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Inglourious Basterds

Crit

Having had my expectations lowered by lukewarm-at-best reviews, I thought at the start that the most interesting thing about the film was going to be the music: "Green Leaves of Summer" (theme song from the 1960 The Alamo) segueing into Beethoven and then into spaghetti-western Ennio Morricone. But in fact, while the musical pastiche remains intriguing (Bowie shows up later, with the theme song [and best element] from the 1982 Cat People, with no firmer connection than the inflammability of the song's gasoline and the present film's silver nitrate film stock), I found the film itself a lot more worthwhile than I'd been led to expect, and a lot more satisfying Jews-with-a-vengeance pic than Defiance. It's a counterfactual history comic book, and understood on those terms, it's pretty darned good.

Trailers

• Capitalism: A Love Story--Michael Moore takes on the meltdown and the bailout.
• Inception--Tagline is something like "The murder is in your mind," which would also apply to the other Leonardo DiCaprio pic whose trailer I saw again today, Shutter Island.
• Youth in Revolt--Think Fight Club with Michael Cera and the secret open from the start.