES BEHIND THE COVER

Just as mysterious as most of her novels, Joanne Harris avoids questions about her private life with obstinacy. “I’m not very interesting,” she says plainly. Not quite something you would believe, if you think that the inspiration for her first novel, The Evil Seed, was taken from the inscription of a gravestone. Harris used to cycle to a churchyard in Grantchester while studying at Cambridge, in fact. Not the average hobby, you would say.

Harris cultivated a passion for the gothic and the extraordinary from a very early age. Born to an English father and a French mother, she studied Modern and Medieval languages at college, while reading, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. Her grandmother is rumoured to have been a witch and a healer, but Harris dismisses these allegations as urban legend.

Memories from her childhood go back to Britanny. Three-year-old Harris would go round the markets in the village of Vitré early in the morning or cook sardines on a charcoal brazier on the shore of the island of Noirmoutier. Sometimes she would make pancakes with Memé, her great-grandmother, the woman who inspired Vianne Rocher, the eccentric stranger who settles in the small French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes and opens a chocolaterie just as Lent begins, defying the bigotry of the local priest.

It’s Harris’s most remembered effort: Chocolat, the 1999 bestseller that was later turned into a film, starring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench and Johnny Depp. Unlike many authors who get upset by a movie rendition of their stories, Harris has always been quite happy with the final result, despite changes to the plot. And unlike many women, she hasn’t fallen for the charm of Roux, aka, Johnny Depp while working on the film.

Notoriety hasn’t changed her much, either. Unlike many writers who enjoy being celebrities, Harris remains discreet and humble. “I’m happy to stay a name on the page, rather than a face on the screen,” she says in a low-pitch but firm tone. This explains why her website features a massive section devoted to her books and a skimpy biography that goes little further from personal data.

Harris is an impenetrable woman. People may label her as “indescribable, awkward, and difficult”. But this is because they have expectations. “They expect me to be like Vianne Rocher,” she says. “But I’m not an extraordinary person.”

A mother and a wife, a bass guitar player in the spare time -she has played in the same band since she was 16, a keen traveller and a red wine lover: this is Joanne Harris, the woman. The writer, though, has already achieved a lot for 45. Her books are translated in over 50 countries and in 2004 she received the International Career Prize of Vigevano City. But she’s still enjoying the pleasure of discovery.

For her latest book, Blueeyedboy, due to come out next April, she has plunged into internet communities to research the way people make friends through the web. A thriller plot will intertwine with a blog-like layout and lots of musical references, marking a shift from her previous books. In fact, she was often criticised for repeating the same literary pattern over and over again.

Chocolat seemed to have set the trend for novels such as Blackberry Wine and Five Quarters of the Orange, where food, smells and tastes are unfailing ingredients. Tastes and smells are particularly evocative because they trigger an emotional response that goes back to our experience of the world as newborns. “Besides, readers understand food,” adds Harris. “In our increasingly diverse and multicultural society, eating remains one of the very few experiences we all have in common; a pleasure, a comfort and a means of expression.”

The love for food is also the reason why Harris co-authored two cookbooks, The French Kitchen and The French Market. Since she started working as full-time writer in 1999, quitting her job as a teacher at Leeds Grammar School, she has written eight novels and several compilations of short stories. Harris doesn’t regret giving up education. “I have taught for 12 years,” she says, “and I think it’s healthy to reinvent oneself every ten or so years.”

So, what’s going to happen next? “Well, I have no idea,” she says. And once again, she’s elusive. Or maybe, her life is just like one of her books: she has a vague idea of the beginning and the ending, but she hasn’t planned the whole journey.

Senseless Life

I've never felt so tired in my life. Every day I come back home, knackered. After a day full of things to do, I sit on the couch or on the bed and I still have stuff to do. It's crazy, the pace of life in this city. And the more I think about it, the less I understand why.

After my -at this point- dreadful weekend, with all the waste of time, the arguments with filthy politicians who wanted me to be their pr instead of being a journalist, after doing flat planning in print production -with all the space in newspapers and magazines eaten up by ads, I've realised that in this world everything is a trade. We, as journalists, are traders. We sell our stories, because we have to sell the paper. We talk about things that are going on and might be a little be PRish too. Sometimes, a lot of times, indeed, we're just filling some space. Stories have become commodities, our job has lost significance, because we're so full of everything that we're throwing up. Bulimia is a good metaphor to describe our way of life.

London is a great city, but the quality of life is incredibly low. The constant sense of urgency, hurry, the feeling of not having enough time. In my life I had never experienced something like it before. And it makes me age untimely. When all we do is building something that doesn't last and doesn't matter, what's the point of planning in the first place? And when I think about the idea of manufacturing something as a stint that goes somewhere in the end, I have to think twice, 'cause we are so full of things, stuff, that even those who actually produce something concrete don't have any certainty that what they do is worth it. We spend an awful amount of time working -'cause in the end we have to pay the bills- but we may not really have a purpose to do so.

Which is sad. Incredibly sad.

Put things in perspective

"Off with her head! Off with her head!," shouted the Red Queen.

I've just seen Alice in Wonderland, the latest adaptation of Carroll's famous tale by the Mouse Empire, aka Walt Disney, directed by Tim Burton. I had to wear these big black glasses, cause the movie is in 3D. And at the end, as I went out of the screen, I felt dizzy, my legs slightly shaky.
I couldn't help but wonder how this new technology will improve over the years. Sometimes I had the impression of seeing a pop-up book instead of a movie, with the characters unnaturally in the foreground and a background overly set at the back of the scene, too blurred. I believe that in a couple of years time we will look at these early 3D movies the same amused way we now watch films from the 1960s, when the scenes where the characters drove were just set in a studio with a fake still backdrop and a shaky bonnet of a car.

You just need to put things in perspective. Wonderland is a magic world where disproportion reigns - a queen with a bump of a head, a king with oblong limbs and slow-motion like moves, Alice who stretches from mouse-size to giant eating cakes. But the real world can be just as puzzling when we cross the borders of our land. Arts prove it. When I went to the Tate Gallery, in one of the rooms I found myself surrounded by enormous chairs and a huge table, much taller than I was. And I became a startled Alice.

My friend recently moved to Germany, some 550 km north from where she has lived all her life in Italy. She couldn't be more surprised, though. First of all, those crazy crucchi don't have speed limits. Hence, they flash past wasted lands (at least where she lives) like bolts. Secondly, those nasty Germans collect the rubbish only twice a month. My friend is still bewildered at the amount of litter she has to keep in her house before putting it out for the garbage truck to come and get it. Thirdly, when her husband tried to get rid of a litter bag on someone else's property (a petrol station), he was tracked down and called back to pick up his rubbish. You may think that the station clerk jotted down the car numberplate. Nope. He rummaged through the rubbish to find a scrabbled number on the envelope of a letter.
Mad people, eh? Compared to the Mad Hatter they're real nuts!

So, you see. Playing cards that brandish swords and rabbits that wear waistcoats are not that far-fetched after all. At the same time, old habits don't die once you've crossed the Channel. I walked back home after the movie, just as I used to walk back home from the video rental after watching a dvd in the middle of the night. Alone. Fast. Looking at my own shadow.
Feeling free and a character of a film myself.

In this city full of CCTV it's almost true.