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Archive for September, 2009

For U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko, things are about to get even more dangerous. The only law enforcement in this unforgiving territory, she has just been sent to investigate a body on the ice. Antarctica’s first homicide. A shocking discovery in itself, it will plunge her into an even more bizarre mystery and the revelation of secrets long-buried under the endless ice–secrets that someone believes are still worth killing for. As Stetko races to find the killer before he finds her, winter is already closing in. In the deadly Antarctic whiteout, she won’t see him till he’s a breath away.

Not a bad story line. You are gussing til revealed exactly what the cache is that is the focus of all the chaos. One would guess drugs, radioactive material, or even perhaps biological weapons and that ain’t it. That at least is suspenseful til the end. Also, the various killers involved in the plot.

It is an interesting locale, Antarctica, with a “perfect storm” scenario hastening the plot. Watchable, relatively fast paced, and sufficient gore to make it interesting.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Synopsis from imdb.com

“College juniors CASSIDY (Briana Evigan), JESSICA (Leah Pipes), CLAIRE (Jamie Chung), ELLIE (Rumer Willis) and MEGAN (Audrina Patridge) are sorority sisters sworn to trust, secrecy and solidarity, no matter what. But their loyalty is tested when a prank at a raucous house party goes terribly wrong and Megan ends up brutally murdered. Rather than confess to the crime and risk destroying their bright futures, the girls agree to hide the bloody corpse and keep their secret forever. Fast forward one year to graduation. As they prepare to say goodbye to the house and each other, the girls plan one last alcohol-fueled bash on Sorority Row, confident their dark secret remains buried. But does it? As the party rages in the front yard, the bedrooms and the hot tub, the girls receive cell phone videos taken the night of Megan’s murder from an anonymous sender who threatens to forward the videos to the police. Then, one by one, the sisters and their unsuspecting boyfriends are stalked by an unseen killer. Has Megan returned from the dead to exact her revenge? Or was their secret discovered by someone else someone now determined to make them pay? Trapped, the girls race to figure out which of them let their secret slip, who wants them dead, and how to fight back as the bodies pile up and their beloved sorority house explodes into flames. A heart-stopping climax reveals the killer’s shocking identity in this suspenseful, hip and sexy remake of the 1983 classic horror thriller.”

Well this is a predictable teen slasher movie of the “I know what you did last Summer” genre. Same basic plot, just a slight variation. The climax is anything but heart stopping because the killer really has no reason to be so. Pretty stupid. A good way to waste an hour and 40 minutes if you have nothing better to do. It at least saves some of your own air conditioning. Typical overacting and this version has more nudity. If you ask me, the housemother should have used her shotgun on the “mean girl” bunch of bimbos.

Rating: 1 out of 5 ( I am actually surprised Entertainment Weekly gave it a D )

The main theme of the film is revenge. The film is set in an alternate history of the Second World War in which the entire top leadership of Nazi Germany, namely Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Bormann attend a film premiere in Paris celebrating the exploits of a German sniper who had managed to kill 300 American soldiers in Italy. Most of the film’s timeframe is set in early June 1944, after the D-Day landings but before the liberation of Paris.

The film tracks the separate attempts to kill Hitler by two disparate forces, one being the “Basterds”, a motley crew of Jewish American soldiers out for revenge against the Nazis. The Basterds have a modus operandi whereby each man must cut off the scalp of a dead Nazi soldier, with orders to get 100 scalps each. The Basterds allow one German soldier to survive each incident so as to spread the news of the terror of their attacks. However, the Basterds carve a swastika into the forehead of that German. The other force concerns Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), the only survivor of a Jewish family killed by the Jew Hunter, who plots her own revenge on the Nazis. The Basterds and Shosanna remain unaware of each other throughout the film.

The film opens in 1941 with Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) of the Waffen-SS, proudly known as the “Jew Hunter”, interrogating Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), a French dairy farmer, over rumours that he had been hiding a Jewish family. Landa manages to break down LaPadite and locates the hiding place of the Jews underneath the floorboards. He orders his soldiers to fire into the floorboards, killing all but the teenage Shosanna.

Four years later, by 1944, Shosanna has assumed the identity of “Emmanuelle Mimieux”. How she manages to do so is not revealed. She has also become the proprietress of a cinema, which is chosen by Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a spotlight-hungry sniper-turned-actor whose exploits are celebrated in the Nazi propaganda film, Stolz der Nation (A Nation’s Pride), as the setting for the film premiere. He is attracted to Shosanna and convinces Goebbels to hold the premiere in her cinema. Shosanna does not reciprocate Zoller’s feelings.

Shosanna realizes that the presence of so many high ranking Nazi officials and officers provides an excellent opportunity for revenge. She resolves to burn down her cinema using the massive quantities of flammable nitrate film in her storage rooms during the premiere and makes a fourth reel in which she tells the Nazis present of her Jewish identity and revenge.

In the meantime, the British have also learned of the Nazi leadership’s plan to attend the premiere and dispatch a British officer, Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), to Paris to lead an attack on the cinema with the aid of the “Basterds” and a German double agent, an actress by the name of Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).

Hammersmark arranges to meet Hicox and the Basterds in the basement of a French tavern. Unbeknown to her, however, the night of the rendezvous is also the occasion of a German staff sergeant (Alexander Fehling) celebrating the birth of his son with his soldier comrades. One of the German soldiers present strikes up a conversation with Hicox and notices that his accent is “odd”. An SS officer (August Diehl) who is in the tavern as well also notices that odd accent. When Hicox gives the wrong three fingered order for whiskies (without using his thumb, a traditional German gesture), the SS officer realizes their deception. A firefight breaks out in which the British officer and two of the “Basterds” are killed as is everyone in the tavern except Hammersmark, who is wounded in her left leg.

Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a U.S. Army second lieutenant in the First Special Service Force [7] and the commanding officer of the Basterds, interrogates Hammersmark and decides to continue the operation against the cinema under the guise of Italians as suicide bombers. Colonel Landa, now an SD officer, is able to retrieve one of Hammersmark’s shoes from the scene of the firefight at the tavern and also an autographed napkin which Hammersmark had signed for the staff sergeant’s son. He approaches Hammersmark and Raine in the cinema lobby and is able to easily see through their disguises, as none, even Raine, can speak any Italian or German. He questions Hammersmark alone and makes her try on the shoe he had retrieved from the tavern. It is a perfect fit. He violently strangles her to death as a traitor, and orders the arrest of Raine.

In the closing stages of the film Quentin Tarantino sets the quirks which show that the film is in an alternative universe. Landa reveals himself to be a turncoat. While speaking with Raine and Utivich, he tells them that four major Nazi leaders must all be killed to end the war immediately. They are all attending Nation’s Pride, and he is prepared to let the assassination continue– for a price. He has no intention of helping end the war only to be tried by a Jewish tribunal for war crimes and end up facing the gallows. In order to help end the war, he wants to make a deal, one Raine cannot authorize, but his commanding officer (Harvey Keitel) can. Landa has his radio operator help Raine reach his general, where Landa states the terms of his deal– he wants full military pension and benefits under his current rank, a medal of honor for everyone involved in the operation, American citizenship and a home on Nantucket Island. He also reveals that he had planted Raine’s stick of dynamite in Hitler’s box at the cinema, meaning that there are now three attempts against Hitler’s life. Raine is placed on the radio and his general tells him that Landa and his radio operator will drive him and Utivich in a truck to American lines, then surrender to them, whereupon Raine will drive the truck to base and bring Landa and the operator to him for debriefing.

Meanwhile, during the showing of Stolz der Nation, Shosanna and her assistant (and lover) Marcel (Jacky Ido) are manning the projection booth when he tells her it is time. He needs to lock the auditorium and go behind the screen. As Marcel makes his way toward the auditorium, two of the Basterds, Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) and Pvt. Omar Ulmer (Omar Doom), leave their seats and exit the auditorium heading upstairs to the balcony level. Donowitz carefully spies on the guards watching the entrance to Hitler’s opera box from the nearest bathroom.

Shosanna loads the doctored fourth reel of Stolz der Nation onto the projector camera as Marcel locks the auditorium doors, sliding the safety locks at the tops and bottoms of the doors into place, and then slides a heavy iron crowbar through the door handles, further barring them. He steps behind the screen where Shosanna had placed her entire stack of nitrate film. Shosanna pulls a lever to switch the projector to the doctored reel. Watching from behind the screen, Marcel lights up a smoke and waits.

Meanwhile, Zoller, uncomfortable with the way he is portrayed killing Americans in Stolz der Nation, leaves the cinema auditorium and makes his way to the projectionist’s room to hit on Shosanna. She is deeply concerned at his intrusion and tries to get rid of Zoller, but he pushes his way into the room and angrily confronts Shosanna about her treatment of him, warning her that she’s no longer in a position to disrespect him. Needing to get Zoller out of the way, she asks him to lock the door, dropping a subtle hint, ‘we don’t have much time.’ Soon as Zoller’s back is turned to her, she pulls her gun from her purse and shoots him in the back, mortally wounding him. Quickly she glances into the auditorium to make sure she wasn’t heard. Suddenly, she hears Zoller groan and realizes he’s still alive. In an apparent moment of pity, she turns him over, and he shoots her dead.

We see Donowitz and Ulmer preparing their ambush to take out the opera box guards. Donowitz is dressed as a waiter delivering a glass of champagne. The ambush goes off without a hitch and they kill both guards, taking their machine guns.

Meanwhile, we see Hitler greatly enjoying the battle scene in the movie, where Zoller is taking out numerous American soldiers by himself. But his joy comes to a quick end when Zoller’s challenge (in Stolz der Nation) is answered with the changes Shosanna made to the fourth reel. She tells the audience that they’re all going to die, and she is a Jew ready to take revenge. On her cue, Marcel flicks his cigarette into the pile of nitrate film, igniting it. The fire bursts through the screen, causing a pandemonium in the auditorium. Just then, Donowitz and Ulmer burst into Hitler’s box and gun down Hitler, Goebbels and the other Nazi leaders. As the cinema is engulfed in flames, they fire randomly into the crowd, who are attempting to flee, but escape is impossible, as the auditorium doors are now locked and barred. Finally, the dynamite that Landa had planted in Hitler’s box, as well as the dynamite strapped to the Basterds’ legs, now goes off. The cinema is destroyed in the subsequent inferno, killing all inside.

In the final scene, Landa and his radio operator set off with Raine and Utivich towards the American lines in Normandy, as part of the deal he had made with Raine’s commanding officer. At the American lines, he surrenders to Raine and hands over his gun and sword. Raine orders Utivich to handcuff Landa, and shoots the driver dead, ordering Utivich to scalp him over Landa’s outraged protest. Raine reveals that while he appreciates Landa’s underhanded deal and all the perks he’s secured for himself, he is incensed that on arriving in America, Landa intended to take off his SS uniform and blend in to the American populace, with nobody remembering all the heinous deeds he committed as a Nazi officer. Raine plans to remedy that. The film ends with Raine carving a swastika into Landa’s forehead and declaring that it may just be his greatest ‘masterpiece.’

This movie is classic Tarantino. It is absolutely fabulous. A bit less gory than most but quite exciting. Five chapters …. The occasional sound track reminiscent of  of an Eastwood sphagetti western makes this a great time.

Rating: 4.7 out of 5