With Inception still on their minds, Richard and Safi go back in time to discuss Christopher Nolan’s excellent 2006 film, The Prestige.

Podcast (cinephile-spoilers): Download (Duration: 47:50 — 22.0MB)

I hate the cold. Not just because I hate wearing layers of clothing or fixing a lot of tea. No, I hate being cold primarily for one reason: you can’t escape it. On a particularly cold night, some part of your body—your nose, your ears, your fingers—will always feel that chill, no matter what you do. Sure, you can crank up the heat, but you know what waits outside. It’s quite claustrophobic, the sense that nature is assaulting you with every chance it gets. I suppose U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) feels the same, many months into her post at a research base in Antarctica, though a series of flashbacks to her time in Miami tells us a perpetual winter may be just what Carrie needs.

Read More…

Similar in tone, if not style, to the Kill Bill films, Tarantino returns yet again with another film meant to appeal to snobs alike. This time, Tarantino takes his revenge fantasies out of the world of Asian cinema and into the world of the spaghetti western, via a World War II setting. The opening scene, which takes place at a French country farmhouse, is a lengthy sequence where a Nazi colonel named Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) interrogates a farmer suspected of hiding Jews. Nicknamed “The Jew Hunter,” Landa is one of Tarantino’s finest creations and the one saving grace of the entire picture. As Landa, Waltz steers clear of Ralph Fiennes’s detached Nazi in Schindler’s List for a more soft-spoken, genial and, dare I say, polite interpretation. This opening, which is longer than expected, builds momentum largely on the strength of Waltz’s performance and Tarantino’s careful pacing, staging, and expressive dialogue (both in French and English). After this scene’s violent conclusion, however, Tarantino has nothing left in his bag of tricks to sustain the film’s running time. He instead repeats himself with scene after scene of monotonous dialogue, followed by rapid-fire violence.

Read More…

Take enough history classes, and you know how all the stories end. It’s like that dreaded spoiler – what’s the fun of watching a movie when you already know its conclusion? See enough movies, however, and you’ll realize most stories, especially in American cinema, end the same, too: guy gets girl, bad guy gets dead, and things get good again. It’s not the end, but the stuff in the middle – the intrigue, the cinematic flair – that makes movies and history interesting. Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of the stuff in the middle, flipping off genre and screenwriting conventions, bending them to his directorial will. It’s no surprise, then, that the marketing for his latest, greatest film, Inglourious Basterds, couldn’t be more misleading.

Read More…