Art comparison

It's no coincidence that saving private ryan and No Country For Old Men look like twins, they had the same parents; read they got made by the same ad company.

















The Devil's Rejects and Hostel on the other hand show beautifully how two different companies can explore a similar concept idea.

















A case of great minds think alike...

Bollwerks

“The Uwe” Boll first appeared on my map when I saw the brilliant trailer for House of the Dead (a Video-Game adaptation) on a Underworld press release DVD.
Not movie of the year brilliant, but brilliant fun.
Or so I thought, boy was I wrong.

Though HotD is not without merits, about all the scenes in the trailer and non of the rest, the execution simply stinks and including original game footage has to count as one stupid idea!

I’m not sure what hurts more, the painstakingly bad almost story the movie serves up or the odd moments when it actually works and gives us a genuine Survival-Horror feeling The Uwe consequently and continuously fails to expand on; a phenomena that can be observed in practically all his movies, as if there was a side of him that actually would have talent in filmmaking if he did let it run free or maybe it’s the other way around and those short moments of quality filmmaking only turn up when he has to restrain himself.
Nonetheless the Uwe has build up a constant output of constant quality, or rather lack of, backed by consistently brilliant trailers (who ever is doing those clearly knows his job) over the years and it has become a kind of ritual to at least rent the newest of his Bollwerks to see how bad it got this time.

Much in this vein I encountered Tunnel Rats, a movie about a less exploited topic of the war in Vietnam, expecting the worst. I’m sure this makes a good part of the reason why I was pleasantly surprised by the movie, but fact is that it also has a certain quality, an odd charm to it. No mistaking, Tunnel Rats is a raw, brutal movie that builds only very loosely on story. Like the war Boll gives not much about why these people are here and as bloody and painful as dying is depicted in that movie as impersonal it is.

If this movie has a message to give then it can only be: War doesn’t care!

Tunnel Rats is no Rescue Dawn, there’s no lingering on the beauty of Vietnam’s landscape (mostly because Boll simply can’t effort that with his budget) and there’s no glint of heroism to his characters, the movie is close to the Australian The odd angry shot but closer still to

Anthony M. Dawson’s war movies.
It feels aimless and mainstream viewers will miss a conclusion to it, but that exactly is what makes Tunnel Rats at times feel honest, it’s a snapshot of war, and war doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The extreme violence shown in the movie, reminded me of something Herzog said regarding a deleted scene from Rescue Dawn:

“I don’t like to show violence against humans”

That’s a strange thing to say for a director of a War movie, no?
Because can this one of all genres justify not to show violence?

Inglourious Basterds

I confess that I’m no fan of Tarantino’s work, and most likely will never be. I could spend hours on end listening to his devout followers and still would not get how anybody can possibly see anything else in the quarter pounder with cheese dialogue from Pulp Fiction than a desperate attempt to stretch movie length and the same we encounter again in Kill Bill vol.1 when Uma Thurman gives a quarter hour closing monologue, apparently trying to talk to death a helpless victim in the trunk of her car (after that fails she does a patch-up job of it trying to bash her into oblivion), a sequence graciously interspersed with Hospital scenes and of which only the last two minutes are of any importance to the movie.
Understandably low are my expectations regarding his upcoming Inglourious Basterds.

Despite my personal misgivings I have to bow before the clever executed artwork for movies like the mentioned Pulp Fiction and now Inglourious Basterds.
One a stylish recreation of classic Pulp magazine titles, showing far more creativity than director Tarantino will probably ever manage in one of his movies, the others showcasing characters that could easily be ripped from the pages of same shown pulp publication. Especially Diane Krüger reminds us here vividly of the old dime novel inspired noir heroes for whom the appearance of the elegantly dressed lady always spoke of coming trouble. What else instantly caught my eye is the semblance between the showcased teaser poster for Inglourious Basterds and the artwork for Mutant Chronicles a coincidence, possibly; a subconscious drawing on same cultural roots, more likely.

When we look beyond the obvious pulpish nature, we see a much more contemporary influence at work: Computer Game art. More and more artists in the visual fields draw, consciously or not, on this ready symbolism ingrained into the computer generation. But where Mutant Chronicles contents itself with recreating a image known from countless ego-shooters with elements of the horror genre, Inglourious Basterds tackles its topic with more cleverness, combining the baseball bat image that has long since become a ready symbol for mindless, often right-wing oriented, violence and turns into what can almost be read as a anti-fascism statement. The true cleverness of this laying in the marketability to both sides, mindless right-wingers, to dumb to see beyond the mere appearance of two of their favoured fetish items, and those opposing them alike.

That is how advertising is done!

Australia

Now, that’s what I call a movie poster!
Honestly, this is the first poster in too long a time that had me go:
Gosh! I have to see that movie!

Yep, a poster like that and you already won me over (* in spite of me * Hit it!)

It sparks such an old fashioned sense of romance that you can’t help but instantly think of such classics as From here to Eternity (actually a movie that will never manage to live up to the overgrown expectations I have build out regarding it, but that’s another story).
Curiously my first thoughts when I first saw this poster were in order:

1. Here’s been someone at work that remembers the old classics, either that or he/she suffers from a healthy overdose of romance novels.
   
2. This must be what Pearl Harbor wanted to look like.

Shame on me, I know, when in the face of such perfect beauty the first other motive that comes to mind is Pearl Harbor you should go and put yourself out of your misery.
Just kidding! Pearl Harbor was a fine poster, not in the same league, in my not so humble opinion, but it had me tempted to watch the movie in spite of what I thought about the trailer.

What pulled me instantly to Australia is this open sense of passion the likes of which we remember from Gone with the Wind (you do remember that one don't you? Clark Gable & Vivien Leigh in a tigh embrace close to kissing each other, cast against the red sky above a burning Atlanta; it's the perfectly metaphor for their love), where Pearl Harbor rather opt's for a chaste love scene.

America's loss of innocence.

And in the best Hollywood tradition there's naturally always someone that says nothing's so beautiful that we wouldn't dare to come up with something, ah, let's stay friendly and just say: Simpler!

Really, I would at best dare to print that one on the cover of a Wal-Mart romance novel. I got this hunch that Canadian lumberjacks could have come up with a more romantic alternative.